I haven’t blocked anyone on this account, but it’s new.
On my last one, I think I blocked three users. I believe all were basically trying to flood a community so that it was unreadable (one, IIRC, was just posting the same large Simpsons or Futurama image repeatedly throughout a thread to try to stop people from talking).
While I’d personally rather have more users over here producing comments and posts and such, I’d point out that unless something has changed, you can browse Reddit without an account or logging in, from a Web browser. You just can’t post, comment or vote.
Specifically for subreddits flagged as NSFW, Reddit’s “new” Web UI will demand that mobile users install their app, but you can bypass that by using the “old” Web UI.
goes to check to see if that still works
Huh. Actually, there is a change, but not the way I’d expected. It looks like at least where I am, California, now even the new Reddit Web UI lets anonymous users into NSFW subreddits using a mobile web browser, just by clicking on an “I declare that I am 18+” button. That definitely had not been the case. Maybe these countries declaring age restriction laws basically made them review their policy, and some of the changes have actually made it more-permissive, based on geolocation of IP.
e.g.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nsfwcyoa
Now both are accessible. I will bet that that’s not what people in the UK see, though (well, not unless they’re on some sort of VPN with an exit node in a place with different laws).
Just an occasion glance every like 15 minutes…like a little drip
“Not like those people with a check-every-three-minutes habit that are fiends for the stuff.” :-)
How else do you even find a community to sub to?
Hit lemmyverse.net, or check and see what people you talk to and find interesting are commenting in. Every subscription to a remote community had to start with at least one user on your home instance doing that.
There’s also !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world (the latter specifically for those communities just starting out) that will have a list of communities actively seeking new users.
I also try to recommend communities that I’ve found interesting when they’re relevant and come up in my comments with the !communityname@instance syntax. Lile, the other day someone posted a question about dice on !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and I mentioned !clacksmith@lemmy.world, which is devoted to people making dice (and has pretty pictures of them). That last one obviously relies on people actually sticking those recommendations in their comments though!
Long run, my thinking is that the best approach is to have something like “user curation lists” and let other users subscribe to them. Could be posts, users, communities or whatever. Then you find something that approximates your preferences, subscribe to “Bob’s community whitelist” and/or “Jim’s community blacklist”, and that reduces some of the human-time load to try to identify interesting content. My understanding is that BlueSky has something vaguely along these lines.
But I think that there are probably more-immediate problems on the Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin developer plates right now, like dealing with the scraper-bots that are severely loading all of the instances that permit anonymous access.
In general, I’d suggest browsing by “Subscribed” rather than “All”.
First, “All” doesn’t actually show you everything out there, because your home instance doesn’t know about everything out there. It only shows you communities that at least one user on your home instance (lemmy.cafe, for you) has subscribed to. You’re seeing content from communities on “.moe” TLD instances because at least one user on your home instance is subscribing to those communities. On very large Threadiverse instances, like maybe lemmy.world, with many users, this is closer to seeing everything, since odds are better that someone on your home instance has subscribed to it. But it’s not everything.
But secondly, I’ve seen a number of posts from people who invariably don’t like one type of content or another — yours isn’t one, to be fair — complaining that lemmy defaults should exclude X from the All feed, for some X, because they don’t like X and find it difficult to exclude X. And the problem is that there’s no global X that fits everyone.
The Internet as a whole is a firehose, and invariably, there’s stuff out there that people aren’t going to want to see, and people who are going to create communities that someone doesn’t like. Might be spam or just noise, might be test material, you name it.
If you really want to see everything out there, you’re probably going to want a script anyway. You’re probably going to want to pull down https://lemmyverse.net/communities or something similar — they spider the Threadiverse, and do actually build a list of all communities out there — which actually does list everything out there, then filter by whatever criteria you want, then subscribe to everything left.
