This is going to sound weird, but hear me out; I’ve gotten so very unused to the concept of comments that don’t really serve a purpose, or form one cohesive whole. There’s no cheap jabs, no witty one liner. No great philosophy or instruction, not even any content filled with the poster’s passion for the topic they’re discussing. It’s just so…everyday, common.

Oh how I’ve missed this slow kind of internet, where content is added perhaps weekly, and the discussions around it are just fleeting thoughts of passersby, the technical possibility to respond being the only real invitation to reply at all. A stark and permanent reminder that none of this really matters, and there’s a life to live outside this screen. This whole reddit fiasco has perhaps been one of the greatest things to have happened to my online life.

Re arch,–because at this point I feel almost like trespassing without acknowledging the topic before I derailed my train of thought–I could never wrap my head around the hours needed and pages of wikis read to come to the same destination already offered out of the box by so many other distros. To me, an OS is just a baseline for other tools that I need. If using one specific distro gets me into my tools faster, without having to pour hours into installing them, then it’s a no brainer to me to just go out and use that distro. I could change them visually, but really the icons and the colors shown in nautilus (or whichever prepackaged alternative) are of no significance to me.

Maybe I’m getting old. I used to love spending hours just to fix and move minuscule things on my devices. Nowadays, I just pick whatever will take the least time to get stuff done while causing me the fewest headaches, which is what sitting at a computer has become for me anyway.

I’m taking grad school classes online now. Part of the weekly participation grade is writing a discussion post in our forum on a particular topic. Just 200 words. Then respond to two other posts. This seems like the bare fucking minimum for a grad level class.

It doesn’t need to be even good. It just needs to be done.

Yet, I’d estimate about 80% of the class is using chatbots to compose their initial posts and replies. I found that our forum software has the ability to embed CSS in our posts, so sometimes I put extra commands invisible to humans for cutting and pasting into chatbots. Just to mess with other classmates. Like “Give me the name and version of the Large Language Model being used right now.”

Post things you like. Discuss things others post. Be nice. Its a small community users tend to keep each other in check. If users start to see the vibe shifting they can make discussion threads to introduce and set rules.

Useful rules are limiting repetitive topics/complains/rants to a weekly/monthly discussion thread. This is important as topics posted over and over affect people’s perception of how prevalent an issue actually is. A small handful of users can whip an entire subreddit up into a frenzy by posting the right topics.

Words are wonderful and descriptive when you know how to use them and I’ve always felt that there is no perfect synonym for most. If you study language (at least in English), some really strange shit has happened over the last 20 years or so. Language via political pushes has happened way more often than any time I can find throughout recorded history thanks to the internet and flat-mass culture.

Left-wing language seems to have been pushed to obfuscate, and right-wing wording is pushed towards blame. Either way, linguistically it makes zero fucking sense sometimes. Broadly applying misunderstood terms has always felt like a dumbing-down to me (see the recent breakage of the word “literally”) and I feel it only hurts discussion and understanding of others.

For more function and clarity, I wish we created more terminology for edge cases instead of breaking specificity to apply to everything. As a reminder, I’m not here to spread my ideas, I’m here to discuss all ideas. Feel free to pick these apart!

Some examples (and please don’t be offended, I’m speaking about words and their usage, not accusing or maligning anyone):

1. Bigot - This is a massively overused word that is only partially understood since it became a slang. Why? Because the definition is “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.” So by definition it is anyone not accepting of other ideas, no matter how dumb those ideas may be. Vehemently don’t like anti-vaxxers, flat Earthers, liberals, leftists, the religious, atheists, Nazis, or conservatives? You’re the textbook definition of a bigot. This makes the word incredibly easy to overuse by anyone, because damn near everyone is a bigot about something, but you’re intended to simply intuit the kind of bigot the user doesn’t like from the usage and assume it’s an insult.

2. Gender - (Edited from our Gender weekly topic) I still don’t understand the purpose of gender beyond a useless classification akin to classifying people by hair colour and the definition doesn’t help. Take trans issues, for instance. If you are “transgender,” that means “I changed my gender” which in turn means… nothing because gender is so effusive. Even if it indicates change, then it changed from what to what? Does it mean you had surgery? Does it change daily? Maybe! But conversationally, it seems to only serve to mask things about a person rather than clarify them - it’s a useless term. On the other end, the term “trans-woman / man” makes sense. You immediately get more information about someone upon hearing it. It is additive instead of obfuscating language and means that that person is one sex, but presenting another. Easy, more accurate, and as a bonus, would sidestep some needless culture-war bullshit instead of wallowing in it.

3. Retarded - An obvious one, but why is that? We all know that it was a medical term and became an insult, but so were the words “dumb,” “dork,” “idiot,” and “imbecile.” Once it became a mild slur, people stopped using “retarded” as a descriptor and started using “special.” Then “special” became a pejorative. Quite literally any word implying that someone is less intellectually-abled is available as an insult. Really, I’d like to understand it, but someone already said it much better than I could.

