What a thoughtful reply from a dev after a detailed, cogent description of tensions and bottlenecks in the ux of the platform they are building.

Interesting, so even you have no way to know whether I was one of the downvotes on this comment?

To expand on standards of transparency in moderation decisions:

Lemmy was built with a public moderation log by design. The ethos of the platform includes accountability through transparency. Every action is recorded and preserved (short of defederation or instance shutdown).

This makes moderation auditable. Mods literally cannot do (much) shady stuff in secret. In essence, moderation policy is discernable from the logs. That’s part of why well-run communities have the rules clearly defined and mods follow their written policy.

If a community/instance wants to make political alignment a moderation offense, they’re free to do so. Many communities/instances are quite explicit about this. If a community wants to make moderation completely arbitrary, they are free to do so. That is somewhat less common, but also not unheard of.

In truth, any community can be designed and moderated in any way whatsoever that the mod chooses.

However, the success of a community depends on the quality of the content and the quality of the moderation. Good content brings people in, but bad moderation drives people out. When the moderation is unfair, it is bad for the health of the community, and ultimately bad for the health of the platform.

It is my experience that transparent moderation, such as announcing changes in policy, techniques, etc., is less work in the long run. It takes a bit of time and attention to roll out changes when they are open for community feedback, but that feedback will come in one way or another. If mods don’t provide a formal outlet, then users will make one. Mods operating opaquely give up their right to have the conversation on their time and terms. They also miss out on the wisdom of the crowd. I’ve been in many situations where community feedback provided a valuable insight or tool to face an obstacle through open discussion about policy.

All that being said, one of the major obstacles to growth of the Threadiverse is the woeful dearth of moderation tools. It’s extremely time intensive to do basic things like identifying alt accounts, vote manipulation, bot behavior etc. It is also subject to a lot of human error. This makes it discouraging for people to moderate. I have heard about tools that use AI to detect CP content and remove it quickly, which I think we can all agree is a good use of the tech. Tools like this are not built into the platform, but cobbled together by volunteer mods and admins to keep the platform safe, legal, and sustainable. If they were built in, then moderation would be far easier (and therefore likely better).

I don’t like this happening, and there should be transparency in all moderation decisions, but some of these points make no sense.

There is essentially no expectation of privacy on threadiverse platforms. Everything is public and probably already being used to train models.

There is no private messaging system. Direct messages are unencrypted and potentially visible to any instance admins. They and should not be used to share anything sensitive.

Thanks, this ended up being a good fit for me, too

Yeah, adulting is hard. But then you do it and you realize that you can do hard things. That feels pretty good.

Or you make a mistake and learn an important lesson; an expert is just someone who has made every possible mistake in an area.

Then eventually hard things stop feeling so scary.

So if I understand correctly, you open the app or web on your phone, and it controls what’s playing on the TV via the server?

Symfonium is really great, but the TV version doesn’t quite work —or didn’t as of my testing probably a year ago.

I have also stopped using GMS, which makes using paid apps more difficult.

One thing that I really enjoyed was the Android Auto mode, which was flawless.

I’d be interested in hearing about your lyrion setup. I haven’t really tried it but it looks like that could open a whole software ecosystem. Do you use a phone app to select/skip/cue tracks?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be controlled by the TV remote, but it does need to be controlled away from the server.

Each one is countably infinite

From an evolutionary standpoint, we have the most advanced pattern recognition in the world. It is, in some sense, what makes us human. It is also the root of our capacity for language, reasoning, music, etc.

Looking for exceptions to complex patterns is key to our survival over great lengths of time.

I don’t get it. What is your fixation on wealthy people?

I had to do the unlimited plan tbh.

It offers AI search, but you have to click it or ask a question - I think it’s similar to DDG in terms of including it.

It really works as a complete search solution with maps, images, video, translation (actually the best translation site out there).

I find that I get good results, without much AI slop, SEO garbage, etc. When I use Google, DDG, or Quant on devices that are not logged in, I definitely notice it takes more effort to get to get to the results I want.

For me, it’s worth it.

Jewish people bless their children to be “like Ephraim and Menashe.” They are two of the sons of Joseph and pretty minor characters in the story, but they are the first brothers who are treated without favoritism and actually get along.

That’s awesome. I’ll check it out.

(Still should be the default lol)

Calibre Web Automated is a completely different project. I am liking it so far.

Some people have also suggested Kavita.

Nope. It’s always safe to ignore any articles about “kids these days”

It’s a Russian project, which some people are suspicious of because Russia has leveraged open source projects for less-than-honest purposes in the past.

It’s managed by a for-profit company to sell their server software, which is generally approached with a big grain of salt in the FOSS community.

They preference OOXML files rather than ODF files by default, which some users (notably the document foundation) consider the more poorly-defined open standard, which benefits Microsoft (who mostly developed the OOXML format). This is some complicated inside baseball and the fork does not seem to be swayed by it—they’ll continue to preference OOXML.

OnlyOffice has contribution practices which are sometimes hostile to the FOSS ethos. The maintainers are not as transparent as most projects, they generally prefer to fix issues in-house rather than collaborate with a broader community on pull requests.

I still use it. Here’s why: I don’t think it’s very good ethics to be suspicious of an entire nationality; the code is open, so what are you afraid of? I guess it’s possible to sneak something malicious into a binary blob, but that borders on paranoia. I’ve personally found the team to be very responsive on issues that I’ve brought up in terms of function and design. When I have brought up issues with the function or design, they have been good partners and been clear in their actions. YMMV

FOSS only thrives because of public-private partnerships; I believe we should reward companies that offer open source code, even when they may not comply with some grand FOSS philosophy. I don’t like purity tests.

OOXML has, for better or worse, become the global document standard. Instead of lamenting it, we should be working to make it the best we can.

Basically, OnlyOffice works for me in a number of ways that LibreOffice doesn’t. I’m not interested in server-based document sharing, but I am interested in good design and mobile support. This fork is only focused on the server software, so I won’t be switching at this time.

My middle name, yeah.

I love FUTO keyboard. I think you can set up other voice inputs, but I’m not sure. I do know that you can use the voice input with other keyboards. It’s honestly the best voice input I’ve ever used. It works better than Google or Microsoft. It’s faster than other implementations of the same library.

A lot of people have said that the gesture typing is bad, but I’ve never had trouble with it personally.

Heliboard is also a great choice - I used it for a while before switching to FUTO. If you are an open source enthusiast, it is the best option by far IMO. FUTO has the source available for audit and community contributions, and is privacy respecting, but it is debated whether the license is truly FOSS.