tables

I don't understand the frustration. With all of the recent examples of people winning photo contests only to reveal later that their "photos" were made by AI, it's only natural that judges grow paranoid of these things.

As for your friend's comment on photo competitions, that sounds like someone who's butt hurt for not winning. I enter some photo contests ocasionally and I have yet to see one in which the winner hadn't produced some pretty decent work.

This is a really well thought out post, cheers. I think your choice is fair in the end, but I also think that it becomes impossible to do this for every word that people decide is racist or offensive to someone.

Especially because it all comes from american internet culture and it's hard for non americans to keep track. By this point, every few days some word or internet term or even the name of something in everyday life that I thought was perfectly normal is suddenly deemed immoral by american users. English is a secondary language to me, a lot of my knowledge of it comes from internet forums and such which only makes it even harder because I don't have a deep knowledge of the roots of the language, especially when it comes to slang or "internet terms" I mostly copy what I see. And while my stance used to be the same as yours, that I could just avoid using that word and it wasn't a big deal, I feel like at some point I started losing track of the list of words and I just gave up.

I remember there being a big fuss around a similar situation in home gardening subreddits because the most common worldwide name of some flower offended someone in the States, and a similar situation in baking communities, and it's just... I give up. There's no winning this fight. Someone is bound to be offended by something eventually. If people are refusing to look at context and intent, too bad I guess.

Also, on a side note, I noticed you tagged me while scrolling through the thread, but I didn't get a notification or anything, I don't know if tagged users are supposed to be notified? Just as an FYI as you might've expected that I would get a notification.

This is a really well thought out post, cheers. I think your choice is fair in the end, but I also think that it becomes impossible to do this for every word that people decide is racist or offensive to someone.

Especially because it all comes from american internet culture and it's hard for non americans to keep track. By this point, every few days some word or internet term or even the name of something in everyday life that I thought was perfectly normal is suddenly deemed immoral by american users. English is a secondary language to me, a lot of my knowledge of it comes from internet forums and such which only makes it even harder because I don't have a deep knowledge of the roots of the language, especially when it comes to slang or "internet terms" I mostly copy what I see. And while my stance used to be the same as yours, that I could just avoid using that word and it wasn't a big deal, I feel like at some point I started losing track of the list of words and I just gave up.

I remember there being a big fuss around a similar situation in home gardening subreddits because the most common worldwide name of some flower offended someone in the States, and a similar situation in baking communities, and it's just... I give up. There's no winning this fight. Someone is bound to be offended by something eventually. If people are refusing to look at context and intent, too bad I guess.

Also, on a side note, I noticed you tagged me while scrolling through the thread, but I didn't get a notification or anything, I don't know if tagged users are supposed to be notified? Just as an FYI as you might've expected that I would get a notification.

I just wanted to say that you're my favourite Lemmy user OP!

Gimp is one of the few FOSS projects with some notoriety outside of tech circles. It, VLC and Linux are possibly the only names I could expect some random person to have heard of. Changing its name would probably torpedo years of work to become seen as a reliable piece of software and send it back to the realm of "software that only people who watch the code repository know about".

And the whole changing the name to avoid offending someone is a losing battle in the first place. According to this thread, "rice" is potentially racist. I had no idea anyone could find "Gimp" offensive, but apparently they can. By this point, it's part of american internet culture to be offended and no word is safe from americans turning it into a slur, dog-whistle, etc etc and advocating that everyone else in the world should stop using it.

Being a non-american, I never really liked the term "rice" because it's not an intuitive term to convey modifying or customizing a system. But I have used it because that's what the subreddit used to call it. I never thought it might be racist as I never saw anyone use the term in a racist manner - I can't even understand how it could be racist - outside of this community, rice is just a word for something I eat for most of my meals. But again, I'm not american, so I might be lacking some cultural context - the whole culture war thing kind of escapes me and I'm not up to date on the list of forbidden words.

The images look fine from kbin. Also, this setup looks great. I love setups that look useful and look like something one could actually use everyday and that aren't only meant to be pretty.

Fine, you are welcome to stay with the meme enjoyers. It makes me wonder why you are not on reddit. If reddit "does it so well" why didn't you stay on reddit?

I'd at least hope you were arguing in good faith, but you're obviously not. I pointed out specific features of Reddit which, in my opinion, worked fairly well, and I pointed out how they could work here as well. That doesn't mean I had any reason to stay in Reddit.

You've mostly deviated from the subject and assume that most people are exactly like you, hate memes and all "thrash" content - by your definition that everything you dislike is thrash. I disagree with that. I think most people like generalist topics, thus why they flow towards those communities.

Mastodon, having existed for longer, is a good example. The main generalist instances are far bigger than the specific tech or art ones. But, because they haven't defederated from each other, everyone can sit in their favourite instances, in which the local content most suits their tastes, but still interact with one another. You can go on fosstodom and mostly see FOSS related topics on the local view, while being able to interact with more generalist instances like mastodon.social at will. If fosstodon had defederated from mastodon.social, it likely would've lost many of its users as they'd probably not like being in an instance that forbids general content.