EDIT:
on “.moe” TLD instances
Sounds like, from the other comment, that it’s not “.moe” TLD instances that you’re thinking of, but rather communities that end in “moe”. Though in general, if the objection is to sexed-up young anime girls, I expect that it’s most-likely inclusive of both.
I remember reading someone on some service…maybe it was Steam?..saying that some wildly disproportionate percentage of their users had January 1 as their birthday. As in, people didn’t even want to bother setting the month and day, which defaulted to January 1, just cranked the year back to whatever was required to avoid age-restriction hurdles.
This might be too far into the “watching gameplay” side of things or not up your alley, but I remember watching through some Arma II videos by Jester814 on YouTube and enjoying them.
He was one of a number of members who play in a group that tries to stay in-character, act as if it were a real Marines operation.
The 506th Infantry Regiment Realism Unit was founded in late 2014 by former members of the 15th MEU(SOC) Realism Unit. Many of our members are veterans and active duty military from around the world. The primary focus of the unit is light infantry combat in Arma Reforger utilizing real to life tactics, techniques, protocol, and communication.
While I do like some military history, I’m not really all that interested in light infantry tactics, so the content itself wasn’t an immediate draw…but I wound up finding it fun to watch through the videos.
One of his ArmA II playlists:
He’s also done ArmA III videos, which are obviously graphically-prettier, but at least in the few I watched — and I haven’t gone back and looked recently — he didn’t have larger numbers of coordinating players acting as larger, hierarchical military units, just a squad or maybe a couple of squads, and I didn’t find it as interesting.
That being said, it’s not something like Red vs Blue, which is content scripted purely for the viewer, not the people involved.
EDIT: Actually, I do remember a couple of large-scale ArmA III operations that he did. Just that there was a lot of smaller-scale stuff mixed in. That being said, could have been that when he was recording them, people hadn’t switched to ArmA III yet — it was still a pretty new game then. I should really go back and see what the situation is now.
Not exactly what you’re asking for (specifically episodic) but relevant, and might be that this tweaks someone’s memory if they’re familiar with such a series and it’s listed here:
Red vs Blue (their channel is locked behind some kind of ‘join’ thing… wtf…),
I think that they went commercial at some point, stopped just being a for-fun project on YouTube, and I assume that that’s what happened. Wikipedia doesn’t have anything clearly indicating the transition, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue
Although it is distributed serially over the internet, Red vs. Blue is also one of the first commercially released products made using machinima, as opposed to a product merely containing machinima. DVDs (and later Blu-rays) of every completed seasons are sold through Rooster Teeth’s official website, as well as at several retailers in the United States, such as Target and Wal-Mart. Rooster Teeth claimed in 2017 that Red vs. Blue has sold more than 1 million DVDs of individual seasons and box sets.[76]
kagis more
Hmm.
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedvsBlue/comments/1ct84yj/rooster_teeth_shutdown_red_vs_blue_and_where_to/
With the final closure of the Rooster Teeth website, and RTs insistance on removing much of their content from YouTube, many may be wondering where you can watch that once popular web-series: Red vs. Blue.
I intend to keep this post as a repository, cataloguing public archives of RvB and RT content. There are of course still legal ways to acquire the show via YouTube, Amazon, Apple. However with that money no longer supporting RT, I can only recommend them on a convenience basis and instead offer some free alternatives.
The most comprehensive and accessible is: https://archiveofpimps.com/ which contains all of the main series and mini-series in both its original and remastered states. It appears to lack some PSAs but with tonnes of other RT content and a strong interface it’s currently the strongest contender.
Additionally, there is a Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NHnQK7-BgwaJiKJOYA7CkRQemKjTQ8Nd This also contains all of the main series and mini-series in both original and remastered formats. Individual episodes and movie edits, PSAs, Behind the Scenes, trailers and bonus material. For Red vs. Blue specifically this is the place to go.
*Our subreddit wiki also has a detailed watchlist order to help new viewers https://www.reddit.com/r/RedvsBlue/wiki/watch_order/
I urge people to maintain their own archives and if you are hosting your own public archives and wish to advertise them, let me know and I’ll add them to the post.
