I think while some of this may be people being people (i.e. tendency to only discuss issues/problems vs accomplishments/solutions), I think there’s also a technical element to it as well in Lemmy’s case.

Up to the latest release of Lemmy (as of writing this is v0.19.4), admins couldn’t adjust the default sort setting, which was Active. Read the docs on the sort setting and Active does what it says, surfaces those posts with recent commenting activity (taking into account score as well).

So you get this unfortunate mix of: people gravitate to discussing negative stuff, people tend not to change default settings (since despite defaults being Active, we can change these if so inclined), and the default sort settings surface whatever is being most discussed/commented on, resulting in this sort of negativity feedback loop you’ve observed.

I noticed and posted about this a few months ago, have tried to upvote and comment on less negatively-focused posts occasionally, but I think this may be an interesting example of a small scale systemic issue as it takes more of us doing similar to address what’s being encountered. However, as more instances update to v0.19.4, I’ll be interested in seeing if admins decide to switch away from the Active sort setting to try to address this in their own way.

I don’t know what sort setting may be better for instances to run with instead, but I’m glad they now have the option. In the meantime I think it’s worth reminding people that they currently have the option to change their default sort settings to something different to try to see different kinds of posts. Personally I switch between New and Scaled to see a variety of posts beyond many of the regular doom and gloom posts.

Seeing as this thread is still active, instead of continuing to reply to people throughout, gonna go ahead and put this out here.

If you’re not finding an active community for something (safe for work, that is) or any community whatsoever for your interest, you’re welcome to post about the topics that interest you in [email protected] till you find enough likeminded people to get a separate community going. This was always allowed tbh, but I’ve tried to make it more explicit and clear that it’s cool.

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[…] but the profitable parts (algorithmic indexer and the app view with advertisements) are very much still in the hands of BlueSky the company.

Yeah, we’ll have to see if/when they fully enable third parties to run their own indexers and app views to see how committed they are to all this, and even then as the thread you linked indicates, there would remain many questionable architectural problems to AuthTransfer.

“lemmy?”
“lemmy show u more memes”

I think another part to it would be leaning in to the silliness of it instead of doing an autopsy on it like a clown doctor

I came away from reading over the AuthTransfer protocol and its handling of moderation/enabling users with a very major sense of, “We outsource almost everything!”

As L. Rhodes writes:

[…] One effect of ATproto’s structure is to multiply the number of administrative relationships for which each user must decide for themselves—often on little to no information—who deserves their trust. The complexity of its infrastructures seems like it would sometimes make it difficult to assess when that trust has been betrayed, and by whom.

So Bluesky may redistribute some technical power from host admins to users, but it also gives them much more to navigate. It makes their need for power more desperate, and I’m not at all sure that the power trickling down to them through those other layers of infrastructure will be sufficient to the need. No doubt many will compensate by sticking to the parts of the network operated by Bluesky itself—apparent choice, de facto lock-in.

…This gets even funnier when you consider how near to Antarctica South Africa is. 😂

US has another meaning for high school, although it may vary from place to place even there. I think it’s typically the…9th year of school, so when people may be around 14 or 15.

I’m sure part of it’s the tone of OP’s title, another part is that the demographics here seem to lean STEM over humanities, another part is that regular mix of people that just abhor anything mandatory, and some of what you mention among other things.

It’s pretty depressing tbh. I don’t agree with OP being all judgmental over it, nor do I think making learning another language mandatory would do much of anything. I’m pretty sure a few years of a secondary language already is mandatory in many schools, and we see how well that goes.

Nevertheless I do think everyone should aspire to learn other languages if for no other reason than simple curiosity, and making oneself at least a little more literate in other languages so that they may be able to experience even those stories that haven’t been translated. Think of all those gems in the rough you find in your own language that may not be translated to any others, and what gems may yet be found in other languages.

Yes, however without experience with Lemmy’s implementation, it wasn’t clear what the differences were. From what I’ve read of Lemmy’s basic implementation, i.e. submit a reason with your registration/application, this didn’t sound that far from it.

As I read it, Pixelfed’s request for more information form is a good addition (better than the awkward roundabout way you’d have to handle it otherwise, as I think I recall seeing come up with Lemmy), albeit as it’s optional we’ll have to see how well it’s used in practice.

Is there something more to it that’s not highlighted in the linked blog post?

we should all be so lucky as to find our own buckets

Ideally these communities would be prevented from appearing in the “Trending Communities” list or local/global feeds unless someone other than the owner was subscribed to them, but wouldn’t be private in the sense that no-one could see them. Just they wouldn’t get wide distribution.

This raises a distinct but interesting additional feature request that might complement “private” or exclusive communities, as well as others that might like to prepare a community before promoting it: a hidden or unlisted setting for communities.

That would enable what you mention here, preventing their appearance from trending, and perhaps also user profile/data areas (i.e. if one can indirectly view others’ subscriptions, this might offer a way to obfuscate/hide that from others besides admins).

I think this would likely be the simplest solution and is worth considering especially since similar concerns have been raised with Mastodon over their naming of messaging specific people (“private”/direct/mentioned only/etc.).

Exclusive may be another good term instead of private.

@[email protected] so you’ll see this too. There’s [email protected], but unfortunately it hasn’t really taken off yet. 😞

This is a longshot and may be wrong, but as I didn’t find the other replies here (nor on Reddit, where a similar question was asked) satisfying, I did some digging and found this paper that relates to something called CARAFE, which seems as though it may fit as it relates to image processing and improving image resolution.

Although arrafe or arafe have dropped the c, perhaps it still relates to this? That seems to make more sense at least in terms of image generation, and maybe in descriptions it’s meant to indicate that this was used, like to improve the quality or something. For anyone interested, the paper linked to isn’t paywalled, so you can check it out and see if this makes sense in context.

From my limited knowledge of this subject, I think it does, but 🤷‍♀️

Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from on this. Personally I’m not a fan of Active as the default, yet I also don’t know what might be preferable to others. With that being the case, I thought it might help to highlight some ways to work with it in the meantime, especially given the outside perspective.

For those here, I think it’s probably good to advise them to consider trying different sort methods till they find one that suits their preferences if they find themselves annoyed by the defaults, which has been happening for awhile already anyway.

I should elaborate a little, while I think commenting is important under Active sort for helping surface posts, I also think it is being balanced out by the vote scores. For a post to be surfaced you’ll want it to be both valued (upvoted) and commented on, then if you’re hoping for it to remain visible for awhile, you’ll want to see fairly steady commenting (that’s part of why you can see posts from days ago lingering around under Active, I think).

I’ve not really noticed too many situations of flamebait style posts doing this, as I suspect they’re generally downvoted…Aside from the beating-a-dead-horse sort of posts that, despite receiving the usual, “Ugh this again” sort of comments, seem to otherwise be valued by some lurking voters.

A more fun variation on this would be to contest mathematical notation. PEMDAS is one thing, but mathematical notation? Not only might you get lost in the order of operations, now you’re lucky if you can even read it without committing yourself to the maths cubicles.

Yeah, they don’t get dungeons, they get cubicles because it’s a geometrically appropriate hell.