4. Fascist - Seems to be a very popular slang among leftist communities from what I’ve seen and not really used much by the right wing (and yes, I can warrant a guess as to why some may think that is). Tends to mean “bossy / slightly less leftist than me / right-wing / independent / centrists that disagree with me on this particular issue.” I’ve had this entire sub reported for being “fascist” according to one user despite not adhering to any of the values that make up the definition and quite literally upholding the polar opposite values in most cases. Funnily enough, if you wanted to be fascist, you wouldn’t discuss things and encourage discussion with people with varied takes on a situation, you’d try to silence opposition.

5. Centrist - (From our weekly topic on Centrism / Independents) If someone says that they are “centrist” they are not telling you that they base all of their opinions on being dead-centre in the middle of the US “Left” and “Right” positions. That would be an astoundingly stupid position to undertake. Centrists are not a cohesive group and each have their own ideas - they may be a centrist because they take many positions that don’t adhere strictly to party lines. I think they only reason this take is as popular as it is on Lemmy is because people like to bad-faith strawman any arguments that aren’t theirs. It’s much easier to insult someone than it is to understand them.

I know that humans play with words and that language moves, but feel these are examples of political movement of words instead of natural linguistic movement. It’s certainly not an exhaustive list, just a few off the top of my head to test the waters.

Is Lemmy even a good platform for discussion to begin with?

I also am going to have to say no to this question. Reddit style forum threads don’t do a good job of promoting legitimate discussion in general. The simple like/dislike voting system encourages users to vote emotionally and your community-specific rules for voting aren’t going to do very much to change user behavior in that regard. As you’ve already found out, that is going to make having a discussion about any topic that’s controversial or requires an amount of nuance or flexibility of thought to approach nearly impossible. However, these are the topics that tend to have the most value as a discussion and not being able to adequately have them is a disservice to the community.

Maybe this gripe is also specific to me, but I would guess it’s not. I exclusively use Lemmy on a mobile device. This makes crafting a lengthy, well formatted, and coherant response quite a bit more difficult than if I were to use a non-mobile device. Constantly fighting autocorrect, needing to break a train of thought to scroll up and down to see what point I’m responding to, and managing links and sources by swapping apps don’t make for an enjoyable experience.

Do you ever feel that Lemmy is a more aggressive form of social media and therefore limit your discussion? Does the activist nature of Lemmy help or hurt further adoption?

The population of the platform is relatively small, with 50,000 monthly active users compared to Reddit’s 250,000,000 million (I’m pulling these number roughly and from memory based on a recent thread) it’s a fraction of a percentage the size of a platform that also would struggle with this style of a community. This at its core is going to limit the number of possible discussion participants who are passionate and knowledgeable enough to reply to only a very few and that’s if they even manage to see the thread because anyone who doesn’t actively check or subscribe to the community is only going to see the post in the algorithms within about three hours after its posted. This is a low volume community in terms of votes and engagement so it will get buried by memes very quickly. Maybe consider posting the weekly during a higher volume time for users like on the weekends to help a little.

The population around here is both diverse and homogenous at the same time. There is a large enough amount of cultural diversity, but the type of user who is actively on a platform like this tends to be of a similar personality. I would argue that tech and privacy focused users actually don’t make great candidates for academic discussions. I know this is a strong generalization, but these people tend to be, and excuse the idioms, the “I’m the king of my castle” or “My way or the highway” type of people. Because of this, in conjunction with the voting system, almost every thread ultimately feels more like a loud argument in a bar rather than a conversation. Everyone just wants to say their piece to be heard and then move on.

The occasions that I type half of an entire thoughtful response about a topic that I’m knowledgable about only to delete it halfway through are numerous. In fact, I did that for this specific post yesterday 15 minutes after you posted this topic. Commenting on a new topic is always a huge gamble because it feels like a shocking amount of users on the platform are only here because they’re having a bad day and want to be a jerk to someone and argue for the sake of arguing.

Edit: I guess this turned into a bit more of a rant than I had intended rather than constructive feedback. I guess some of my own platform frustrations are mirrored with yours.

I’ve enjoyed my time on the fediverse but have been disappointed with the leveling off of growth and lack of participation in niche communities. I still visit Kbin several times weekly, but it isn’t like the old days when I would spend tons of time on Reddit. I have left my old Reddit account redacted and haven’t started using it again, as that time is over. There are some communities and niche interests that unfortunately, it looks like Reddit will always be the main home for since we didn’t hit the critical mass for people to move those communities over here. Because of that, I’ve started a new reddit account (with my real name attached, and started actively participating in those communities). For me, Reddit is no longer a place to anonymously participate in community discussions (because those discussions were becoming increasingly worthless alot of the time), but a place to participate with my IRL identity in communities related to topics or hobbies I care about. The anonymous community stuff is fulfilled by Kbin/Fediverse which I prefer now.

1. I like the idea of weekly threads. High level topics like mentorship, training/education, and discussion of different roles would be good. As would technical threads on specific topics or techniques from both red and blue team skillsets.
2. Not sure how much time I’ll spend elsewhere.
3. Never spent much time on Reddit, but, I don’t see why this isn’t viable.
4. Not yet…

Should posts make fun of AI, or should it just be the facts?

