

I respect that:-)
Compassion >~ Thought
I respect that:-)
There are multiple themes to choose from. People that already know how to use Lemmy will be able to do more with Lemmy, for sure - PieFed is atm more of a concept of what is coming up, hence exciting! Especially for onboarding new users who don’t already know how to use Lemmy, i.e. from Reddit. I use PieFed as my daily driver, but I frequently have to fall back to Lemmy to accomplish certain types of tasks. So it’s not yet ready for the masses who don’t have an early adopter mindset. But it does offer tools to help with specifically those two things that you mentioned!:-)
Afaik, any proof of humanity depends on instance admin practices - same as Lemmy (and Mbin) too - but what PieFed offers uniquely along those lines is “reputation”. This can either be used directly by a mod (or admin) - e.g. for the first 2 weeks after signing up I was not allowed to DM anyone - or even by the individual end-user, as I’ll mention below with icons.
One really cool thing I see from PieFed already now is democratization of moderation: mods on Lemmy (and Reddit) have a binary choice to make between removal of content vs. allowing it, while PieFed significantly expands upon those options. One way is to auto-collapse, or even auto-hide, comments and posts below a certain vote threshold (different values provided for each of those, the first retaining the ability to always see the content just one single click away, the latter removing it from view altogether), thereby allowing people who want to avoid “controversial” content to do so more readily (related: there’s also a NSFL option, on top of a NSFW one, attempting to maximize such features available to people), in a manner that is independent of a community moderator, and with the ability to change the setting at any time.
PieFed similarly allows people to block all users from a specific instance, without having to defederate that requires admin support as Lemmy does (Lemmy has a feature that it calls instance blocking, but it is horribly misnamed bc it does not in fact block instances as all, and despite being promoted by people as an instance block is really just a community mute, leaving users free to spam your notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after you no longer want to receive them - which is a real thing that has happened to me, TWICE, and basically caused me to leave Lemmy altogether as a result, although fortunately I found PieFed so didn’t have to go all the way back to Reddit to avoid such).
Another cool thing that PieFed offers is user icons: either placed by the user (whatever custom one you want, to help you recall whatever you feel that you need to - like “be careful, this guy is wordy!”), or automated ones placed by the system. Examples include new user (who may not know how things work, so be gentle), account which posts >20x more often than comments (hence may be an unregistered bot account), someone who receives >50x downvotes than upvotes (highly contentious person, very insensitive to whatever community they are in) - and to be clear these are overall, not specific to a community or post/comment, hence still works to brand-new content offered by each user. Whereas previously I spoke to removal or posts/comments based on such features, note here that this feature merely places a LABEL onto these categories of users - ultimately leaving it up to the end user, rather than a mod, to decide what to do about it. You can ignore these icons entirely, seek them out specifically, or whatever. But those varieties of “reputation” scores are made available to you in a numerical capacity.
Another cool aspect of labeling, this one requires an instance admin, is to place a commentary below every post from certain instances, like for Beehaw it says:
This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.
Note that link is to the exact statement from the instance admins themselves describing their policies in their own words. So this is far from “unfriendly”, and rather more welcoming to describe for instances where the “normal” expectations differ, what their particular desires are. Can you imagine if for Lemmy.ml it would say “any post criticizing Russia or China or North Korea is subject to removal” or some such!?
Speaking of, note how the community “side-bar” text appears below EVERY post - while some apps hide that away, PieFed places it front and center every single time, so that users have access to the info that they may need.
Also, PieFed is written in Python, rather than Rust, so its future development should proceed forward more quickly than Lemmy, allowing it to reach feature parity soon and even exceed Lemmy, as it already does in so many ways (though crucially: not all yet, so again I’m mostly describing the future here rather than the present, even though all of the above already exists).
And presumably excited? 😆
Ironically, religion seemed to be helping. And before that (before humanity itself), tribes. An extension of “self” to include other who nonetheless were not “other”, at least not fully. But people seem to prefer wanting to game the system, allowing forcing others to put into while themselves pulling out from.
The age of enlightenment did much good to expose religious corruption, yet offered an inferior product to replace it: “knowledge”, which so few people know how to properly handle, lacking training. e.g. in the USA we knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that most people were too busy and tired to properly educate themselves, yet we placed no restrictions upon voting (like a college degree, or even a test as simple as asking how many branches of government there are - which even that would cause many people to fail).nor did we offer the requisite aid (like a livable minimum wage, or conversely access to a minimum form of healthcare) to help people to help themselves, nor did we keep watch against the predators that would take advantage, e.g. safeguarding the media (instead allowing it to be bought out by billionaires, rather than staying true to the mission of doing “journalism”, the seeking out and reporting of actual truth facts).
We brought this upon ourselves. Even if Donald Trump were to have a tragic accident tomorrow, even if the entire Republican party were to disappear into thin air, or all politicians combined, we would still be left with a broken system, just as before. We cannot escape the laws of Nature (whether put there by a God or not, but it’s worth noting that for those who believe in such, He agrees that we deserve this fate).
