Lemmy shouldn’t have avatars, banners, or bios

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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    • 7 felt like it was mine

    I remember that marketing campaign. Windows Vista had a shaky launch, because the hardware manufacturers hadn’t polished the Vista-compatible drivers yet. 6 months later, they had caught up, but people still had a bad taste from it.

    So when service pack 1 came out, Microsoft made a reskinned version of it and started an ad campaign with “customers” claiming “Windows 7 was my idea!” and the public ate it up.






  • This is a symptom of the problem, I think. The idea of a social media platform being confusing enough to even need a new user guide will be enough to put people off.

    I think the conversation needs to be framed differently. Most new users aren’t going to care about federation or decentralization when they first look at the platform. Don’t tell people to choose an instance, just recommend one that you think is good. At that point, the only thing that will draw people in is to see interesting conversations and communities when they visit.

    To me, that means feeds that aren’t dominated by niche interests by default. Don’t get me wrong, I love Star Trek and I appreciate Linux for what it’s good at. But if I wasn’t into those things, I would think those are the only communities being represented here.

    In that respect, the sorting algorithm needs work. The votes are a good way to start, but it’s become pretty clear that in the new user feed, some communities need to be weighted differently than others. The initial experience should probably show more actual conversations, and fewer communities that live off bot posts.

    People were really excited about being able to make bots that repost entire rss feeds or repost other site content into everyone’s Lemmy front page, and those are fun projects to work on. But those need to have a lot smaller impact on the default feed that instances show









  • I’ve never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before,

    I hope you don’t actually believe this.

    I think you misunderstood me. We all use open source software or develop using open source libraries, and in the context of the question, I don’t care where they host their code, as long as I can find it. But that isn’t what I was talking about. I have never felt like my career depended on me publicly hosting my own code. I have found jobs and connected with people through other means, and they haven’t even asked to see my github profile in any interviews I’ve been in.

    which is why you should always open source your code unless there’s a specific reason not to. If you’ve ever made something that works, then your cube would be useful.

    Sure, I have a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi controlling my garage door opener. You want it, I’ll show it to you. I believe in open source software, but I’m not going out of my way to publicly host (and document, yuck!) every little thing I’ve made for myself, especially when they have often been tailor made for my home environment, or hacked together in 15 minutes and riddled with secrets.

    But my main reason is simply privacy. I don’t want to broadcast to the Internet what project I am working on right now, or reveal the architecture of my home network or smart home setup. There’s a lot you reveal about yourself when you show the world what you are doing, and I would prefer not to do that.


  • I don’t understand the question or the responses.

    It’s a host for code repos. I would “switch” from GitHub if the repos I need to interact with were hosted somewhere else.

    How do y’all use GitHub? Is everyone running their own open source project? None of my personal projects have ever been open source before. Very few of them were even useful for anyone but myself

    I’ve been a developer for 20 years, I’ve never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before, and I would be uncomfortable if it happened. No employer has even asked for my public GitHub profile or to see my commit activity. Not even when the company hosted their code on GitHub


  • A couple of main points:

    • You are reading tutorials to help you get it up and running. Most of the time these are designed to walk you through setting things up on a fresh node, and most often just VMs on an isolated (trusted) network. When you are providing a guide to just get someone up and running, the first thing to do is establish a known baseline configuration to start from.
    • Kubernetes is a complex distributed application, and as such, the audience is generally expected to be relatively experienced. Meaning if you don’t know how to configure your firewall, people assume you aren’t going through this tutorial.

    Still, I feel your pain. When trying to get into these technologies, most people who have done the work are engineers, and we stink at writing documentation. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, we automate the solutions for issues we encounter, and then those tools or automatic configurations fail to make it to the end user.

    And I’m probably biased, but don’t use a video guide for this sort of thing. It’s just the wrong medium for a technical tutorial.




  • Even in Spacey’s case, why did most of these allegations not come out until he admitted he was gay?

    I think it went the other way around, didn’t it? At least the first accusations came out, and he used the occasion to say “I didn’t do that! But now that I’m talking about this stuff, by the way I’m gay.”

    It wasn’t a great look, because it came across that he tried to deflect the accusations by coming out as gay.