If you put the url (instead of the community alias) into the search field it will retrieve it if it isn’t yet federated (which is probably the reason it can’t find it by alias). It’s an unfortunate UX quirk.

I wonder if it’s the same issue I posted about here: https://slrpnk.net/post/602890

You seem to know this person so maybe you won’t be surprised by their posting history, but for anyone else, I recommend checking it out to get an idea of what to expect from that instance and some context to these discussions.

The fact that you even hesitate to defederate from them is reason enough for me to abandon this ship before it turns into an intellectual dark web hub.

https://slrpnk.net may be a reasonable alternative for some of us who are closer to the intersection of nature, science, sustainability, and decentralisation of power and wealth.

I appreciate the considered response.

Let me prefix that I am stubborn as well, but in the opposite direction. I would rather have a dead forum than one full of toxic discourse. If discussion is going to make people feel worse and not be of any real benefit to anyone, it might as well not take place at all. It’s similar to the issue of being open-minded; if your mind is too open your brain may just fall out and you would have been better off just being overly skeptical. There’s no benefit to absorbing any and all things presented to you, and presenting it as some sort of virtue is weird. You may not think you are (or maybe you do), but you are implicitly presenting it as a virtue when you tell individuals to actively filter their own content. It becomes whack-a-mole for each and every one of us and by making toxic content visible the default, it suggests that blocking it is just like a personal prerogative. That the person is somehow sensitive for not wanting those turds floating around and you keep allowing the same people to continue to pour buckets of turds into their pool.

We are in the fediverse now, and there is a very important line to be drawn in between “Subscribed”, “Local”, and “All”.

I understand that there is a possibility that someone vulnerable may browse by “All” and run into harmful content.

The problem is greater than that. As long as we are federated with instances rife with bad actors, their posts, comments and votes will appear in communities we are subscribed to as well. Fortunately (well, in a sense), most instances are better moderated than this one and so communities hosted on their instances will not be accessible to the worst instances. Their protection then extends to us (well… whoever ends up sticking around), but there’s nothing preventing hate groups from harassing people here via communities on this instance, via PMs, or communities on other unmoderated instances.

If I were to receive many user reports - and I mean reports of specific content - I may also take action even if these are not Local. But I am being asked to block things before users even run into any of this content!! As in, I am pretty sure users have had to go to other instances to learn about exploding-heads, because I have not had any issues here.

Whether you have “run into” bad content or not is irrelevant. If members of this instance are made uncomfortable by what they see in All, in comments here and there, or worse, in PMs, that becomes your problem because you are responsible for what type of content this place allows. I hope you read the article about evaporative cooling because regardless of how you feel about people being made to feel merely uncomfortable on your instance, those people will eventually go away and be replaced by people you may not want to represent this place. This will happen slowly and once you realise, it’s probably too late.

Another property of your stance is that it is inherently reactive. You require that people have a sour or harmful experience before maybe taking action, and based on your stated philosophy, probably not nearly as drastic action as would be necessary to really fix the problem. You can’t just ban a person from an instance full of equally ‘bad’ people and expect that to be enough. The core principle of not being presumptuous or excluding may come from a good place, but it’s misapplied and you won’t be appreciated for it by people you would want to appreciate you.

I’m being quite prescriptive here. But to moderate and maintain a healthy community you need to be proactive. Your job as a moderator and admin is to prevent people from having a bad experience. You are not a police officer that goes around punishing people for behaving badly in the name of justice. Banning and defederating is not a device for punishment, it is a tool for carving out your own space. One that reflects your moral values. And yes, your moral values should be reflected in how you run this place, because as I’ve already argued, a person can not be impartial other than by chance. Let people who find your moral framework agreeable come here and subject themselves to your judgement out of trust. That, in my opinion, is how a good, cohesive community organically emerges.

Again, trying to act impartial only obfuscates your biases and people can’t rely on your judgement if they don’t know where they have you. It only opens you up to complaints about arbitrary and inconsistent enforcement of whatever rules you may eventually come up with.

Here is a relevant podcast episode by Sean Carroll (includes transcript). He identifies as an intellectual who is interested in open, rational debate, and gives some considered thoughts on how to balance moral principles like free speech vs people’s well-being. If you have time and interest, I can recommend it (and his podcast in general).

You are shifting responsibility of moderation onto users. What you should be doing for all of us, you are asking us to do ourselves. Each of us would have to moderate the same content, and with fewer tools to do it. Massive duplication of effort and needless exposure to harmful content (or perhaps you find value in that type of content?).

If this is your stance and you are done thinking about this, I mourn what this instance might have been.

I want to know too. It’s time for this instance to establish some basic moral framework.

Open discussion and interaction for the purpose of exchanging ideas and learning from one another is essential, and that only happens in an environment where people feel encouraged and safe. (The word safe can be a trigger for some and is often misinterpreted, so let me narrow the definition to the sense that you feel in control over your own well-being so that you can push your comfort zone on your own terms and grow as a person without having your comfort zone invaded and vandalised).

If people are made to feel discouraged and unsafe by a foul atmosphere and repeated exposure to content/interactions that degrade their health in any way (directly or indirectly; short term or long term), they will not benefit from any supposed openness or freedoms.

Whether some content technically breaks any explicit rules or not is inconsequential to the impact it has on the well-being of a community, so I don’t want to see this place moderated under some false pretence of impartiality. Just keep it tidy and healthy so that we can focus on what we’re all here for. If someone wants to go swimming with the sharks they can very well do so on some free speech instance. We all know what those are like. And there is a reason they end up that way.

This is cool! Typing with it right now. Have been hoping to see an innovation like this for a long time. (Maybe some proprietary products have come and gone but non-free software doesn’t exist to me unless I really can’t afford to abstain)

It hasn’t been updated in like a year and there is no spell correction. Am I missing something or is this just an acceptable tradeoff for you?

It’s “different from”.

“Similar to”; “different from”; “less/greater than”. “Different than” doesn’t make sense.

Different app

I wasn’t implying they got access to unpublished research. I just mean that when they construct such a vivid world with narrative and highly detailed recreations, much of it is inevitably artistic interpretation based on limited evidence. It would be helpful if they had narrated more on what parts of a presented depiction are based on actual findings so that people don’t walk away with misconceptions about what we know vs what might have been.

But instead they took a very immersive approach. Which is fine, they can do that. I personally would just have liked some scientific commentary while watching.

It’s reflected in the recent documentary Prehistoric Planet (I hope I got the name right). It’s a good series, though I feel like they could have been a bit more transparent about how much is creative liberty vs based on solid evidence (but to be fair they usually have a short segment afterwards with a bit of that).

I didn’t watch this video but I suspect the sentiment is similar to Sabine’s (I highly recommend her channel)

The problem there is you not having the ability to change the configuration of the system image. Not the immutability.

I’m thinking about using a headless browser (like Selenium), grabbing the text, and using GPT to analyze and summarize the text. I need to try this out and guesstimate the pricing for it.

There are plugins these days that you can make the LLM use to search, retrieve and extract content from the web. If you have OpenAI API access you can use that, or you could host an open model yourself (but I’m not sure what the situation is in regards to how well those handle plugin tool use).

The idea is that you browse your feed of subscriptions, not that you literally go to an instance and browse their local feed.

It has video+audio calls but not push-to-talk and there are no “voice only”-rooms or whatever it is discord has

I don’t know if I solved it by disabling and re-enabling the repo but that’s one of the things I tried and later I could see it.

Ew