Being in an instance with people who share similar topics is fine. Defederating from general instances, though, just puts you in a small bubble. I don't understand why you reject that any other solution other than defederation might work when it has worked for Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.

I personally don't even care about rhetoric pushback, it just makes american political discourse impossible to read or interact with. I don't know how americans deal with this on a daily basis without just giving up and noping out of politics.

When people talk about Nazis in my country's political scene, they usually mean actual Nazis, skinheads covered in swastikas touting about and committing acts of violence on minorities, genuinely the worst kind of people you can possibly imagine. The same goes for fascists, probably because we got rid of fascism not that long ago. When americans (on the internet, at least) talk about Nazis or fascists, it's a coin toss whether the person they're talking about shares actual Nazi ideals, or is just someone very slightly right of center who they disagree with on some very specific issue. It just makes it impossible to interact with any american political discourse. Which would be fine if it was contained in specific communities, but it eventually spreads out to any community which has a large american user base.

I did address the point. My conclusion is it cannot be done reliably by an automated system and that we have the choice of blocking manually or defederating.

Reddit did it fine.

So you want the insightful posts being hidden from a mag because someone else in the same mag spammed memes?

Mags should moderate themselves. Going back to the Reddit analogy, if a subreddit mixed memes and useful content, and I didn't want to see memes, I'd stop following that subreddit. That's why most informative subreddits usually banned memes. If I follow a meme subreddit though, I expect to see memes. I don't expect to see nothing just because someone else decided to defederate from every instance containing memes.

So you want the insightful posts being hidden from a mag because someone else in the same mag spammed memes? Because that's what you will get.

No, that wouldn't happen with my proposal.

Sorry but I don't want that.

Neither do I, but that's ironically what we'd both get if we followed your suggestion of defederating from "generic" instances. Most useful and informative communities I follow right now are on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. If we defederate from them just because you don't want to click the block button a couple of times, we would both lose access to most informative communities in this space.

If, however, we simply filter some of the most active communities' content out, and enable users to keep blocking out stuff they don't want to see at all, you can get a good mix of all the content you follow, and you can still go directly to the communities in which you want to read every single thread and read every single thread. We could even have a /sub and a /filtered-sub, where in the first one you'd see aboslutely everything, and in the second one you'd have a Reddit style sub tab with a mix of content of the various communities you follow.

/all will soon become unusable anyway. It was great at the beginning, but the more people join and the more it will become unusable.

And that's fine IMO. /r/all was unusable on Reddit, too, and I think that's fine because it's not made for you or me. Some of my friends loved /r/all, though, and refused to use the sub only view. I think like on Reddit, /all is meant for people who want to see content from absolutely everything and like living in chaos, basically. I personally don't see the point of that, so I'd rather follow /sub. But I want /sub to have all of communities I follow, and not have most communities arbitrarily cut out because, again, you alone don't like memes.

This would be great, it would enable users to follow all of the communities they want to follow without having the bigger more active ones drown out the smaller ones.

I don't think your answer addresses what the OP is talking about at all and it's getting kinda scary that the immediate answer to every small issue people have on the Fediverse seems to be defederation. People do love their echo chambers apparently.

I want to be federated with lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and etc and I'm fine that they're generic instances. They don't need to "specialize" and I don't even think that was the point. Maybe people assumed Kbin and Lemmy would follow the tracks of Mastodon where indeed some instances were created as specialized art or technology instances, but I don't even think that's really a great idea.

But I do agree that some communities are a lot more active than others - like meme communities - which leads their posts to drown out other smaller communities. I don't think the problem is the "quality of the content" - I don't want anyone controlling the "quality" of the content either, as long as it's within the rules, because that's just way too subjective - for example, you seem to think all meme accounts are spam, whereas I don't think they are at all - I think people are allowed to have fun.

What I want, and I think that's what the OP is talking about, is simply to have a way to slow down the posts from the more active communities - kinda like how Reddit didn't show you all of the content of a very active sub when you were on your main feed, but only the hottest threads, and you'd get a mix of threads from very big active subreddits and smaller more inactive subreddits. I love the LOTR meme communities, for example, but I don't want to see all of their posts on my main feed, since it drowns out discussions from other smaller communities. All we need for that is a limit to the amount of threads you can be shown from every community on your main feed.

I dislike the idea of "federations devoted to a topic" because they get boring really fast unless your whole personality centers around that single topic. I created an account on fosstodom once since I do contribute to FOSS and like seeing discussions about it, but eventually it got boring because, naturally, no one talked about anything other than software and people didn't engage on other topics - which is probably fine if software is the one and only thing you like having in your life, but I would dare say is not fine for most individuals with a balanced life and different hobbies.