@chris Ok, so you go to the doctor who says the car charging is fine, but you have to tow car 82km home because it won't charge? DId I get this right?

@douglasvb I've been able to find a couple online references to there having been a 502nd Admin Company in the 2nd Armored, but nothing definitive yet.

There is a veterans' association for the 2nd Armored, though. You might try contacting them, they might be interested, or able to put you in touch with the appropriate Army museum for an artifact like this.

https://2ndarmor.org/about-us/

@ai6yr do you think that's the cuff size or the width of the leg?

Oh, do you mean the private voting issue? I went on record as being against that right from the start, before he even made it. Obviously (to me) it was going to come across rather poorly when a ton of votes start flooding in that in every way looks indistinguishable from spam, plus it did not accomplish what it set out to do as it was implemented - it had enormous holes in it that could easily be worked around. It can be difficult for people to accept, but we need to live in reality, not a fantasy, even if the fantasy sounds nice.

If it helps, I had previously responded to some of the more controversial points that users had raised a year ago. I think I might have phrased things differently and even tweaked my position slightly since then, but the overall core remains the same: individuals should be free to do as they choose, including having the ability to block out content that they do not wish to see. That is nowhere close to the same thing as an institutionalized “echo chamber” effect such as goes on inside of the Tankie Triad - that is just people making choices for their own selves.

Absolutely. I was ready to leave Piefed over it.

I essentially did. I admit to being very wrong here - I thought, and even said publicly - that surely Rimu would reverse course and walk back that decision, as he had so very many others previously. But he instead dug down deeper, doubling down on being adamantly against people’s wishes. Which, as above, is his right to do so, but we have our rights too. I saw so many individual people complaining and even mentioning whole entire communities that had wanted to migrate over, but now indicated that they will not do so as a direct result of that decision. Plus the slrpnk.net entire instance was ready to migrate as well (that link is not from slrpnk.net bc it is down now for unrelated reasons so this is a cached copy on my own instance), but now is not doing so - that one I do not believe has had the full reasoning explained, and is a mixture of at least partly other factors, namely their Lemmy database corruption issue I think getting resolved or mitigated or some such. Through it all, Rimu’s response has been the same: “get used to it” / “deal with it”. He acts like Huffman, treating people as landed gentry on his platform. Which is… the truth!! Hence people have left it, and even more are choosing to simply go to it. Nonetheless, I truly do wish the best to the project… I just no longer have any hope that it will continue, most certainly not like it had in the past.

Here is a very interesting exchange illustrating that fact: piefed.social/…/upvotes-turn-green-but-number-doe…. The complaint was that “Upvotes turn green but number doesn’t change” (title text), and goes on to add “Basically the title. Sometimes it is logged as a failure but most often it’s not logged. Been happening for a few days…” The OP user made several comments like “I like being positive and I want to encourage people to post and comment. Often times I might not like or even agree with the poster/commenter but I value their interaction and viewpoint and think it’s important to encourage participation.”, and Rimu’s response was "There are a ton of other ways to support the fediverse. Find interesting content to post, write nice comments, moderate some communities, improve the docs for Lemmy, translate the UI, report a bug in the issue tracker, report spammers, spread the word on mainstream social media, donate money, and so on. Get creative."

GET CREATIVE?!?

Rimu not only took away voting, and did so in a way that breaks the ActivityPub model - leaving users to scratch their heads wondering what error had occurred where the arrow turned green but the count did not change - but in response to why people were not allowed to vote anymore, he said to simply move on and do other things besides voting. He is wrong btw: people do not HAVE (as in forced) to accept his decision - the hidden, third option is simply to not engage with communities located on piefed instances anymore. And bam, just like that, communities such as !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social had their contributions drop like a rock (I skewed those stats a bit b/c I seemed to forget for a moment and submitted 6 posts before I remembered, as I tried out different 3rd-party apps to see what those experiences were like).

So I truly, genuinely wish the project all the success that it can muster. But yes, burning bridges does not bode well for its future. Technically the Snoopy thing might not be fully related, similar to slrpnk.net, but it certainly does not fill me with confidence that the stress fractures are not spreading further. Nor does the number of contributers declining. PugJesus shared with me in DMs that people were hopping mad at Rimu’s decision, but that he overrode all of their input and ram-rodded forward despite any complaints to the contrary. THAT process is the main thing that is killing off the code: not the decisions made, but HOW they were made. People need to feel like they are part of something, and that their input is valued. They feel… quite the opposite.

