trynn

Yep. Musk is basing his idea about having an “everything app” on WeChat’s success in China, which basically does what he’s talking about. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to understand that there are cultural differences at play between Chinese users and western users that prevent mass-adoption of a single app to do everything in the west, and that WeChat already exists and isn’t popular in the west at all.

It’s the first change to the Office default font in more than 15 years.

Man, I remember the change to Calibri, and now I feel really old.

I don’t think you quite realize how much craziness is in the world at large. There are have been instances of pizzagate levels of craziness in my home country, as well as in the other countries whose news I follow.

You also don’t seem to grasp how discussions on the Internet work. People will post about things that interest them. Telling people not to post things that are of interest to them because you don’t like it is counterintuitive and borderline offensive. I told you the reason you’re seeing much more US-centric posts. You have quite a lot of options if you don’t want to see that stuff, but telling everyone else not to post it is not one of those options.

Welcome to how the Internet work? The thing you don’t seem to be realizing is that this isn’t an ‘American obsession’ thing. It’s a population thing. kbin.social is advertised as an English discussion forum/link aggregator. It just so happens that the largest English-speaking country on the planet is the US, and by a lot too. The next-biggest is the UK, which has a population 1/5th the size of the US. Canada is even smaller, at about 1/10th the population of the US. Even if people post things at the same rate, you’re going to get 5 US-related posts for every UK post, and 10 US-related posts for every Canadian one. There are simply more Americans online. This kind of thing is going to happen on any widespread English-language discussion forum on the Internet, and has been this way since Usenet in the 1980s.

Your first mistake is assuming that Elon Musk uses any kind of logic.

I don’t know anything about the mobile apps for the fediverse, but you can definitely search for communities from the Lemmy web UI (same goes if you’re on kbin). If you go to the Communities tab there should be a search field in the upper-right.

Both the Lemmy and kBin UI show the domain of the link in a post. I would assume if someone got a post to the top of hot/active/whatever and edited the URL, then the UI would be updated to show the new URL’s domain.

It’ll have to be tested, but I’m not sure Perspectives will do what the ‘reddit’ query does for many people. I can only speak for myself, but I typically would add ‘reddit’ to searches because I was looking for thorough information on a subject, and I was certain there would be some random subreddit out there full of experts and enthusiasts on that specific niche topic. I don’t want social media or influencer content, I want content from people with extremely deep knowledge about very specific things.

This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author’s points, that’s not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn’t really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn’t provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they’re in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don’t go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.

In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.

I think it’s because there was a hope for wholesale migration of most/all users from Twitter to the Fediverse. Or at the very least for enough migration to make Twitter a barren landscape that would precipitate its imminent demise. Neither of those happened. Of course, neither of those are realistic outcomes either.

Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it’s about the number of visits.

Looks like that number lines up with their reported DAU (daily active users) metric rather than site visits.

52 million DAU is about where Reddit was in the summer of 2021, per data on Statista. It also tends to vary up or down by a few million at each sample point, so we’d really have to see a long-term trend-line rather than a 2-week data snapshot to know whether the blackout had any real effect.

There’s evidence in the modlogs that the Lemmy developers (who are also the admins of lemmy.ml) have been banning users and removing posts from lemmy.ml with a reason of ‘orientalism’ or ‘racism’ when those users say anything mildly critical of China.
So it’s a bit more than just refusing to suppress anti-American content on their instance.

You seem to be missing two rather important points.

First, users have no obligation whatsoever to ensure Reddit is profitable. That is not our job. We’re the customers (we also arguably create all the value of the service, but let’s set that aside since nobody’s expecting to get paid for commenting on threads on Reddit). If Reddit needs to find a way to be profitable, then it’s up to them to do it in such a way that doesn’t damage their business. They have full control over all of this, and have consistently made the wrong decision every step of the way. Reddit management could easily have done what most other companies do in situations like these and backpedaled, given some kind of pseudo-apology, and found a way to do what they want to do in a less objectionable manner. They didn’t. If Reddit goes the way of MySpace, it’ll be the fault of the /u/spez and the others running the business.

Secondly, the company was founded in 2005. That’s almost 20 years ago. If they haven’t found a way to be profitable in that amount of time then they’re not going to. They have a fundamental business problem they need to fix, and they’re in a tough spot because most solutions to that problem will end up damaging the business they’re trying to save. Sucks to be them, but they really should have thought of that over a decade ago.

I can only assume that the people having trouble understanding kbin/lemmy are either relatively young, or relatively inexperienced with technology. Basically those people whose online experience really only started in the era of Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Those of us who were online in the early 2000s are familiar with web forums. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically just web forums that can be interacted with from any kbin or Lemmy instance that’s federated. Those of us who are even older and were online in the 90s (or earlier) are familiar with Usenet. Kbin Magazines/Lemmy Communities are basically Usenet newsgroups, with the particular instance you’re on essentially the same as your Usenet provider. Or for the really old folks like me, instances are like BBSes that are connected to each other with FidoNet.

It reminds me of people who get confused getting on Discord for the first time, when it’s really just a modern incarnation of chat-rooms or IRC. None of these ideas are new, and people were able to figure out these core concepts decades ago.