I wonder to what extent the massive imbalance in news coverage was simply super wealthy families handing journalists pre-written pieces so that laziness would dictate this result (rather than the journalists doing this naturally, although laziness is natural enough I guess).

Very cool, I didn't know they added !msocial.

Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.

I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.

On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots...?

While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it's clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they're usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

I'm not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to "bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people" because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn't take that long to click honestly.

Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don't turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn't seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what's going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I'm sure...!

I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like "if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to" and "I don't have to align it by eye, it's a computer".

And I'm definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn't need to be on at all... it's just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It's pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.

Did they initiate the process and ask for help or did you offer?

I've been teaching twenty years. If students get themselves to the point of coming with a question based on experience, odds are excellent that they will listen to what I'm saying. If they do something at my suggestion, they are not engaged and do not retain. Same is surely true for learning to use a new website.

So I dunno if this is a suggestion for you or other people reading this post, but consider directing them to magazines/communities that are an actual draw, since people are the actual draw. When they find they cannot post, then they will have incentive to pay attention.

This is so far true for "what is a photon", "what is consciousness", "how do you do a kick", and "why are most metals thermally conductive" so I suspect this isn't a unique thing. Dangle the incentive, then wait for them to ask how to get involved.

Again, not criticizing especially since I don't know your approach, hopefully this can help others. The draw is the community and posts, so highlight that way before they ever see a signup page. They can browse the site without an account.

I think that bots that repost automatically are lame, personally, but as long as they are clearly tagged and I have the ability to ignore anything from any bot that's fine. We had the same issue on Mastodon, I still can't figure out how to straight up block bots on there which is frustrating so instead I just filter out any posts that say "twitter" or "RT".

I don't have any issue with bots as long as they're easy to block across the board instead of individually.

I do think it's lame and that y'all are better than that.

Thank you @ernest !

In your case, lemmy.ca says this about the instance you are on.

Lemmy.ca
A canadian-run community, geared towards canadians, but all are welcome!
Welcome to Lemmy.ca!

“Lemmy.ca” is so named due to it running the Lemmy software, in the Fediverse, and it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by a Canadian. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!
We have some rules here:

No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No porn.
No Ads / Spamming.

That gives a fair amount of information about what is and is not acceptable on that particular instance. Looking at your local communities only should tell you a lot about the general character of the group, I don't use Lemmy (this is from kbin, hi) but it seems like your UI has multiple buttons to show all/subscribed/local feeds, so switch it to local and see if it pisses you off.

Telling who owns it is harder, I think that's often somewhat obscured for dox/harassment reasons. However, in this case the website shows at the bottom of the right-side column who the admins are:

admins: @smorks @crb

And now I see that @smorks noticed your post and hopefully that will clear things up ;-) Hopefully they don't mind being doxxxxxxed.

I love #mosstadon (do mastodon tags do anything in posts on kbin I wonder?).

I love how many mastodon posts are people taking pretty pictures of moss or mushrooms or birds.

I've been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I'm coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching -- you cannot tell people things like "you should just join lemmy/kbin" -- you have to wait for them to ask "how do I join lemmy/kbin?"

That's okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be "here's what you're missing", positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

It's an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn't gaslight people), but they're also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

Consider focusing on the positive -- link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don't need an account to read and enjoy.

Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread -- that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They'll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what's going on.

And now they've convinced themselves it's worth joining...

I'll try submitting the same, sure.

I am suspicious that the search URL will only be indexing kbin.social and not the greater kbin/lemmy universe which is not good. But it's a !kbin bang and the !msocial bang goes to mastodon.social so I guess it makes sense.

I'd much rather see a !kbin search that returned results from all kbin instances it has indexed, and a !lemmy search that does the same for lemmy instances, or a !fediforum search that returned results from both. But it's a start!

Doesn't that result in the general public owning shares that gradually decrease in value while the current owners make money at the current value? Seems like index funds will be paying for it unless the actual amount the Reddit owners sell it for goes down before the sale.

Satisfying I guess, but frustrating that the people that did the damage get a payout while the public holds the bag while it deflates.

Can't control when you do it.

Yeah, it'd just be nice if it lost all that value before going public and ended up a loss for the VCs instead of retirees.

okay by their rules (what many of us just left Reddit over)

People are leaving Reddit over their moderation rules? I thought the CEO did something with the API.

But I mean, yeah, people who have compatible instance rules will federate and the people on those instances will have agreed to those rules. I think you might be overestimating how restrictive typical rules are, unless you think transphobia being called "not okay" is too restrictive.

Of course in a magical world all the different basically the same magazines on different instances would get merged seamlessly in the UI with posts all somehow connected.

In the real world I can't even conceptualize how you could handle moderation (or a random collection of posts vanishing from a thread) with instances that have different rules unless each magazine for different topics was a separate silo.

The natural outcome, without much active effort, seems likely to be that niche stuff is consolidated on a single instance that members aren't necessarily on in order to have enough participation while popular stuff truly just gets silo'd into different self-sustaining groups that talk about the same stuff but with different culture developed, different moderators, and a different instance.

Is there another way? We're assuming each one is self-sustaining, it will be good enough or you'll find one on a different instance...

I expect people will see there's existing local magazines for a bunch of things, and then to search out magazines for niche interests.

Nah, no idea. I suppose it doesn't really matter really, just curious if it's a bug or a misunderstanding. I can't really find any documentation about it so probably best to ignore it.

FTL, Into the Breach, and Slay the Spire are mostly puzzle games -- but since they're roguelikes they have a little depth. Depends on what you mean.

I find them very replayable but I like puzzle games because I have bad hands and game controllers are not an option.

I think I'm much too old for Prodigy or something because one episode was too much.

But Lower Decks is absolutely amazing, it's really nice to have a legitimate comedy within the honest-to-god Star Trek universe so they can just actually make fun of Riker by name.

I like Strange New Worlds alright. It's better than Discovery, and I liked Discovery fine.

Picard was great until the S1 twist and I refused to watch further. Maybe that's not fair, I found it a bit Disney-ish but wow that ending. I just have to head cannon a more respectful ending and I imagine I'll get around to it.

Though I have somehow never managed to get around to Enterprise...

I'm not from reddit, what is a reputation and what practical effect does it have? Is it just upvotes minus downvotes?

I found a reputation in my profile of "1" but I don't have a clue where that came from. I'm not sure why we need to have scores associated with our accounts, that in itself seems toxic to me to care about (clout chasing).

Upvoting comments in threads makes sense, I'm just not seeing any actual practical connection with the thing called "reputation" on my profile. What does it do in a best case?