Thank you Rooster Teeth for 21 years of laughs. Let’s try and preserve their legacy. ❤️💙
That post was dated a year ago, so I assume that there was some change that happened around that point in time.
Honestly, it might not be a terrible idea to give them a bogus date, if you’re concerned about privacy and want to encourage poisoning data that data-miners are using.
If they require some sort of actual validation, like an ID document, then I get you.
Also, while there’s no absolute guarantee, most communities have something vaguely along the lines of prohibiting harassment, as do most instances.
That doesn’t mean that a given user’s idea of harassment and a moderator’s or admin’s idea will always perfectly line up. What you think of as being harassment might be what some other people consider disagreeing. But in general, if someone is clearly following a user around and just commenting with the aim of trying to make them miserable, rather than disagreeing with them on some point or something, you can probably report it to a moderator (or, ultimately, admin) and have them remove their comments and probably issue a ban. Brings a third party’s eyes into the situation.
And if you truly don’t feel that a given community’s moderators are sufficiently-restrictive, you can switch to a community that has more-restrictive rules.
If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.
In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.
I’m not totally sure about the chronology, but I think that the “old->new” block change on Reddit may have been due to calls from Twitter users. Most of the people I saw back on Reddit complaining about the old behavior prior to the change were saying “on Twitter, blocked users can’t respond”.
On Reddit, the site is basically split up into a series of forums, subreddits. On the Threadiverse, same idea, but the term is communities. And that’s the basic unit of moderation — that is, people set up a set of rules for how what is permitted on a given community, and most restrictions arise from that. There are Reddit sitewide restrictions (and here, instancewide), but those don’t usually play a huge role compared to the community-level things.
So, on Twitter — and I’ve never made a Twitter account, and don’t spend much time using it, but I believe I’ve got a reasonable handle on how it works — there’s no concept of a topic-specific forum. The entire site is user-centric. Comments don’t live in forums talking about a topic; they only are associated with the text in them and with the parent comment. So if you’re on Twitter, there has to be some level of content moderation unless you want to only have sitewide restrictions. On Twitter, having a user be able to act as “moderator” for responses makes a lot more sense than on Reddit, because Twitter lacks an analog to subreddit moderators.
So Twitter users, who were accustomed to having a “block” feature, naturally found Reddit’s “block” feature, which did something different from what they were used to, to be confusing. They click “block”, and what it actually does is not what they expect — and worse, at a surface glance, the behavior is the same. They think that they’re acting as a moderator, but they’re just controlling visibility of comments to themselves. Then they have an unpleasant surprise when they realize that what they’ve been doing isn’t what they think that they’ve been doing.
I’ve got a top-level comment about why I’d rather not have a feature of the form OP requested. Reddit’s block feature originally worked the way the Threadiverse’s block feature presently does. It was later changed, and that change introduced problems.
However, that being said, I do think that there may be a real UI issue if people think that they’re preventing responses, but aren’t actually doing so, and get frustrated. That’d be a legit UI issue.
considers
I don’t think I’d use “mute”. In IRC, “mute” refers to a moderation action more analogous to what OP wants. I think that that could still produce confusion.
Usenet uses “kill”, for “killfile”, in the sense of “automatically killing posts from a user”. Probably not a great choice either.
Maybe “ignore” would be better than “block”, though. I think that that would make it unambiguous what the operation is doing. I’m guessing that the Lemmy devs just chose “block” because Reddit happened to use it, didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it.
