Hey, welcome! Thank you for your contribution to the network :D
As for discoverability, it is a problem yet to be properly solved. For now, I’d suggest making a launch post and share your communities in the many posts that have recently popped around (e.g https://lemmy.pt/post/36126)
mmm weird, I don’t know them. Here’s a video of it: https://spectra.video/w/oo3SuFed7L2mfpkZPbWn3t
Sure, that is a valid concern, but maybe that could also be mitigated by making it pretty clear that you can interact with content on other servers just fine, even if you’re not from there. Perhaps a little note banner on the “Join Lemmy” page itself.
Regarding moving to another instance, that is not quite possible right now. There’s no way to properly move an account to another server, you’d just have to start from scratch with a new identity. In the future, it would be nice to have proper account migration, or at the very least a way to import/export account data.
The issue is that the “first move” advantage is quite real and the momentum gained by lemmy.ml and beehaw.org can easily dwarf diversity on the network. Of course you don’t have to aggressively spread people out, but maybe the spotlight should be fairer, so to speak.
Yes! :)
You can organize your tabs into panels (little side tabs for tabs :P) and groups (collapsible tab folders for organization inside a panel). You can set colors, set containers, move to panels and windows. You can duplicate, unload, clear cookies. You can flatten trees and mute tabs. You can set up automatic snapshots to manage your sessions.
You get the gist, it’s super powerful.
I have been running a (unfortunately still low local volume) instance with a big federation pool for a while now, and resources are really manageable. CPU usage is almost non-existent (save for a few short spikes), pretty much always below 5% of my ~2GHz vCPU. RAM has never gone above 500MB, and typically sits around 250MB (mostly from postgres). Network I/O has never surpassed 50MB combined daily. Disk I/O is slightly higher, averaging at 40MB combined daily.
Overall, it’s really cheap to get a Lemmy instance up and running for you and some friends, and with the officially provided Ansible setup (and I believe there’s a Yunohost package as well), getting one operational is pretty easy.
In my experience, you have to find the community on web first (by searching https://lemmy.ml/c/tf2
in this case), before it appears in the app.
However, someone else (which you might not be seeing, since they are posting from an instance yours blocks) is saying you should search for https://lemmy.one/c/tf2@lemmy.ml
and it should work.
Remote community discovery is definitely something Lemmy still has to improve in terms of UI/UX.
@nutomic@lemmy.ml @dessalines@lemmy.ml maybe add some form of dedicated place to search for remote communities? Or maybe make the regular search endpoint understand more community formats, like !name@server
, instead of just the URL.
Besides the typical privacy-oriented Firefox extensions, I love Sidebery. It’s by far the best tree-style tab add-on I’ve ever seen. Beautiful and powerful.
Despite it not being available through i.reddit.com, compact mode is still reachable at reddit.com/.i, and I find it even better than old reddit for mobile.
I’m looking forward to the release of Christopher Noland’s next movie. I enjoy his works and it seems this one’s gonna be a good one.
At the time I’m replying, it has already come out and I’ve have already been playing it, but I’m so incredibly excited about Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an absolute banger of a game!
In the tech word, I look forward to improvements in the Matrix protocol (that Matrix 2.0 presentation at FOSDEM really peaked my interest), as well as to the usual continuous updates and QoL improvements to a whole lot of FOSS I use every day, and with special excitement to KDE 6!
Revolt is an amazing project and has a lot of great energy behind it, but one must not forget the issue that is scale. Discord is absolutely humongous, serving millions of concurrent users with pretty good performance overall. I’d love to see Revolt reach such userbase, but realistically, two 2nd year CS students are unlikely to get there. For a platform to reach such volume there needs to be money, which is likely to come with strings attached. Though what you say is true – Revolt has strong open-source roots while Discord has always been a VC fueled company, so I’ll keep my hopes hehe
Regarding Nitro, I agree it is a bit too much, but I actually think a subscription of sorts with bigger upload limits, streaming quality and so on (the original point of Nitro) is a pretty nice model to sustain a platform since it helps cover the cost of all needed infrastructure. Of course, Discord Nitro has since gained a lot of extra fluff and nothing impedes Discord from both selling a subscription and our data (which they’re likely to do), but the premise is quite reasonable.
Like others have said, on Discord the data rests entirely on their servers, without E2EE (so completely visible to them). They claim not to sell any data to anyone on their privacy policy (at least last time I checked, might not be up to date), and if you believe that (which isn’t entirely unreasonable, though I’d find it unlikely) the platform is probably more decent than the other giants. It also lets you browse communities without a real account (you can just open the browser app with a guest temporary account by just giving a name), which is really neat for exploring certain communities, as you were saying.
Now, I’d like to add a couple of points.
First, it’s easy to dismiss this because of the general anti-privacy stance regarding Discord, but it is absolutely undeniable that they have the absolute best platform to run and manage an online community based on chats. They have, in my opinion (and I’ve tried nearly every platform that is remotely known), the best implementation of text and voice channels, reactions, roles, onboarding, events, statistics and bots as well. Guilded was (is?) an excellent platform in terms of features as well, but they lack the massive network effect Discord carries, which is another undeniable big factor. As much as I dislike it, the network effect is really strong and, in my experience, with exception of very close friend circles and generally privacy-oriented folks, realistically adopting other alternatives is really tough.
Second, the corporate feel you mention is a bit lost on me. Certainly they are not as down-to-earth as some community-run projects can be, however they are visibly better than similar platforms like Slack.
Why all this? Am I a Discord shill?
Quite far from it. I don’t like them, nor do I hate them. Hate is a pretty strong word which unfortunately is thrown around quite a lot in topics as this one. Discord is really not ideal from a privacy perspective but let’s not completely disregard its many merits. I find that more often than not, conversations in pro-privacy circles revolve around hating on companies and platforms and dealing with absolutes, but the truth is that privacy need not be dealt in absolutes. It’s all relative and dependant on each person’s needs, and failing to see that more often than not harms the whole cause and people trying to get in.
Anyways, went a bit offtopic, sorry for that. Rant over, I suppose.
More open hardware and firmware for sure.
Stuff like Fairphone and Framework are nice steps forward, but those ideals could be expanded to a lot of other electronics, like house appliances.
More open hardware and more community-driven repair hubs would go a long way to help reduce consumer electronics waste and actually help people save money.
But alas, those efforts will always be swimming against a very strong current.
The time you see a system’s weakness most clearly is definitely when stressing it in a real scenario. The goal is to improve further each time we get an influx of users :)