ThatOneKirbyMain2568

…Who exactly is asking for this? AI chatbots are cool and all, but I have no idea why you'd want them in your messages app. What would you even need that for?

When I was going through redesigning all of the U.S. state flags, this is one of the first designs I made. Here's the symbolism:

• The colors are reminiscent of the orange, white, & blue pattern used in many of New York's state flag.

  • The blue has been replaced with the purple of the Iroquois flag.

• The white shape in the center holds several meanings.

  • It resembles a crown to represent New York being the Empire State.
  • It points upward to represent New York's motto: "Excelsior" ("Higher").
  • It looks somewhat like tall skyscrapers because duh.

This is my take on a flag for Kbin, a fediverse thread aggregator like Lemmy (and the one that I use). There isn't that much to the symbolism behind it. There's magneta because there's magenta in the logo, and there's a slash to go with the shape of the logo.

I also used this flag for the icon of this community's Kbin equivalent: @vexillology.

What's that even supposed to be? Even ignoring it's… distinct shape, it seems like it was just a bad idea from the beginning.

Yeah, having posts automatically upvoted by OP would be great. I think that Lemmy automatically starts with an upvote count of 1 regardless of OP's vote, so I think Kbin should do the same. I get that Hot is meant to factor in activity and time, but it just feels super off for the only post in the past month to not appear. Surely a post that was made an hour ago is hotter than a post was made weeks back.

Given that we're so small at the moment, why should a post need an upvote to be at all visible on the default sort? It can the only post of the past two weeks, but if there's no upvote, it doesn't get seen. It's very impractical.

And even if we go with this logic, why should the criterion for a post being seen be whether OP remembers to upvote their own post? It doesn't make sense. If you think that posts should only be seen if someone opts to go through new and give it an upvote (because otherwise it's not a "hot" post), OP shouldn't be able to do that.

Right now, we have a system where a major factor in post visibility is, "Did OP remember to click the upvote button?" It's just not beneficial.

The current flag

Since I already like Rhode Island's flag a lot, I didn't want to go too far from the original design. I decided to make the following three changes:

• The background was changed from white to blue. I felt yellow on blue popped a lot more due to the higher contrast, and it helps a lot with the nautical vibe.
• The "HOPE" ribbon was removed. It's fine, but I prefer the flag without it.
• The ratio was changed from 29:33 (🤮) to 1:1 to match maritime signal flags.

Oof, that's never fun. When I'm typing a long comment, I always spam copy it so that I can paste it back if I end up losing it. On PC, you can even use Windows+V to pull up a clipboard history, which has come in handy more than once.

Anywho, glad my reply was helpful! There are a lot of ways to interact with the content on the fediverse, and it seems like you're well on your way to finding one that works best for you. Hope you enjoy it here!

This flag was used by the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. As you can see, it has a very intricate design rich with symbolism.

Fun fact: The escutcheon (shield) of the Jamahiriya's coat of arms uses a similar level of excruciating detail.

The image icon in the bottom left corner of image posts can be clicked, showing the image at a larger size (i.e., what you'd get if you were to enable "Auto Media Preview" in the sidebar). There are a couple of userstyles that make this more button-like, such as kleanbin and (my own userstyle) idkbin.

The icon I'm talking about

I think there are a few culprits here.

• Not everything wants to be an everything app. While everything in the fediverse uses ActivityPub, that doesn't mean everything has to aim to be interoperable. I wrote a lengthy rant about this here, but essentially, it's important to have things with a more specific, restricted purpose if we want the fediverse to be accessible. If someone just wants a thread aggreegator (i.e., just Reddit's style of media), they shouldn't be forced to grapple with microblogging features more fit for a Twitter-like. There are some platforms that aim to combine different media types—Kbin/Mbin has both thread aggregation and microblogging, and I've heard that Friendica tries to work well with everything. Even so, if someone wants federated Reddit, they should be able to have federated Reddit, and Lemmy aims to provide that. The same way that Pixelfed (an image-sharing platform like Instagram) doesn't need to incorporate Reddit-style threads or Twitter-style microblogs, Lemmy doesn't have to do it all.

• Federation is still in the works. Something to keep in mind is that most of these platforms are early in development and still working out a lot of bugs. Kbin (the platform I use) is an obvious example due to its currently incredibly spotty microblog federation (tho I've heard that Mbin has implemented fixes to fare better in this regard). We have to be patient while all the kinks are worked out. As much as we all wish it didn't, software development takes time—a lot of it.

• Admins can sometimes be a bit trigger-happy with defederation. I don't think the fediverse has quite grasped that defederation is essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation tools, cutting off interaction with all users of an instance. While there are times where this is justified (even preemptively, such with Threads imo), there are times where the nuke has been threatened over a quarrel between admins or disagreements about other defederations. Hopefully, this will cool down as the fediverse matures, but we'll have to see how that pans out (especially with Threads federation growing ever nearer).

Continuing with the trend of vexillological organizations having their own flags, the Flag Society of Australia has one. While the flag within the flag looks really cool and has a nice color palette, I think the flag as a whole looks a bit odd. The Southern Cross looks weird since its stars are crowded closer together but not shrunken themselves, and the arrangement of everything just doesn't work imo.