Lately, Discourse has been including all kinds of generative AI features that I’d literally have to pay API providers to use, and aside from the actual, legitimate use case of spam detection in non-private communities, I can’t imagine who’s asked for any of these features.

“now your users can generate images right from discourse using your money”

yeah, well, before today they could have generated images using their money and posted that, how is this better?

“you can do sentiment analysis of posts in your community”

it’s a private community full of software developers over the age of 40, many with kids, the sentiment is always “tired”, I don’t need an AI to tell me that

I’m pretty sure the Discourse target market is exclusively late-Gen-X to Early Millennial because nobody else is old enough to even still want a forum, the Children communicate by sending furry VR-sona Tiktoks to private Discord communities

build an AI that automatically posts relevant quotes from The Simpsons (seasons 2-10) and reassures us that Final Fantasy VI and Cowboy Bebop were the apex of media and NOW we’re in business

“yes, millennial AI, you CAN has cheeseburger”

So far, a lot more than Mastodon, I’m noticing that the people on Lemmy are people who do not understand why they have been banned from reddit

which means that while the dream of federation is in and of itself just, reddit itself might have to get bad enough to drive away some adults before lemmy is fully usable

In my experience, internet communities formed around the locus of “we’ll create a place where :existing community: can’t ban us for NO REASON” lack the deep introspective reserves necessary to form a healthy community

I’m not internet popular - aside from a few times I’ve gone (by my standards) extremely viral and had something of mine suddenly in front of tens of thousands of people (or the one thing I helped build that’s seen millions of people) and there’s a point in there where things disappear from the “regular adult conversation” zone to a territory where complete strangers will have insane arguments with one another about total misinterpretations of your point without your involvement.

I can comfortably say that the point where people stop charitably reading your intentions or grokking your humor - somewhere in there is the point where things cross the line from it being fun to go viral to it being kinda bad and weird actually.

So, our company, as a matter of policy and practicality, doesn’t allow users from email providers that can algorithmically spin up new e-mail addresses with no restrictions, because they have an enormously high tendency to be botnets.

This has resulted in one prominent privacy focused email provider (the one that I use, humorously enough, but I have a custom domain so it doesn’t matter) petitioning us repeatedly asking us to unblock them.

But they can’t fix the problem, so…

it’d be a bigger problem but my assumption is that anybody technically clever enough to want to have an account with this provider is also technically clever enough to figure out a way to use our service anyways

I get mad when I see people complain that all software tools just DULL YOUR WELL HONED DEVELOPER SENSES and everybody’s getting soft, but then I also get mad when I see people crow that people who don’t adopt every AI tool right away are going to be left in the dust.

the solution turned out to be very simple: shut off twitter

the problem isn’t either of these points of view, it’s an algorithm that prioritizes engagement showing me the worst version of any given argument to make me angry at it

Tools can, in fact, make you faster. They can also make you sloppier, and more reliant on said tools.

Every developer is responsible for finding their own happy, productive middle ground.

This is as true for Copilot as it is for an IDE with an integrated debugger, or talking your code over with ChatGPT, or using npm libraries, or StackOverflow, or doing math with a calculator

The first and. I think most important step in learning how to use Mastodon is that you should follow me.

The second step, and this is crucial, is to log in regularly to see the things that I am saying.

The third thing is, of course, actually I don’t care just do the first two things and you’ll probably be fine.

sometimes you run into someone who talks like they use LinkedIn as their primary social network

i can’t imagine the brain damage

any community forum, be it a small town subreddit or Nextdoor, seems to immediately devolve to people asking what that noise was or where all those cops were going.

a lot of people secretly wish to be a part of a small, close-knit democratically organized co-living community, except for people who are from big families or people who’ve been very involved in their strata or people who’ve had roommates

i come from a very close knit family and have participated in strata, and as a result my ideal living situation is me, my wife, and my cat on an island that my friends and family visit regularly, then leave

I don’t like it when I crack into a discord community with like 100 people in it and they have 40 different threads

you don’t need this many threads

you need maybe three

AITA for naming my baby something “unconventional”?

