• 6 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.

    The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium’s developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.

    The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google’s whimsy.

    Pragmatically it doesn’t matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.





  • 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.


  • Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit’s end. I don’t even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn’t readily and transparently available from Reddit’s developer tools.

    Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.


  • Laxaria@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldBotDefense is leaving Reddit
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    1 year ago

    Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.

    As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit’s new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).

    At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.

    BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the “client” here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.


  • I wonder if he feels people have ripped off his hard work? There are direct clones of his app.

    In the software world this is to be expected once one puts out something that has any significant reach. “Copycatting” is aplenty, either for malicious reasons or merely as a tribute. Getting hung up on it is a great way to barrel down a endless pit of whack-a-mole. It’s ok to express a bit of disdain for it in some regards, but at the end of the day trying to intervene aggressively only leads to more pain and grief IMO.

    A lot of people are taking what was learned in putting together Apollo’s UI/UX and adjusting them into new tools and applications for a new environment. It’s part and parcel of software in general. In the next few years we might look back and wonder why we even considered an Apollo for Lemmy to begin with given the trajectory of current development. And there is much to be said about continued longevity given the preference for open source paradigms of currently popular Lemmy apps.

    Time will tell, I think, even if many of us around here are all eager to put Lemmy and this entire ecosystem into a time dilation bubble so multiple years of development can happen in a single day.



  • 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.


  • I would love a version of “compact” that hides all thumbnails. It makes for an even more compact list of text rather than dedicating space for a square thumbnail, many of which are just empty because they are text posts and/or just outward going links, and I do enjoy the visual cleanliness that comes from not having a variety of different squares of colors against a black background lining the right side of the text.

    Thanks for all the hard work on this!



  • 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).





  • The content porting really only means something when it’s not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.

    The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it’s just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.

    Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn’t do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.

    Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.