chromodynamic

joined 4 weeks ago

You can view and post in channels on other instances from your home instance without switching. For example, I'm commenting from piefed.social

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The term "social media" is already toxic. When I started using the Internet, socialising and media were two separate things. Conflating the two implies that every time we say something, we are publishing an article and should care about how many views and likes we get, instead of making a genuine attempt at connection. And it suggests that every reply should be some kind of review of the post it replies to.

In the days of forums, people would just post what came into mind. They were more honest because there was no number next to your comment rating how good it was.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 22 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Browsers should be designed from the start for the benefit of the users. There are too many "features" that only benefit the server owners. It's been this way for a long time. Like the "Referer" header. Old as dirt, but how do I benefit from telling a server what page I was visiting beforehand?

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 55 points 5 days ago (5 children)

Client-side scripting is a hack. HTML didn't have all the tags people wanted or needed, so instead of carefully updating it to include new features, they demanded that browsers just execute arbitrary code on the user's computer, and with that comes security vulnerabilities, excessive bandwidth use and a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 8 points 6 days ago

Quite the opposite in fact. Microtransactions offer the promise of fun, but never deliver, because in order to incentivise users to purchase them, the player must feel like the game is 90% of the way to being fun and that tiny additional purchase will get it there.

It's like the cartoon image of the donkey rider holding a carrot on the end of a rod. The donkey keeps moving to try to get the carrot, but never quite reaches it.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 10 points 6 days ago

Quite the opposite in fact. Microtransactions offer the promise of fun, but never deliver, because in order to incentivise users to purchase them, the player must feel like the game is 90% of the way to being fun and that tiny additional purchase will get it there.

It's like the cartoon image of the donkey rider holding a carrot on the end of a rod. The donkey keeps moving to try to get the carrot, but never quite reaches it.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 29 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 19 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The root of the issue is this idea that a web browser should be an "everything app" that can basically recreate the functionality of any other app on the system. It's total feature creep, and in addition to privacy issues, creates a barrier-to-entry that makes it very hard for people to create new browsers because of the sheer amount of features they're expected to implement.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Kind of, but with automation. So if you trust site A 90%, and site A trusts site B 90%, then from your PoV, site B has 81% trust* (which you can choose to replace with your own trust rating, if you want).

Could have applications in building a new kind of search engine even.

  • I'm just guessing how the maths would work, it probably requires a little more sophisticated system that that, such as starting sites at 50% and only increasing or decreasing the rating based on sites you already trust.
[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Perhaps some kind of fediweb that allows sites to rank other sites for trustworthiness. Then as a user you mark a few sites as trusted, and use their judgement to find more sites.

 

I was looking at Voyager on my phone and saw communities I hadn't subscribed to in my home feed, and upvotes on posts I hadn't voted on (or even seen before). When I tried to remove the upvotes, a message said "problem voting, please try again".

Thankfully, when I view PieFed through Firefox, these problems don't exist, so it must be the app. Not overly surprising since it was initially developed for Lemmy, I believe.

Not sure what changed to cause this problem or whether the change was in Voyager or PieFed.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Got me thinking about how YouTubers get money. According to a quick web search, YT pays $0.01 to $0.03 per view. So if you release 10 videos a month, you made $0.10 per viewer. But Patreon memberships are typically around $5.00 a month, equivalent to $0.50 per view in the same scenario. Of course Patreon will take a cut, but it is still a lot more money.

So, if a lot of your viewers think your channel is good enough to donate to, ad money basically becomes an afterthought. In this case, the only advantage of YT over PT is discovery, i.e. the number of viewers likely to find your videos in the first place (but there's also more competition on YT, so...)

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Does that affect interaction? Perhaps this is a difference between platforms? When I signed up to PieFed, I chose some interests and it automatically subscribed me to various communities, some of which had the same name but different instances (for example five different communities named "Games"). I don't know much about how community discovery works on any of these platforms to be honest.

 

I'm sure there are some good reasons, but I don't know what those reasons are.

I've noticed that sometimes the instance of the community doesn't match the instance of the user who posted there, and I was wondering why they chose to post to that community instead of an equivalent one on the instance they joined. Are there pros and cons to doing this?

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