OpenStars

Except that's not what I said - it is a reaction to what people fear that I might have meant. And I understand that, I do, but it is still not what I said, and sometimes (not here though) I have even gone to great lengths to try to painstakingly say that that was explicitly not what I meant.

Btw, please allow me to clarify that I am not saying anything against you personally - you have been nothing but polite and helpful here.

A straw man argument, sometimes called a straw person argument or spelled strawman argument, is the logical fallacy of distorting an opposing position into an extreme version of itself and then arguing against that extreme version.

I also have fears. And they go beyond Biden v. Trump in the next election. I fear that we are losing the ability to even so much as talk in a halfway civilized manner about political matters. Not that downvotes are themselves the same as impoliteness...:-)

But my main point here isn't about the downvotes, it is that people are doing the latter b/c of being driven by their extreme fear of what is to come. Which ironically seems to be the one thing that is shared in common amongst all Americans right now - the only real difference for most people being which set of facts you choose to believe in.

Don't worry about it - being intelligent and assuming the best of others is nothing that you need to apologize for imho!:-)

As the other commenter pointed out, it is from that movie "The Shining". It is more than 40 years old, and based on an even older book by Stephen King. I wonder if most younger people today have even seen it, and it wasn't even all that "good", as in like production values from the modern standpoint (especially things like pacing) - though the story itself was quite excellent.

That said, it is one of those cultural, iconic "classics" like Wizard of Oz or the three stooges that most everyone seems to know about, especially in the horror genre. In particular, the main character in it starts to slowly go crazy as he sees visions of ghosts (leaving it unspecified iirc whether they are real or just a product of his delusional mindset), and one of the bits is the word "murder" spelled backwards, and written in red lettering, seemingly in blood.

Another bit is the two ghost girls that appear in the hallway - I suspect b/c it is one of the more SFW images that can be shown on the internet for this movie, but really that's all there is too it, they just stand there, creepily.

The last thing you really need to know about The Shining is the scene where the character portrayed by Jack Nicholson (edit: I misspelled his name) uses an ax to cut through the door to get to his wife, who is ofc absolutely terrified.

And there you are, you are all caught up with The Shining!:-) You are probably far more knowledgeable than I irl and in the wider sense, but I did enjoy this chance to explain what I know:-D.

Algorithms, great idea, horrible in practice.

Tbf, it is not the computer's fault - someone made it do that, and that same someone is the type to call a landline phone just as you sit down to family dinner (Leave It To Beaver style - at least I assume they did that in that show:-), or to literally knock on your literal door and try to sell you a vacuum cleaner or whatever - i.e. it is pure human greed, and the algorithm is just their latest tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.

Anyway, algorithms can be used for good too, if we wanted them to. Asimov for instance prompted three laws of robotics including foremost among them that robots would be allowed to do no harm - which is itself and interesting proposition bc like how else would a doctor perform surgery if it couldn't cut into a patient, or like what if a robot absolutely refuses to allow humans to commit suicide, or even to die in any way despite having lived for thousands (millions?) of years already? (It would become pure torture at some point!) To do a good or evil act, something needs to have "agency", but right now algorithms are purely tools to reach some externally defined end.

In case anyone needs a break from the existentialist dread that is life: It is Monday, my dudes - and yup, it is exactly what you think it is:-).

Yes. I mentioned it as "supporting evidence", but good clarification.

The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don't have the resources to truly do the job anymore?

Sorry, I iz too dum-dumz to understand this - want to walk me through it? Murder of the affairs (the thing, genitive... plural?) => Death of the heart?

I feel the need to be pedantic here: that quote continues on to the very next (and final) sentence being:

Not something that can be done with a simple plugin.

However, anything that is logically possible, is doable, with enough effort & investment - e.g. that infamous quote:

All that quote means is that it would be most simple to do as a back-end task, not a simple front-end one (though even a front-end could, in theory, e.g. slurp up 1000 posts and then use some metric to figure out how to display the most proper subset of 20 from that superset).

But for instance, someone could spin up their own instance, and then add whatever sorting method they wanted to it. However, recall again what happened to DMV.social - anyone who opens up a Lemmy server will be spammed with CSAM, it would seem - so there are other more urgent matters to be attended to first, unless that someone used it purely as a testbed, and made all connections to it to be read-only, or else had a team of moderators willing to put in large amounts of time to fend off those attacks with both manual efforts and also developing automated tools at the same time - e.g. they would need to have technical skill even just to moderate, much less administer the machine (unless, like existing Lemmys, there is a whole team of admins doing the technical parts already). Anyway, I don't suggest this lightly like it is trivially easy, just to say that it is possible.

It would be beneficial to talk more about these desirable features to ensure that when developers do invest time in them, we’ve already come up with a good and robust solution.

