There are different ways of approaching microblogs — reading, writing and interacting. You have @s and hashtags in mind already, they’re a good way of finding conversations and engaging with people.

You’ll find users who write interesting stuff about your favourite subjects — you’d want to follow those to get all their updates. That includes boosts/reposts, i.e. posts by others that those you follow share to spread a message. That will also help you find more interesting people and organisations.

Now, interaction. I have come recently to Lemmy from Mastodon instances, and I see quite a bit of difference in the etiquette and forms of socialising. Two generalisations that I can think of:

1. Mastodon and other fedi microblogs were built by users who were fed up by Twitter’s lax moderation of harassment, so they built in safeguards against that; Lemmy was made in reaction to the commodification and heavy handed enshittification of Reddit, but largely expect the same conversations here. They are not the same mentality.

2. On Lemmy, you post a question or thought in a dedicated community to get answers or start a discussion. Each community has its own room where the discussion is centred around one subject. On the microblog side, you might imagine one big, sprawling social club where people mingle and form smaller groups to talk about one thing, then disperse and join other conversations. And sometimes they just talk about their pets or hobbies to nobody in particular.

Sorry, I’m writing this over morning coffee and I know I’m only covering broad fragments of the microblog experience as it differs from using a forum. I hope it helps though.

And in your understanding, Google are somehow superheroes swooping in from on high by … putting the thumbscrews on a union website?

I get you have an undefined grudge against publishers, but you’re kind of off the mark here.

Hardly. The lesser evil perhaps, but in any context that includes Google there’s never a doubt who’s actually the bigger culprit.

Picard agrees.

I’ve been thinking the same thing. The first season felt a little like a patchwork of different visions.

I’m glad for what we got, I’m one of the people who actually liked Disco from the beginning. It would be interesting to hear his roadmap in more detail, though.

Given how much fediverse users have actively campaigned for instances to defederate from Threads, this martyr posturing tells me a lot about Minds.

Besides, they’re still free to talk, doesn’t mean others have to listen.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. As may be apparent I have spent some time on the microblogging side of the fediverse, where people tend to take less kindly to their content being aggregated without consent. I understand if perhaps sentiments are different in a discussion forum mode, and your decision reflecting that. I appreciate the consideration you put into the matter.

Look, at a glance it looks to me like you’re populating a monetised platform with content off the fediverse without attribution. That’s strike one.

Then you seem to stall for time to implement federation while admitting your developer quit… and continuing the above content scraping. Strike two.

And from what I read in this thread it appears you’re actively dodging defederation by using subdomains to keep scraping content. Strike three.

My concern in this is the integrity of the fediverse and its users. Yours, apparently, is “saving” a platform that leeches content off federated platforms to make a buck off those users. I don’t see much chance of agreement on “what is fair”.

@jwr1@kbin.earth, I stand by that request to defederate.

Ugh, sorry to hear about your experiences. Yeah, I’m not going to bat for all bus drivers. I’m speaking in favour of having a human onboard, because the passengers aren’t necessarily an ideal crowd either…

The role of being a proxy authority figure can definitely turn some asshole drivers further to the dark side… I don’t want to come off as defending those.

Yeah, the reasoning seems to have been “Think how much we’ll save on driver salaries! Plus, the computer will never unionise or cause a fuss about hours.” That’s the only arguments I can think of.

At the same time, I can think of several times I’ve been glad to have a human driver on the bus, mostly to do with obnoxious fellow travelers…

Perhaps the real question is, are we ready for a world without bus drivers? I think they’re a net positive in the daily commute.

I’m sort of okay with driverless trains — they are pretty much/ideally limited to the railway tracks. This has too many possibilities for error for my taste.

So close, and yet…

The “market economy” is the death cult. The notion that somehow market forces are inevitable, natural powers is the logical fallacy.

We are so primed to capitalist market thinking that we accept its dogma. As Frederic Jameson said, at this point it is actually easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

It isn’t the “rot economy”; It’s the Economy, Stupid.

I’m not completely clear either on how Microsoft have implemented this previously. As I said, I didn’t look very deep into the repository.

If these are indeed other Python projects they piled together, as others suggest, I’d be happy to hear what speech recognition library this might’ve built on.

The single exception to this (which is actually buried fairly deep in the feature list) is the audio transcription tool. I didn’t take a closer look at what is used to perform this, but at least it’s not “just” document conversion like pandoc.

Or just Google doing their best filter bubble. I don’t think they have any useable info on me any more, haven’t used their search for ages.

Either way, I’ll take your word for it and just thank my lucky star that I can continue to use Newpipe without problems.

Okay, I’ll click your Google link —

It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search

— and certainly none mentioning Newpipe 🤷

It also has way more features, which might exain the extra resources. I’m sceptic but would love to proven wrong that Lemmy would fare any better with a bunch of FB-like features tacked on?

Calling in @jwr1@kbin.earth re possible domain block.

Cannot confirm, in my usage I have never encountered this. I use Newpipe almost daily and do not have a YT login.

Occasionally Google has done something (deliberately or coincidentally) to limit third party app access, but that’s usually worked around very quickly.