First of all, how is called this category of programs, instance engine?
Second, why there are 3 different, basically inter-compatible projects out there, what are the benefits of each one over the others? and why does Lemmy prevail all of them.
*i will be using feddit as a umbrella term for all the reddit-like fediverse.
I don’t have much of a technical Background to know how this things work under the hood, but I’m quite curious of where all of this is heading.
I see a lot of awesome features locked away in these other projects that would be just nice if it was standard to have them, like piefed’s hashtag-like system that allows people to seek things by topic instead of going to a specific community hosted in a specific instance, it would instantly fix the fragmentation problem across feddit, lol.
How the future of feddit will be? will be all be using Lemmy or other specific project, or instances will use whatever project they like and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?
I think we should move away from “threadiverse software” and embrace a transparent social web.
If we want to be transparent, we need to stop creating these leaky abstractions. Votes are not private. A vote on Lemmy is just a
Like, a downvote is just adislike. Instead of pretending this information should be private, we should make it clear to the users that they should only react in anyway if they feel comfortable in sharing their opinion in public.I’m about to spin up a personal lemmy instance. It sounds like Vocta might be more suited to my needs, but the software’s deployment and use is pretty darn obtuse. Like, maybe that does what I want, but I really can’t tell. While you caught my interest here, I ultimately did not learn anything useful. Please explain this social web thing further if you were trying to make a point.
And yes. Votes are quite simply public. I’m all about exposing that.
People act better when they know they are observed.
Vocata is great as a concept, but not practical at all. Even the developer of the project agrees. If you know your way around Python and/or Javascript, you might be interested be interested in my ActivityPub Toolkit project, though.
That depend, what your are trying to achieve.
Your point is valid. PieFed point of view is also valid. There are circumtance where voting is better private than transparency. As for myself, i would completly remove the voting system because it is useless.
Why are you voting ? Do you like the cat picture ? The article ? The title ? We will never know. So what’s the point of voting since we don’t know its reasons ?
Why it is at the top of my timeline ? And what about minorities ? Let’s imagine 10 deafs people 1000 hearing people. If ya 1000 hearing people downvote a post because you don’t want to see a post with sign language…
Don’t overcomplicate this. Voting is a way to collectively curate content. If it is relevant to the community and you feel the content is a positive addition to the community, you vote up. If you think it’s a negative addition, you vote it down. That’s all that there is to it.
I never downvoted any posts, you may check my alts. I don’t do that. I simply ignore or tell users or repport.
Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.
At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.
StackOverflow solved this specific issue pretty well IMO. Each downvote costs you a reputation/karma/fake-internet-point. Lemmy doesn’t count karma, so that’d a bit of a nonstarter, but for systems that do, that feels like a good way to discourage rampant use of downvotes.