So, I (29F) recently gave birth to my first child, a beautiful baby girl. My husband (31M) and I spent months deliberating over the perfect name for her. We’re both into mythology and literature, and we wanted a name that felt unique but also meaningful. After a lot of back-and-forth, we settled on Nyxiryn (pronounced “NIX-er-in”). It’s a combination of “Nyx,” the Greek goddess of the night, and “Irina”, which means “peace” in Greek. We thought it sounded poetic, strong, and unique.

reddit decided yes

It’s unlikely to happen, but were I to have a kid, I’d keep my tragedeigh desires confined to their middle name, which can be as silly and stupid as I want (is there a cap on number of middle names? no? great.), because they’re basically vestigial.

My wife and I both have names in the sweet spot (rare enough to be unique to an arbitrary group of 100 people, usually, but common enough not to be interesting or stand out in any way) and I’d want my kid to have the same experience, name-wise.

like, you want them to be a Vincent in a sea of Micheals and Johns and Noahs and Olivers - you should be able to think “I know 1-2 persons with that name, but not dozens, but also that is not the first time I have ever heard anybody use that name ever”

my dad is one of the many daves

a card-carrying member of the dave supercluster

although my wife and I do keep a running list of awful baby names

Oh, and @curtis, Scotichronicon is on the list of hypothetical best baby names we’ve been making.

It’s now:

• Janarthanon
• Surfbort (Bort for short)
• Crabitha
• Garol
• Queeth
• Hyort
• or Scotichronicon

also “Tressica”, “Beff”, and “Jeffica” made our original list, I think

man, for a protocol that doesn’t seem like it has much of a defense against random bullshit from third party outsiders, Mastodon’s moderation (on my instance, at least) is pretty tight.

Sometimes I’ll see someone blast loud garbage everywhere on a popular tag like “canada” from an account they just made on a reliable instance or an homemade server, and then minutes later they’ve been lasered from orbit.

either their reliable instance got them, or MY reliable instance got them, or their server was completely defederated

when I first looked, I thought “this has all of the same problems as email, there is no way this doesn’t immediately devolve into the spammiest spam ever to spam a spam”

but actually, the layered silo approach means that there are lots of opportunities to catch a predator if you merely have loads of people pouring a lot of effort into it, all the time

i am very surprised that this all works and I suspect that the thing holding it all together is “effort”, so remember to kick some money towards your silo admin if they’ve made it an option (they probably have, go check)

sometimes I’ll look at something unbelievably stupid on Mastodon for a few beats too long, then think about it for a second and think “wow, it is super nice that a malevolent algorithm didn’t get behind-the-scenes convinced that my staring at it was interest motivated and send me 100x more of that exact kind of content”

it feels like a real luxury to be able to take some time and examine content that I don’t plan to ever return to

the bottom of the Youtube Shorts barrel is this dollar-store motivational content with 0 likes, 0 views and no subscribers where some chump is like “ONLY YOU CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS, NOBODY ELSE CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS FOR YOU”

this is part of the hustledork continuum where every hustledork is doing it because they saw (maybe even PAID) another hustledork to tell them that this is how they get money and influence, and now they’re sharing the same messages

it’s “viral” but, viral in the way that rabies is

if you get too many of them together they metastasize into a linkedin

the bottom strata of the internet are 14 year olds who are just learning how to use their phone’s camera and people who’ve paid to buy motivational content that have instructed them that the only way to make money is by selling other people motivational content, BUY MY COURSE TODAY

I think that one of the big problems getting frustrating tools like Element/Matrix off of the ground is just how good Discord is, even avec mild shittification.

