GameGod

@GameGod@lemmy.ca

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

The changing feel lemmy.ca’s front page

Back when I joined lemmy.ca, the front page was full of bicycles, city/province-specific community posts, and others like woodworking This morning, four or five of the front page posts were making fun of some crazy bikini lady(?). I read their “read this first” post and understand why they’re doing what they’re doing,...

GameGod ,

It order to fix that, .ca would need to limit what kinds of communities can be made on this instance

Why not just curate the frontpage feed? I don't think you can avoid having to do this.

GameGod ,

Can.... can we change that so it does have a curated feed? 57 options isn't exactly user friendly and it's not really a solution to OP's complaint (echoed by others in this thread). Anyone know if the Lemmy devs would accept a patch for something like that?

Alternatives to Mailcow?

Hello, I self host an email server and I am currently using mailcow-dockerized, however I have found their community support to be extremely lackluster, and their software having major annoyances that have either gone unfixed for years or are so specific in scope that going through the song and dance of submitting it to their...

GameGod ,

I haven't tried it personally, but Mox looks like a nice modern mailserver. It might do what you want.

GameGod OP ,

Like, what beyond being pro-Russian and having low-quality information do you find problematic with the community?

All I'm going to say is: Does having this community/content around, on Lemmy.CA (the defacto Canadian instance), make this a better community? Is this going to attract the audience we want on the site? Is this the type of content we want to expose that audience to?

GameGod OP ,

You don't have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it's just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it's going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It's similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.

Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can't just look away and pretend it's harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it's going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.

GameGod OP ,

And I remember when Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter turned a blind eye to blatant astroturfing and widespread manipulation from around 2015-2020, pretending their sites weren't overrun with inauthentic behaviour. The lesson from that is that you need to take disinformation and coordinated manipulation seriously if you want to have a viable community on the internet. Lemmy.ca has to get in front of this stuff. (who am I kidding - Reddit and Twitter are still at least 50% bots.)

GameGod OP ,

I can respect this take. I do worry that burying problematic content isn't enough these days though. Even if only 2% of the visitors on this site see the content, all it takes is one person to believe there's a demonic child trafficking ring and then you have someone shooting up a pizza joint. Not everyone who uses the internet has all their faculties and I think that's an argument for going further than just burying the content. (I suspect we'll start seeing more pressure on YouTube and Facebook to go further than they have too with regards to problematic content like this.)

Edit: I also think that as platforms have become more strict about their community guidelines, the effectiveness of grand, overt disinformation campaigns has diminished, so bad actors' strategies are switching to more subtle, softer disinformation campaigns.

GameGod OP ,

broad, sensationalist strokes

Can you clarify what you perceive as sensationalist about what I wrote? Based on the number of upvotes this thread has, I'm not the only one that thinks this way. (My tax dollars are currently going to fighting cybercrime sponsored by Russia, fighting Russian disinformation campaigns, and providing materiel to fight the Russian military.)

I take great pride and responsibility in my critical thinking skills

Me too, but as I mentioned in another thread, the issue is that not everybody is gifted with those same critical thinking skills, and the impact on those less equipped can be catastrophic. (see: pizzagate shooting)

range of ideas acceptable to post on Lemmy were restricted to those acceptable to our mainstream media

I do think we disagree on this here - For me, mainstream media is primarily good journalism where information is fact-checked and vetted. (Don't forget there's libel laws that keep journalists in check too in most countries.) Opinions and editorials represent the views of the writers or newspaper. Every organization has a slant in what they choose to cover and find newsworthy, you just need to be aware of it. With this in mind, I don't see mainstream media as a bad thing at all or something that needs to be rebelled against. It serves a different purpose from Lemmy.

Where I see Lemmy being useful and interesting is as a news aggregator with insightful discourse in the comments that's not dominated by inauthentic behaviour. Reddit is completely flooded and driven by marketers and bots, where the content and discourse quality have become low and repetitive, which seems to be the end state of 2000-2010 era social media platform.

GameGod ,

Your post couldn't be more true. Decades ago I was sold on MythTV, this PVR software but it only ran on Linux and you had to compile it yourself. So I gave Linux and MythTV a shot. As it turned out, both MythTV and early desktop Linux were a buggy, frustrating mess. X broke all the time. Incomprehensible, ungoogleable compile errors all the time.

I spent so much time troubleshooting MythTV and compilation problems that I ended up learning Linux inside and out and the C programming language to be able understand the compile errors. I went on to lead a major open source project and have had a long career as a programmer, using all the knowledge I gained that started with fighting MythTV.

GameGod ,

I don't want to dox myself so I'd rather not say, but it was some time ago and I'm no longer leading that project. I do still do development in the same field though!

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