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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • From my PoV it’s probably many of these projects are effectively public good spaces. Hosting a code repository has become less of an esoteric thing and turning into a public good benefit (like a physical library but virtual for code). Spaces like Reddit and Twitter are todays analogous of a public discussion forum in a park or at a bar.

    Internet tools have become so ubiquitous they are critical to serve public needs and public benefits. However these internet spaces are increasingly commercialized and privatized, which runs against them being valuable public goods (see the difference between Wikipedia, run primarily for public benefit, and Wikia/Fandom).



  • Unless you have a super compelling reason to get sequenced, do not use direct to consumer sequencing services or offerings. In general it’s not so much the tech or whatnot that is bad, but rather without being in a position to determine if you have some genetic, prospective genetic screening isn’t ideal.

    If you feel you have a good reason to be sequenced (eg family history of a kind of cancer, particularly breast and colon), seek out a genetics consult with a genetic counsellor or geneticist at a major hospital or academic center.

    This comment isn’t to constitute any kind of medical advice. Rather, you are much better served getting sequenced done well.



  • Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it’s resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I’m so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.

    In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.


  • From my PoV:

    1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it’s very easy to consume content
    2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there’s a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it’s a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
    3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That’s understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

    Things will hopefully get better with time.



  • Yep since the first party app’s primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it’s packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:

    • Ads
    • Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
    • Obtrusive Ads
    • Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
    • Ads masquerading as real submissions
    • Paid promotions

    Third party apps don’t have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.


  • In many cases it’s a numbers game. Not a bad idea to connect with old colleagues or acquaintances, or to network with current or recent ones.

    The unfortunate reality is the job market is kind of awful right now, insofar as the experience is for someone looking, so you run better odds leveraging who you know.

    Specialized job boards are particularly great places to target (for example, postings at large public or private institutions nearby instead of generic job boards).


  • Yep.

    So I have one primary account on Lemmy.world and then have additional accounts localized to those instances.

    For the time being things are a bit of a hassle because there’s no good way to migrate from one instance to another and bring your data with you, and the underlying lemmy software is still in development.

    Effectively we’re doing this in production!


  • Yea unfortunately the nature of Federation means that instances (servers) are dissociated from each other but nonetheless communicate with each other via a standardized protocol. Consequently, there is nothing stopping one instance from saying they want to stop communicating with another instance

    In some situations that makes sense. For example, if you are running an instance and don’t want to get people/content from another instance that posts incredibly hateful messages, you can choose to defederate from that instance.

    In other situations it creates complications. For example, if you are on a somewhat popular instance (like Lemmy.world) but then get defederated from an instance you want to participate in (like Beehaw.org), even if the defederation came from justifiable reasons, you will need a Beehaw account in order to view that content as you won’t be able to access new content from Beehaw.org using your Lemmy.world account.

    For the most part, in pragmatic terms what this really means is if one wants to participate in the most active instances, they’ll probably want an account on an instance that federates with the biggest instances.