Even so, I hope for better. I don’t know what, or how, only that I need such for the sake of my own sanity.
Why read the article (especially if there’s a paywall) when you can read - or even better make - the comments? 😜
Seriously, if the goal is that sweet sweet dopamine fix, then this is the most efficient means to achieve that end…
Thinking is hard, hence just don’t do it! Better yet, downvote those who do as being “pretentious”.
It’s far easier to talk rather than listen over others.
PieFed offers both, as well as most of the most heavily asked for features lacking from Lemmy (Categories of Communities, sign-up wizard asking for interests and subscribing to communities based on those answers, hashtags to facilitate cross-community discovery, etc.). Ironically it is the more foundational features (cross-posting, users tagging, comment previews, post searching) that it still lacks, but the point is that work is being done along the lines of what you said, even though I highly doubt that such will ever appear in “Lemmy” per se.
Humans seem not to be great planners - we are too short-sighted and selfish, but like in a bad way where we first lie to ourselves, and then also to one another.
This allows us to get out of local minima as we spread to new areas, but that same trait seems equally likely to lead to our extinction when all areas have been found and we need rather to switch to a more stablilzed society, yet won’t bc we don’t feel like doing so.
I mean… depends on what you are into, I suppose:-D.
An hour earlier:
No no no no no, you are supposed to reassure me with nice-sounding “factual” statements!? Everything will be okay bc… Cap’t America, or sumtin.
What I know is that if people have principles but not convictions, then they have neither.
And unfortunately, greed is a principle.:-(
What will really blow all of our minds, is that once we get this tiny little matter of the fate of the USA under control (I’m mostly joking here bc I think there’s a strong, >50% chance of that never happening), there is still the fact that climate change has radically altered our word forever.
And the internet too.
And globalization as well.
Oh and automation likewise.
Meanwhile, to deal with all of THAT, we have… “Congress”.
No matter what, things will never be the same again, nor would those of us who think about it even want to. You can’t un-pop a bubble, and why would we want to make a new one? (bc that worked out so well the last time)
Damnit, I’m not trying to be fatalistic here.
Skulls haven’t melted yet, check!
it’s not going to be simple
Sadly, while the myriad ways that this could play out from here are yet unknown, some things really are just flat that simple that we can guarantee them.
e.g. tell a child “you better do this before I count to 5! 1… 2… 3… 4… 4 and a half… 4 and a quarter… 4 and uh…” - do you see what we’ve lost? This was a test, in the same way that every single thing everywhere is always a test. The goalposts are now shifted: this much they can do - there is no use pretending that we will suddenly decide to halt their next set of actions, or the ones after that, or the ones after that, etc. “First they came for” is happening now, LIVE.
The ruling by the Supreme Court that a sitting President could do anything he ever wanted - including assassination of any American citizen anytime for any reason, iirc without much if anything in the way of oversight (although I never did get clarity on that point) - already ended our “democracy”, months before the voting. Biden may not have chosen to use it, but the goalposts had already been shifted even then.
Even if we had elections again 4 years from now, and I see no reason that we would bother (for the same reason that Trump promised us that he had never so much as heard of Project 2025, during the election, except in this case he’s outright said that we will not), the ratchet has already been sunk in, and the do-nothing Democrats will do… absolutely nothing about it. Man I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist or even a subversive agent but… the facts and conclusions should stand or fall on their own merits regardless.
This is the new normal. You’ve seen the link I’m sure, but here it is again for easy reference: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no. And the Democrats are silent, to save their own families from the death threats that they are literally and actually receiving (https://www.reddit.com/r/Connecticut/comments/1ieiom5/senator_chris_murphy_on_why_the_democrats_are/?share_id=Ce7meV-39mMJsjvxXgn9N).
Democracy has been on the decline now since before I was alive, so it’s not exactly unexpected, just nerve wracking as we go through this transition. It’s also simply a natural consequence: this is what the people want: to not have to make decisions anymore. We could have… well, in the past we could have done things, whereas instead, this is what we’ve done: nothing. And it is what we will continue to do, I predict, bc it’s what we are good at, so long as the price of eggs and gas isn’t too awfully high…
Um… why is that female manipulating that youngling’s lobes?
And while wearing, urk, clothes 🤢🤮
No way!
Definitely it would be closer to 90%, if the internet is any indicator.:-)
While in contrast, you are dead to her. Do you hear me, dead!?
Or at least, you hope… :-P
I’m not sure how it is possible to produce merely average people though? Anyway, even if humanity itself were to not change, the world around us still does. Perhaps one day aliens will show up, assuming that climate change doesn’t kill us all in the moderate term future. Just like all those species of animals and plants and such that we’ve driven extinct: they lasted so long, but then could not survive us.
So I would argue that we always should remain strong… it’s just that the definition of what that even means will constantly keep changing, in response to our circumstances.
But, Stoicism, yeah - it’s literally all that we can do, so let’s do that.:-)
“Data is jacked”, there, ftfy:-)