That was Voat. Voat, feature-wise, was like a better reddit. But then they (I think it was like one guy administering the whole site) stuck to “freeze peach” and it quite quickly turned into a cesspool. Like on Day 1. And of course reddit tried that, too from time to time when it was convenient. But as soon as it was inconvenient, like when the media found out about the JB, FPH, etc subreddits, free speech was off the table.

Free speech - as it’s understood in the US - concerns one thing: Governments. People literally have no free speech in any other regard; certainly not on privately owned/operated websites. Unless it’s their own; and it’s never their own, because no one would visit it.

I always wonder if these free-speech-people have ever tried yelling profanities or slurs at their boss or customers at work. The answer is of course they haven’t for the vast majority, because they know that yelling back “FREE SPEECH!” wouldn’t stop them from getting fired on the spot. But it’s the same principle. So it’s weird to me that people think they have some fantastical “right” online to get away with saying anything.

This is impressive thus far. Keep up the good work!

For anyone who hasn’t had any experience running a server of any kind, it can be a lot of work. I’ve run Minecraft servers for my friends, first on hosted services, and then out of my basement. For like 5-10 friends. There were times I was giving up my entire weekend to get the MC server updated, research, get plugins and mods working, speaking with support people, and attempting to fix it all when it broke. When we were using hosted solutions, we technically split the cost, but every month I still had to go around semi-begging for donations (we were a bunch of poor college students/new grads). When I started hosting out of my basement, I bought the computer to run it. It was inexpensive, but still money entirely out of my own pocket.

So I cannot imagine what it’s like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.

I think I did like 30hrs once in college. Pull an all-nighter to study with a friend, and then had to go to class to take the exam. I don’t even remember what class and how I did.

I happened to look at my Discord profile today. I’ve been on Discord for almost exactly 7yrs. I’m in several tens of servers, mainly gaming-related. Some of these are just Discords for specific games, other are for guilds/clans that I’m in, and I’m “required” to be in them (like for Eve Online).

In addition, my main friends group uses Discord. My brother (also a gamer) and I use Discord to chit chat with each other. Since us two were on there already, I convinced our parents to join us in a family Discord. Was way better than the Android vs iOS SMS/MMS texts we were doing before, which were terrible for videos and photos. And I tried to get my family on Signal; only my mom got on.

It basically doesn’t matter whether I like Matrix or Discord more (fwiw, I just created a Matrix account today today to see what it is). I and the communities I’m a part of, both IRL and/or online, are already on and invested in Discord. Like someone else said, Network Effect. I guess I could leave Discord and move to Matrix…but then I’m just sitting there by myself. Super useful for a communications platform.

Raining again. It’s like an ice rink out there right now.

And just as I was going to take a nap…

I started at the beginning, but then went to get some food. And then I ended up taking a drive around town. Was gone for like an hr.

I feel like when I left it was a safety car. And then when I got back it was a safety car. Not sure if the same one or not.

I don’t know all the rules with WEC and endurance racing, but why is this safety car so long? Just because it’s wet? They have wet tires don’t they? Or are they still on slicks?

It’s interesting, too, to see how small the subreddits need to be to maintain that community feeling. I helped found a political subreddit 9yrs ago; a non-partisan US state news & discussion subreddit. Political communities tend to be pretty spicy for obvious reasons, but when we had like maybe less than 500 sub (so maybe like <100 actually active users), there was a nice sense of community, even though people of different political persuasions would argue and debate. I’d see people tend to have fairly civil discussions. They’d chit chat and joke around in less controversial threads. It wasn’t always rainbow and unicorns of course, but for the most part, the active users played nicely together. We rarely had to bring out formal moderation tools. A simple “Hey, you two, chill out,” was usually enough to settle things. And it was like that for a few years.

As the number of subscribers and active users increased over the years, that sense of community started getting away from us. There was a lot more dogpiling. A lot more incivility. A lot more of the typical rPolitics style low-effort comments. The older active users started dropping off. Reddit tends to lean left, so the left-leaning majority started drowning out the right-leaning users. And my state is solidly right-leaning these days. Not that our sub had to be representative of the state political demographics, of course.

Today, the sub is like under 7,000 users, which is still a smaller subreddit, relatively speaking, but any sense of community is long gone.

I’ll admit, we – and especially me as head mod for most of our existence – could’ve done better to tamp down on that stuff. But I also think that that kinda thing is a natural part of growth of a community. That the sense of community tends to disappear. People can’t individually recognize and emotionally connect with that many people. It’s so easy, especially on the Internet, to simply say something mean-spirited to someone and metaphorically walk away. They may never see or interact with that person again. And if they do, do they really remember who they are?

Obviously my experience is just anecdotal. But it still makes me wonder how Lemmy (and similar sites) will deal with that. How can we maintain a sense of community, while also wanting to allow people in and grow communities?

A year?!

Reminds me of back in April 2021 when the building’s chiller unit died. So no AC. It was unseasonably hot during that time, peaking into the upper 80s/low 90s F (~30-33C). Overnight, the temps were still pretty elevated, especially since this was in the middle of the city, which meant lots of heat radiating off the streets, buildings, etc.

It took the apartment managers like 4 weeks to get it fixed. People were starting organize protests. Our apartments ended up on the news.

They did buy me a portable AC though. And they gave my brother and I like half off rent for the month. Still sucked. Thank god I don’t live there anymore, since that wasn’t the only issue we experienced.

Hopefully you were able or will be able to wring some concessions out of them for them waiting a whole ass year!

My company is hosting our big event of the year towards the end of the month. We’re expecting about 600 people this year. While we’ve been preparing for the last several months, the stress and worry didn’t hit me until today. We have three weeks until we ship our stuff out to the event center and I’m in charge of the logistics. And there are worries that not everything we need will arrive before ship via freight.

I’m also unveiling some new software for some of our volunteers to use at the event. I have no clue if this is going to work, but from my admittedly limited testing with coworkers, it seems like it will. If it doesn’t work, that’s OK, we can revert to an older system on the fly. But I really want it to work, because I think it’ll be a better experience for the volunteers, attendees, and my coworkers. Plus I don’t want to have wasted all this time researching and setting this up.

On the plus side, last week my event manager and I met with the AV rental company. We were able to knock off $25,000 from the initial quote by getting rid of stuff we didn’t need and by deciding to run some AV stuff ourselves. Didn’t feel so bad about splurging on upgrades to my train/plane tickets after that!

This is my 17th edition of this particular annual event. Yeah, I’ve been with the company that long. Anyway, it always comes together and our attendees are always greatly pleased. If there are issues behind the scenes, our attendees never see or know about them. We have several veteran staff who’ve helped run this event more times than me, So any stress and worry is generally overblown. But we still never want to rest on our laurels.

Regardless, I’ll be happy on July 2, because the event will be over!