Yes it is actually easier to put up with them trying to sell me Final Fantasy XIV and emoji merch packs than it is to deal with Matrix’s frequently broken encryption and poor discoverability.

local communities on any platform like reddit are nothing more than a constant drumbeat of “what was that siren?” and “someone’s dog pooped” and “i think I saw a criminal??” in small cities

and “oh my god big cities have homelessness and drugs, that should be against the law” and “the endless bike/scooter argument” of larger cities

if I were looking for communities to replace with an AI these would probably be the first, I feel like I wouldn’t need a complex model or even an LLM, necessarily, I could do this one heuristically

it would be slightly harder to simulate that one guy with a bunch of numbers in his name who’s constantly pushing hard right accelerationism on every forum, but not impossible

so, on reddit, for the past 6 months or so every time a post on one of the local subreddits comes up asking “why all those sirens” or “what was that noise?”, I always respond with some variation on “oh, yeah, an old man exploded”

this provides no value and isn’t terribly funny, and yet, deep down in my heart, I think it’s a joke that will pay off in a few more years

sometimes I get rate limited by Mastodon, while using the Mastodon client normally, from a single tab, which strikes me as a bit odd

on account of… you know, Mastodon, you’re the one doing this

A new super-dangerous and completely made-up exploit has gone viral in the VRChat community about once every 8 months for the past 6 years.

i hear they can make it so that if you die in VR, you die in REAL LIFE

To be honest, I’ve always thought that the open marketplace “economy” monetization model in metaverse spaces is actually a huge anti-feature.

It’s why so many of them feel like abandoned malls. People don’t like being sold to and giving your creators tools to try to nickel and dime people for every interaction with their products creates a bad and unpleasant experience for your users, so they leave, then there’s nobody to sell to so your creators leave.

Your creators would have stuck around to create art for the sake of creating art, but now that their art could theoretically be profitable and isn’t they don’t want to stay any more.

It’s one of the things I actually love about Second Life, you boot it up and it’s this eternal haunted mall, just emptiness and the hull of commerce around you as far as the eye can see. Nobody was enjoying this, they all just thought they could make some money.

A vibrant VR platform lets you play with the bowling balls and drink the beer and you don’t have to pay some idiot $1.75 to do that.

A dead VR platform gives you nothing to do without productizing it, and most real human beings go “fuck this” and bail, because that’s the kind of platform that appeals to speculators and capital and not, y’know, people.

On the other hand, Roblox is printing money right now and Second Life made enough money on a virtual speculative land rush bubble that they created that they could sit on their hands for a decade, so maybe I should shut the hell up.

Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about setting up a Discourse community without remembering that the software is the world’s most effective ghost town generator.

The internet needs a modern forum software, I think. It’s good that this exists: and I’ve been running a tiny, private Discourse community for lo, near a decade now. So, actually, I’m kind of on the side of Discourse.

Like, my Discourse site doesn’t have a CDN set up. Because the CDN that I use, Cloudflare, one of the most common CDN platforms on the internet, isn’t supported by Discourse. That’s fine: I only have about 30 users, all of us in the Pacific Northwest, serving the whole site out of Wasabi object storage in Oregon is perfectly fine. but Discourse feels the need to pop up a notification every single week letting me know that this is a critical error that I need to fix! Let me live my life, Discourse.

I’m still weirded out by some of the ways they brand themselves and act. Discourse. A civilized discussion platform. Who decided that their marketing should be dripping with, like, neo-colonial derision for the way that people communicate online? That’s really baked in from the get-go, too, all the way down to the name of the platform itself. “Discourse”.

🧐 Mmm, yes. Fetch me my tea, Willinglsley, it’s time for a civilized discussion.

This isn’t a place for your memes and nonsense, this is a Serious Roman Forum for high-minded communique.

I can’t think of a software package where I’ve had to disable more dubiously helpful “leave it to us, we know how to run a community better than you do” features than Discourse. “That’s not enough words, you can’t post a response that’s just an emoji.” “Oh, you need to read everything and rank up on the forum levels before you participate, you neophyte.”

obviously the problem with internet communication has always been that it’s Not Polite And Erudite Enough

why, if we could all simply have a vigorous discussion with a polite exchange of ideas and then shake hands afterwards, what a pleasant place the internet could have become, but INSTEAD you’re ignoring our civilized offerings and pelting one another with TWITCH EMOTES like a bunch of sava—

It is simultaneously the best or second-best available FOSS community communication product (in competition with Mastodon, even though they serve different purposes) and just awkward and frustrating and disappointing in so many little ways.