Max-P

Paste the URL in the search bar, it’ll fetch it locally on your instance and get you there. No need for link guesswork to find it on a particular instance.

If it’s spam it should have been deleted anyway by the admins as well, but sometimes this doesn’t federate correctly.

I found the setting to turn that off in the settings so that checks out with what you said. Good to know!

Why is this always the argument that comes up? It’s like if foreign people came by thousands to post the 9/11 attacks on american media to test the free speech. Most would take it down, some might stay up, but it’s ultimately still very disrespectful and upsetting for a lot of people.

You can enjoy a heavily moderated platform for what it’s good at. I use rednote for my cat, food and art content and enjoy the cultural exchange. There are better suited apps in general for free speech and political debate. I’m tired of politics invading every platform, so it’s been rather nice in that aspect. For what I want to use that app for, I’m perfectly fine with the CCP’s rules, even if I disagree with some aspects of the CCP.

Free speech is important, but we don’t need it literally everywhere.

No FOSS clients, nobody’s got time to reverse engineer it as it happened so fast.

As for privacy, well, it uses plain HTTP for at least all the media, so, not very private. It requests less permissions than Meta’s apps however, and only asks when the feature is needed (for example, the Nearby page requests GPS which makes sense). It does seem to like to paste my clipboard which is not very cool, no idea what it’s doing with it. I use a VPN for it.

It’s still a chinese app under the control of the CCP. Personally, I’d rather China have my data than the US, because at least for China it’s useless whereas with the current administration in the US, who knows what they do with that data.

As for the app itself, it’s pretty nice. Don’t expect free speech, but the rules also make it for a rather respectful and positive experience overall. For what it’s intended to be (share cats, recipes, makeup, and other entertainment content) it’s pretty good and a breath of fresh air compared to the non-stop political fighting on other platforms. That said it’s not as censored as some assume it is: if it’s presented tastefully you can usually get away with it. Respect and honesty gets you far on there whereas lies and aggression gets you banned. I’ve seen guns, LGBTQ, cars, religion, politics, comparing capitalism and communism. They’re talking about Elon’s nazi salute on there and all.

The massive cultural exchange going on there is quite enjoyable. People from all sorts of countries are trying out new recipes and adapting them to their local taste. Turns out mandarin isn’t so bad to learn either. Very welcoming community. Rumors are it made the chinese government consider relaxing the great firewall. The sentiment is very anti-war as people from enemy countries are building online friendships.

I approach it with caution, but I’ve been rather please with what I see.

I wouldn’t be surprised they do, but at the same time if they do that it’s a major red flag.

I literally won a “silent but deadly” award at a company retreat of which the premise is, I’m a very quiet person but when I do speak up you better pay attention because it’s important. I hate talking so when I talk I’m not talking about my weekend, I’m talking about why we can’t do that because systems Y and Z will blow up.

1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

Lemmy is a lot closer to Reddit, and is centered communities, not people. I think you’d have a better experience on one of the microblogging platforms for that use case.

2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

That’s a big “it depends” as some instances have bots to go subscribe to every community and pull it all in. Lemmy only federates content to instances that have at least one subscriber to the community, so discoverability would be a problem.

3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

You just don’t see them and they’re not counted in the score displayed to you. They’re still added up in the back end unless you post to a community with downvotes disabled, in this case then they’re discarded entirely. But since this community is on lemmy.ml and that one accepts downvotes, then they work as you’d expect. You still won’t see them on your side.

4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah? Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

No, far from it. Everything is visible publicly, and when it’s public there’s little to do to stop AI scraping.

5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

Yes. I don’t even need to crawl Lemmy to index it, all the other instances are willingly sending it to me in real time. I have a copy of everything my instance has seen.

6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

Only the developers can comment but it seems slow but steady.

7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

Zero, none. There is zero privacy on Lemmy because the fediverse is inherently public. I can see who voted what, I could see the entire edit history of a given post or comment, I could store all deleted posts and comments, the data is all on my server should I want to do anything with it.

So your privacy will depend solely on your OpSec: don’t share personally identifiable information or anything.

8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

Those do drown pretty much everything else, but you can look at Lemmy Explorer and find communities you like and subscribe to them, and then browse by subscriptions. The default feed is basically a firehose of literally everything going in every community at once.