Related story: I once worked with a guy who had worked on Yahoo Maps, way back when. It was one of the first mapping services to provide navigation instructions. He told me that he was the one who had, at some point, suggested “bear” as a verb for the navigation decisions (e.g. “bear right”). It was a pretty off-the-cuff decision, but apparently it’s confusing to some people, since “bear” isn’t a terribly-commonly-used term and can potentially be confused with the animal of the same name. IIRC, Yahoo Maps ultimately changed it, years later, but I understand that not only did they use the term for quite some years, but some other services also copied it, so it had considerable inertia.
kagis
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/kid-gps-instructions-bear-right/
EDIT: Sorry, I think it was actually MapQuest that he was working on, not Yahoo Maps.
Ehh. I don’t think that the underlying goal was to try to obtain some sort of “ban monopoly” on the Threadiverse. If they had, they had a ton of things that they could have done that they didn’t.
Don’t support federation in the first place.
Have lemmy.ml and friends simply disallow federation with other instances.
Break compatibility in new builds to make it harder for people to run other instances. Don’t open-source Lemmy in the first place.
Like, I think that it’s pretty lame that some of the official Lemmy software support stuff is communities on lemmy.ml, which has an admin situation that I don’t really like. But…that seems like an awfully weak lever to be pulling if someone’s goal is to try to exclude anyone else from having the ability to restrict users.
I don’t really think that I have a range that’s anywhere near that narrow.
First, some of my favorite games are roguelikes (e.g. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or Caves of Qud), and they often have very few assets, which is where all the data in larger games comes from.
It looks like the largest release of Cataclysm (the one with the graphics and sounds) unpacks to be 586MB. Caves of Qud — actually, I’m surprised that it’s this large — has a 1.4GB directory in Steam after installation.
I have a hard time imagining a lower bound (short of maybe demoscene type stuff, where I’d be surprised that stuff could fit into so little space). But I have a hard time imagining avoiding a game because it’s too small.
Second, I don’t think that there are any commercial games out there that are going to cause me to not play them due to storage space. Starfield is probably the largest I’ve done, and while it uses enough disk space that I’m not going to leave it installed if I don’t plan to play it anytime soon, it’s not an issue to store it.
https://twinfinite.net/features/biggest-games-all-time-ranked-install-size/
This says that Starfield has a 125 GB install.
The largest that they have listed there is ARK: Survival Evolved , at 435 GB. That does seem a little excessive to me, but, I mean, you can get a 4TB NVMe drive on Amazon right now for ( checks ) ~$200, so that’s really $25 in storage, and when you’re not playing it, you can just uninstall it and put something else there. As gaming hardware goes, $25 just isn’t that big a deal.
In theory, I could imagine some sort of game that procedurally-generates a dynamic world as one explores that has massive save files or something, something in the vein of Minecraft-style games. Disk space there could be theoretically unbounded. So you could design a hypothetical game that I’d object to. But…I don’t really think that there’s really a practical limitation that excludes games for me today today.
Devs want a monopoly on the power to block people they don’t like through the use of bans
Admins can ban on a per instance basis. Moderators can ban on a per community basis. But devs don’t have any particular banning power.
I have not done so in the traditional sense in quite some years. My experience was that it was an increasing headache due to crashing into a wide variety of anti-spam efforts. Get email past one and crash into another.
Depending upon your use case – using the “forward to a smarthost” feature in some mail server packages to forward to a mailserver run by a SMTP service provider with whom you have an account might work for you. Then it still looks to local software like you have a local mailserver.
If I were going to do a conventional, no-smarthost mailserver today, I think that I would probably start out by setting up a bunch of spam-filtering stuff — SpamAssassin, I dunno what-all gets used these days on a “regular” account — and then emailing stuff from my server and seeing what throws up red flags. That’d let me actually see the scoring and stuff that’s killing email. Once I had it as clean as I could get it, I’d get a variety of people I know on different mail servers and ask them to respond back to a test email, and see what made it out.
There was a point in the past when it was common to run multiple GPUs. Today, that’s not something you’d normally do unless you’re doing some kind of parallel compute project, because games don’t support it.
But it might be the case, if stuff like generative AI is in major demand, that sticking more parallel compute cards in systems might become a thing.