Sure, I am not trying to tell you what to do. Just stating that until and unless someone is willing to tinker with actual implementations - and again, right now their attentions seem to be directed elsewhere, plus while Scaled-sorting Hot may not be perfect it is something (I don't personally have experience to say if it is better than before b/c I was on Kbin.Social at the time which was totally different - but I thought I heard many people say that it is better now?) - then it is going to be a purely theoretical discussion. Which is probably how Scaled sort got implemented too? Though now that it is built, it could be tinkered with, if there is the will to do so.

But unless you are offering to do any of the actual implementation work yourself, I think you would need to discuss this with the actual admins who you would expect to do that work for you - hence you might try Matrix where they hang out, rather than solely discussing it here.

And then, as you said in your OP, when they say "no" and close all GitHub issues, that, as they say, is that. You can't "force" someone to do work for you for free - and even if you were offering money, or perhaps offering to do all the "design" work yourself for free, they still would need to agree to actually do the implementation.

Moreover, even if you DID offer to do ALL of the implementation work entirely on your own, unless you do want to spin up your own instance to actually run it on, you still would need the buy-in of the instance admins, for which having the buy-in of the developers would go a LONG way.

So you asked:

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?

And my suggestion is that you cannot walk into someone else's house and tell them how they should do things. Especially when they have ALREADY said no. They know better what their prioritization is, and what they hope to accomplish over the next month, year, and so on. The absolute beauty of the Fediverse is that you can take all of the existing Lemmy code, which is entirely functional, make a fork of it, and spin up your own instance - and not just run it, but even modify the code to do... whatever you want! And then you can share that code, and benefit all the instances that are running Lemmy too! Discuss.Online, Lemmy.World - all of them, well, those that choose to keep your suggestions, though it is up to each one individually to either accept or reject them, and it is ultimately their call. Reddit does not work this way, nor FaceBook/Meta/Threads, Instagram, Xhitter, etc., but we do, b/c it is "open-source". The caveat to that being... that someone, somewhere, must put in the actual effort to get it done.

And the people who would normally do that, seem to have said no. I gather that you feel frustrated but... it is what it is. Therefore, of what use is it to talk about any of this, when there is no path forward for it? THAT is how to move forward your ideas: either find or become someone yourself who can implement them, and THEN in talking to them you will actually be in an even better position to understand how it all works, and how it might be changed to work even better than it does now.

I dunno, perhaps I should not have replied at all? Sometimes I do overshare my thoughts and if you disliked that here then I apologize:-). It was my hope to help spur your thoughts along these lines that I was thinking, since it seems to me to be the only way forward. But I guess please ignore me if you think I am wrong, and I wish you luck either way!:-)

Fwiw, I do agree that eventually, when the developers are ready to move forward with this again, they indeed might appreciate a ready-made solution if one happened to be already available by then, but again that assumes that one could be made purely on theoretical grounds alone?

Thank you for explaining this.

I don't know what some people were assuming that I meant, but ofc I mean that I was browsing the "All" feed (what else could I have meant? well, I suppose "New" also, and ngl I do switch back and forth between those two, though spend >98% of my time on "All"), and that I wanted something in-between having to subscribe to each and every single thing individually, vs. EVERYTHING (with like a ton of sports, it used to be a bunch of foreign-language communities - which is... fine, I don't begrudge most any non-illegal community its entire existence? - and cooking, etc.).

My own "Local" barely has anything, so perhaps that is a source of bias - StarTrek.Online has roughly 2 posts per day, if that; and Discuss.Online where I was previously was the same; and Kbin.Social where I was before that literally has no Local mode at all iirc!

Anyway, to clarify, what I want is to start with inclusivity, then begin narrowing it down a bit - and all the better would be to use a toggle rather than a full ban, or even just limit the frequency of things so that e.g. I do not see 4 different posts about cooking from 4 different cooking communities in a row, followed by 4 different sports, followed by knitting, followed by... well, anyway, I just am not interested in scrolling endlessly to find even one thing that interests me, that way. This way I actually find TONS more posts than starting with exclusivity and trying to work upwards from that. (ironically, at the same time, it also misses many posts compared to visiting each community itself, but they tend to be the lowest-upvoted and commented-on ones; so anyway, it is what it is)

But for some reason, most people here that are choosing to respond are arguing against that, citing how it "won't work" (I mean... I already do it, literally daily, and have been for months?), as if I am somehow trying to take something away from them, somehow, but I am just talking about curating my own personal feed, which works for me, until we can get something better going on.

Also, there is the potential to be even more inclusive if the user has stipulated that they have a particular preference, when a community is new and struggles to gain acceptance in the wider Fediverse, the way that I am talking about. e.g. if someone says that they enjoy sports, and a new baseball community emerges, then it could be helpful to show up less often for people that do not like sports at all, but conversely more often for people who have indicated that they do - even if they have not subscribed to it yet. Sort of like how targeted ads work, except not being driven by seeking profits, and instead seeking out a genuine connection between a user and what content type they have asked to be notified about.

Well, it's fun to dream. :-)

Joke's on you: it looks like it was not the fabric that the dude wanted to touch! :-P

That makes perfect sense - only ~~grown-ass adults~~ whittle gurls could ever be afraid that someone might lose a game!