CoderKat

I don't get what the alternative is supposed to be. You can't make stuff like blockbuster quality movies on ads and/or donations alone. And between ads vs subscriptions, ads are iffy because you end up with sketchy or unethical advertisements. Plus ad blockers make it hard to sustain a business on just ads.

In an ideal world, nobody would need to "make a living" and we'd be able to offer more services for free. But we don't have that ideal world. Musicians, animators, writers, programmers and more all need to get paid somehow.

It's admittedly annoying how fractured subscriptions get, though. I miss when Netflix was the only streaming video subscription I needed. Now there's half a dozen major services and they all want exclusive contracts to show certain movies and TV.

Personally, I'm happy to pay for the stuff I use a lot. Which includes stuff that I don't even have to pay for (eg, I donated $20 to kbin). It does suck for stuff I only want a little of, though. eg, I don't have any news subscriptions because I only check news sites here and there and it's almost never the same site, too (mostly I get linked from sites like this). I want to see subscriptions become a bit more centralized, spanning multiple sites to account for this.

I think that's a big thing. The people who most strongly supported the blackout largely left or at least use Reddit a lot less.

Heck, one sub I use frequently, the Stardew valley sub, apparently did a poll yesterday (and only yesterday) about next steps. But I was treating the 14th as a day to still stay off Reddit (it wasn't really clear exactly when the blackout should have ended), so I didn't get to even have a say in the poll despite using the sub frequently. I only even saw it because of a post announcing the results (majority wanted further blackout but it needed 2/3s).

How did you find the config file setup? That was where I looked at the file and decided "ah, I don't wanna deal with this". I just wanted to test what I expected to be an easy fix. If the code in question had unit tests, I would have just used those, but I didn't see tests. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm used to test files living alongside dev files, as is the Go convention, but maybe it's like the Java convention with tests being in a mirror folder tree. I should check later.

I've made more posts than usual (I usually only comment, not post).

I've also posted a bunch of issues to the kbin issue tracker and investigated the code for a few. Maybe at some point I'll actually contribute some changes, but admittedly setting up a dev env is a pain in the ass and I do enough dev for work that I don't usually have energy for more.

As I get more and more into the idea of just staying here (I really was hoping Reddit would have just pulled its head out of its ass), I may also recreate some communities that aren't yet here. Last I checked, my city didn't have one here.

I love Go. Sure, it has downsides like it's error handling is annoyingly verbose, terrible support for functional programming, the standard library is very tiny, and it doesn't have much syntax sugar. But damn if it isn't the most easy language I've ever used. I think it has the fewest gotchas, the code is generally the easiest to read, and it performs well (especially with goroutines). Code is read far more often than it's written and ease of understanding unfamiliar code is very helpful for getting people to contribute to your project.

But on the other hand, Rust is a highly desirably language whereas PHP has a historically bad rap. I don't think devs necessarily want easiest. They want whatever is most enjoyable to use. Tooling support also matters. Stuff like static typing, for example, makes unfamiliar code way easier to understand. I've contributed to a lot of unfamiliar servers and I've noticed that ones in languages like Go are a lot easier because the static typing means it's easier to read the code. In particular, I found servers written in Python hard to work with, and it's not for lack of experience with the language (I've been using Python for longer than Go).

How easy it is to run the code also matters. Has anyone tried that with Lemmy? I was gonna run a dev kbin instance to try and make some changes, but the amount of work it seemed to require just to run the server was more than I wanted to do at the time (I really just want as close as possible to a single command way to run the server locally to test my changes so I can verify they work). Ease of contributing is very important for me to actually bother to contribute.

You never heard of Rust? Today's lucky ten thousand then. I've personally never had a chance to use Rust, but it's my #1 most interested in language based on all the things I've heard about it.

Though I'm personally on kbin and naturally there's the most interest in fixing issues that are on your instance. Kbin sadly is just PHP, but whatever. I was gonna make a bug fix yesterday, but the steps to turnup a dev instance are so long that I got lazy and didn't bother. I'm spoiled by all the servers at my work that I can just start running with a single command that having to spend potentially a few hours turning up a server feels like too much now (and let's be honest, setting up a dev env is the most boring and annoying part of our job).

MMOs have done expansions well. I personally wouldn't ever pay money for micro transaction cosmetics, but I will buy every decent expansion for an MMO I'm playing.

Beehaw has a signup form reviewed by humans

I'm honestly not sure what difference that makes with federation. Someone from a server with easy signup can still post and comment in Beehaw subs. It doesn't really scale well to manually review signups, either (with an essay question when I saw, lol).

Thank god the NFT avatars are no more. If any Fediverse instance tries to support NFTs, we must collectively agree to nuke them from orbit (or at least block the server from the rest of us).

I noticed this too. I believe that Lemmy communities (and perhaps also Kbin magazines -- I haven't checked) don't have a "default all posts to NSFW". Thus, every individual poster must remember to mark their post as NSFW. If you look at the community view (https://kbin.social/m/gonewild@lemmynsfw.com), you'll notice that most posts are marked as NSFW and properly blurred in kbin, but some posts aren't marked NSFW.

So yeah, basically we need the ability for communities/magazines to be NSFW by default, as we can't depend on posters remembering to do so. There will always be some times when they forget.

EDIT: I've confirmed that kbin magazines have an option to make the whole magazine NSFW by default. Can any Lemmy users check if there's a Lemmy equivalent yet? If it exists, then it's a community configuration issue. If it doesn't exist, someone who knows where the Lemmy issue tracker is should go file a feature request.

Yeah, I'm sure lots of it is people starting a community with genuine intentions, but then they decide "actually, I don't wanna use this site anymore", so they abandon it and will never see your messages.

I think more of it may happen because there's likely plenty of people who came to the Fediverse sites because of the Reddit blackout and then will just go back to Reddit. IMO it's important that server admins have an easy way to reassign communities.