Some people also opt to just block the communities they’re not interested in such that all that’s left is interesting ones so you don’t miss anything.

That’s exactly what it’s for. Some of them have background music on them, to get it misclassified. Some also put a random face at the bottom with the same phrases every now and then to get it classified as a reaction video. I’ve also seen black lines in the middle of the screen. Sometimes the clip jumps forwards and backwards to make it harder to detect.

I think the subway surfer thing was also originally intended for that, before it was found that it somehow also increases attention. The split between the videos also makes it harder to identify what it is, so maybe it’ll get classified as a minecraft clip instead of copyrighted movie.

People go to insane length to post full movies and shows on YT Shorts/TikTok/Instagram. It’s like early YouTube again where you’d watch and episode over 50 parts.

It has its bads and a lot of the content is worthless trash, but it’s also a really good way to see what’s going on around the world from those people’s perspectives. You see a lot of stuff that doesn’t make it to Reddit or Twitter.

It’s a lot harder to be against Ukraine when you can see the horrors minutes after a Russian strike.

The government hates it because they can’t control it. They’d rather people only see what the mainstream media says, and not the fact everyone sympathizes with Luigi.

The free speech argument is genuine, despite how much I hate the shady practices of the platform.

No, otherwise the security cameras wouldn’t record and that’s precisely the opposite of what I want when I’m out.

Technically a lot of the newer chips used in datacenters support encrypted VMs which encrypts the RAM too, although you still have to trust that the hosting provider uses that feature.

When you subscribe to a community, you only start receiving data from that point on. It doesn’t go and download the history, that’d be very resource intensive on the remote instance. Thus it fetches a handful of posts, and no comments as a preview of the community, and after a couple days of activity is looks mostly normal.

There’s nothing left of AlienBlue with their redesign, it’s basically a glorified web wrapper like many other apps at this point.

They’re just apps not made by Reddit, but made by Reddit users, some of which were paid. And many which were significantly better and more reliable than Reddit’s.

A quick example on Lemmy just with the web, these are all lemmy.world but different UIs:

• https://a.lemmy.world/ - Alexandrite UI
• https://photon.lemmy.world/ - Photon UI
• https://m.lemmy.world/ - Voyager mobile UI
• https://old.lemmy.world/ - A familiar UI

And that one too: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

And that’s just the web browser ones, there’s a bunch for iOS and Android too. Reddit had even more.

A good app that matches your style of scrolling really makes a difference.

Maybe it can be hacked together with Syncthing: have your phone’s camera sync with an inbox folder on the desktop, have the desktop pick up the files and transcode them with handbrake, then move the original out of the inbox. This will cause Syncthing to sync the deletion back to your phone, and sync the transcoded version back on your phone.

I’d also check if you can just change the bitrate in your camera app’s settings in case there’s a way to lower the quality there. Could be noticeable, could be just as good as handbrake, never know with hardware encoding.

~Not really. All the features of that tool are basic functions we’ve had before LibreOffice was still OpenOffice.~

~Since this converts to Markdown, it’s inherently a very lossy conversion. What’s hard to pull off is preserve the full formatting when converting to an odt or something.~

Someone pointed out it doesn’t just convert word documents to Markdown, it can also transcribe and OCR, so I guess it does have some usefulness!

Yeah there’s those situations, fairly rare. Most of the ones I see coming here are the free speech kind that are mad they got banned for harassing people and generally being major assholes.

Welcome to Lemmy then! The mods aren’t perfect either but at least you have choices in instances.

There’s a few, and they proceed to get downvoted to hell and banned from here as well because people are even less tolerant to those that love to test the rules here.

If you look at it from a different angle and ask: who might be interested by a user being reported, given that each instance operate independently? The answer is all of them.

• The instance you’re on could be interested because it might violate the local instance’s rules, and the admin might want to delete it even if from just that instance.
• The instance hosting the community, because regardless of the other two instances they might not want that there.
• The instance of the user being reported, because it’s their user and if they’re causing trouble they might want to ban the account.

The rest comes naturally: obviously if the account is banned at the source it’s effectively banned globally. If it’s banned on the community’s instance, then you won’t see that user there but might on other instances. And your instance can ban the user, in which case they’re freely posting on other instances but you won’t see it from your perspective.

Seems a bit harsh considering single user instances or very small ones. I can be away for a week but not dead.