I’m a scientist and systems engineer, particularly materials science, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, bioengineering, renewable energy, um… okay, so kind of I enjoy being a general engineer and doing a little of everything.

But I love trying to help scientists turn super technical concepts into usable prototypes because I can translate biologist to electrical engineer really effectively.

I am the star trek kind of anarchist.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I mean, largely to me this is fine and great as long as the reverse is also true. It’s fabulous to have two totally independent systems that are fully interoperable to such an extent.

    I don’t think there’s a meaningful competition in growth or anything, that’s just a number. The main downside is reduced development focus…

    But – If Lemmy is like a frontend for kbin and vice versa, isn’t that fine? The Lemmy apps will load kbin posts and kbin apps will load lemmy posts.







  • I’ve been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I’m coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching – you cannot tell people things like “you should just join lemmy/kbin” – you have to wait for them to ask “how do I join lemmy/kbin?”

    That’s okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be “here’s what you’re missing”, positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

    It’s an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn’t gaslight people), but they’re also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

    How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

    Consider focusing on the positive – link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don’t need an account to read and enjoy.

    Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread – that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They’ll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what’s going on.

    And now they’ve convinced themselves it’s worth joining…


  • While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it’s clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they’re usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

    I’m not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to “bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people” because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn’t take that long to click honestly.

    Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don’t turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn’t seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what’s going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I’m sure…!




  • Did they initiate the process and ask for help or did you offer?

    I’ve been teaching twenty years. If students get themselves to the point of coming with a question based on experience, odds are excellent that they will listen to what I’m saying. If they do something at my suggestion, they are not engaged and do not retain. Same is surely true for learning to use a new website.

    So I dunno if this is a suggestion for you or other people reading this post, but consider directing them to magazines/communities that are an actual draw, since people are the actual draw. When they find they cannot post, then they will have incentive to pay attention.

    This is so far true for “what is a photon”, “what is consciousness”, “how do you do a kick”, and “why are most metals thermally conductive” so I suspect this isn’t a unique thing. Dangle the incentive, then wait for them to ask how to get involved.

    Again, not criticizing especially since I don’t know your approach, hopefully this can help others. The draw is the community and posts, so highlight that way before they ever see a signup page. They can browse the site without an account.


  • I’ll try submitting the same, sure.

    I am suspicious that the search URL will only be indexing kbin.social and not the greater kbin/lemmy universe which is not good. But it’s a !kbin bang and the !msocial bang goes to mastodon.social so I guess it makes sense.

    I’d much rather see a !kbin search that returned results from all kbin instances it has indexed, and a !lemmy search that does the same for lemmy instances, or a !fediforum search that returned results from both. But it’s a start!


  • Very cool, I didn’t know they added !msocial.

    Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.

    I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.

    On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots…?







  • Doesn’t that result in the general public owning shares that gradually decrease in value while the current owners make money at the current value? Seems like index funds will be paying for it unless the actual amount the Reddit owners sell it for goes down before the sale.

    Satisfying I guess, but frustrating that the people that did the damage get a payout while the public holds the bag while it deflates.



  • Of course in a magical world all the different basically the same magazines on different instances would get merged seamlessly in the UI with posts all somehow connected.

    In the real world I can’t even conceptualize how you could handle moderation (or a random collection of posts vanishing from a thread) with instances that have different rules unless each magazine for different topics was a separate silo.

    The natural outcome, without much active effort, seems likely to be that niche stuff is consolidated on a single instance that members aren’t necessarily on in order to have enough participation while popular stuff truly just gets silo’d into different self-sustaining groups that talk about the same stuff but with different culture developed, different moderators, and a different instance.

    Is there another way? We’re assuming each one is self-sustaining, it will be good enough or you’ll find one on a different instance…

    I expect people will see there’s existing local magazines for a bunch of things, and then to search out magazines for niche interests.





  • Okay, so I’ve been using Mastodon for years so I basically understand the idea of how content is propagated.

    People on your instance are following someone and so you see the people they follow on your feed, or else they boost posts that they can see in which case people can see them on your feed.

    I know this is using the same protocol but I’m trying to understand a few things –

    It sounds like each instance has separate magazines, so this means different instances have different magazines. How does it handle it when two instances have magazines with the same topic? No real attempt at trying to merge the two? It seems impossible to do with distinct mods from separate servers with different rules, did someone figure out a way?

    Similarly, if someone from @kbin.pub wants to comment on a thread in a magazine on @kbin.social or whatever (assume valid instances), how do they know that the thread exists? They subscribe to that magazine on a different instance and then see it in their own home page? Or does them subscribing to a magazine on another instance make that magazine appear to others on their own instance?

    I guess I’m trying to understand how this system is handling discovery and moderation in a forum system where different instances split up a forum, it would be neat if things were somehow interleaved.