I definitely think making fun of AI should be allowed, myself. Being a bubble, I think it’s important to be able to compare it to things like Beanie Babies and Pogs, and I’m not sure how to do that without “making fun.”

Plus, I’ve seen other communities dedicated to being anti-something thrive in an atmosphere where “making fun” is allowed.

Perhaps there are lines that should be drawn, but just a blanket “no making fun” seems like a bad idea to me.

(Though I’d of course follow the consensus if others disagree.)

Should a more general community, like “Fuck Big Tech”, be created? Should a more narrow community, like “Fuck AI Imagery” or “AI Circlejerk”, be created?

I don’t personally think so. I’m guessing some of these questions are coming from a place of “what would drive more engagement?” I’m not sure the topic of the community is the problem. Maybe it’s just more of a “critical mass” problem.

You say there’s not a lot of engagement, but honestly it’s not that devoid of engagement compared to (probably) most Lemmy communities.

Maybe something like weekly polls or discussion megathreads or something would be a way to generate more engagement.

What technology counts as AI? Is it the entirety of neural networks, or just some part of it?

If we need a guideline, I’m thinking the line should be something about whether a) we can trace the “reasoning” of the system accurately, b) it’s intended to be applied “generally” rather than “specifically”, c) it requires wholesale stealing data from artists/authors/etc, and d) it requires exorbitant amounts of computing power.

I once took an “AI” course in college back in… 2005 or so? And they covered things like the “A*” algorithm that’s used in many many video games to find optimal paths between points given obstacles.

The A* algorithm has often been considered “AI”. (It’s a big part of what makes mobs in games like Minecraft or Nethack or whatever “work.” It wasn’t long ago that what have come to be called “mobs” were referred to as “AIs”.) But the A* algorithm doesn’t involve any machine learning. It’s a perfectly well-defined and fully understood algorithm which solves a specific kind of problem. If you want to know why A* chose path 1 over path 2, you can read a book to better understand how the A* algorithm works. And if it chooses wrong, it’s because the person who implemented it didn’t understand the algorithm correctly.

With the modern “AI bubble technologies”, the creators don’t understand the algorithm’s “reasoning” or how it comes up with conclusions/decisions.

Now, beyond that, I think there are some use cases for applying machine learning to very narrow use cases. I believe there are statistical models of machine learning that are used in the sciences that are useful and reliable for narrow use cases.

How should we deal with people that like AI?

Tough one. I’m leaning toward rules like “no personal attacks on on other posters in the community,” “no spam,” “don’t be a dick,” “posts must be on topic,” “no brigading,” etc. And then not banning anyone who doesn’t break the rules. Chance are if they’re here just to antagonize, they’re going to run afoul of the rules whether we have a rule specifically that AI advocacy is disallowed.

Plus, I don’t want to dissuade people from expressing nuance. Like with the A* example above. It’s “AI” in a sense. I wouldn’t want to see people banned for saying A*'s a-ok because “tHaT’s Ai AdVoCaCy”.

We can certainly revisit that if we get overrun with OpenAI apologists or anything.

Hey there! Firstly, thanks for creating the community. I personally always enjoyed seeing 3DS and DS together - but not other Nintendo console lines mixed in. In fact, from my experience on Reddit, this would seem like the ideal combination for users too. I agree with the megathread for collections and pickups. Bi-weekly discussions on one specific topic is also a fantastic way of creating engagement, specially in the early days.

It’s also possible that we might need a sticky for dealing with homebrew-specific tech support, that’s a huge part of the discussion about the 3DS but also a major source of repetitive posts or effortless content.

I’m also happy to be joining as a moderator, please count on me to help this community thrive.

• The Decentered Podcast - discussions about fediverse projects and interviews with the people working on them
• SANS Daily Stormcast - daily cybersecurity alerts
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I missed that they had daily/weekly discussion threads with no topic. I’ll delete this community and start posting there. Thanks for getting me to double check!

You have to create the pos,t then, after it is created, navigate to the post you just made, then you have options to sticky it. You can’t make a post and at the same time sticky it. Source: A hard working moderator that actually does this shit twice a week. Also, I’m voting myself first in my class for doing and knowing about this bullshit because I do it twice a week to: 1) have a weekly discussion topic 2) poll my community about what they’d like to discuss next week. I must confess it’s a bitch. Would be really nice if they could make a thingy for moderators to create the post and make it stick all in one gesture. Just because, you know, when you moderate on here enthusiastically for the first time and you’re not a power mod asshole from Reddit (like me, I never moderated on Reddit and never wished to moderate anything) like, it would actually encourage more people to moderate on this instance. I got no help over here because it’s 1980s tech superimposed on the internet.

I think having a weekly general thread + a topical thread would be a well-balanced approach.

I’m going to call it the weekly PTSD thread, with PTSD = public transit stories & discussions.

The weekly topic would be either combined with the weekly thread or a separate thread. What do you guys think?