I do strongly hope for the success of PyLova. It has not made any major splashes yet - although this user-shareable blocklist feature alone could be a full GAME-CHANGER!! I do so eagerly anticipate more.

About politics: it is democracy itself that is dying off, globally. People were not willing to put forth the effort to maintain it, hence it is in decline, as it has literally always been throughout history. We are now doomed to repeat it, as was always going to happen. People being shocked says more about them then about the events that transpired to make them shocked.

Yeah, looks like there is some significant growth in the Threadiverse this week…

REALLY! That’s amazing! I would guess a migration over from Reddit. I hope they feel welcomed.

About downvotes, I misrecalled: Mia said that it was added to the to-do list to be added for the next release, although that was 3 months ago, and yet I have not seen it added yet. So something must be holding it off? The screenshots showing it in action (proof-of-concepts on a test server I presume?) are now gone too so perhaps they expired. That entire conversation with Mia is here if you want more details. Those screenshots of it working got me very excited about it!! And recalling those visuals was why I thought that it had already been done but… not so, in the public release, it would seem.:-(

On a different note, I ran across a post who deleted there account, because almost no one was voting on their posts. I think it was a federation issue, as in the community hosting instance never received the posts and they only stayed local.

There are a lot of “unfriendly” aspects such as this to the Fediverse. I see some people fleeing now because their instance went belly-up - off-hand I can think of mander.xyz and slrpnk.net and… at least one more that I cannot now recall the name of (their admin team simply listed a single account beginning with "The ", which at least at one point had not posted for years), all of which are having issues. Of course that is simply par for the course for the Fediverse model!

But less necessary are those bot spam posts made ostensibly to make the place look more welcoming and active and alive - at first glance, but then those accounts (almost?) never respond to anyone’s comment, which sours people and leaves a negative impression of this place as being a ghost town. Which arguably it kinda is, but not really, and if they would invest effort into learning more and figuring out how to block such then it can be better!! But… it is simply not worth the effort, when Reddit and FaceBook and Insta and X and Bluesky have REAL (high amounts of) content, so investing all that effort to learn and block what they do not want will yield significantly greater dividends… they seem to think, and by the mantra that “the customer is always right”, they are correct. Thereby if we want to attrack them more, we need to offer such blocking by default, making unregistered bot accounts either outright illegal or at least opt-in rather than allowing them to be opt-out. All of which Rimu was helping to lead the good fight against… until he chased everyone else away and poisoned the well. Now I would put my hopes into the shareable blocklists to do such.

About your idea: I disagree. An admin that is hosting their own instance is different than someone who is simply using an existing instance. Such a person should have access to a “connectivity health” monitoring tool yes, but I don’t see why it would need to be on a per-post basis. Not having hosted an instance myself, I would naively hope that such a tool already exists, even if it is not graphical? Also, if the tool needed to spend 5 minutes and actively seek out that data to build such a graph, that is not so bad to have such a spike in traffic, for the express purposes of displaying it to someone who explicitly asked for such? I mean as opposed to having every single post do this across the entire Threadiverse, at all times. For instance if I make a post to !Fediverse@lemmy.world, even as a mere user (not an instance admin) I can go over to that instance at lemmy.world/c/fediverse/ and look for my post there (similarly for comments). I have routinely done that many times in the past, especially from StarTrek.Website that had such horrible network connectivity at the time that I joined it, prompting me to seek out Discuss.Online that has such fantastic uptime due to spectacularly capable admins (including Jgrim the author of Sublinks). Previously though, I would likewise post something and then getting zero up- (or down-) votes, go seek out why, and dis

@ai6yr @EugestShirley

I can only hope that it will not cause you to crash, if you wear it while cycling!

@chris That really sucks

Nothing like helping your elderly mother with a new tech gadget to remind you of just how utterly awful the entire experience of using new tech is. The metaphors and idioms and icons and processes we all grudgingly put up with in our daily life are completely baffling to most everyone else and doubly or triply baffling to people entering the mental decline stage.