The linked post shows how most non-tech people’s understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.
If you want to get non-techy users, then there is absolutely no need to even use the word fediverse or to try to explain what any of this means. If you want to help a friend get onboard, just send them a link to sign up on the same server that you use, or a nice general purpose server. That’s it. They sign up, they use it, and THEN they can start to learn about fediverse shit if they care to.
Yes. You can use it without understanding how it works behind the scenes. At some point, they’ll run into a situation where it is helpful to learn some part of how the fediverse works and then they can ask about it, generating more content and interaction along the way
"you know how you can’t talk to someone on Twitter.com from facebook.com? But you can email from your @gmail.com to someone with an @yahoo.com address?
That’s the difference, federated social media is like email in this way."
I’m mostly sure even my elderly parents understood it when I said it…
till they throw you the curveball that they can indeed talk to someone on twitter from facebook.
And you know how, when you subscribe to a mailing list, you will only receive new mail sent to the list if your server happens to “federate” with the sender’s server?
Oh wait, that’s not how e-mail works.
Email providers absolutely block other email providers who abuse their system.
I’m not talking about blocking, but about being unable to see all replies to a post unless you open it on its home instance, which happens all the time on Mastodon.
I don’t think it matters. the specific ways in which email services work or are used are not what the analogy is supposed to explain.
it’s supposed to explain how two people who log in to different lemmy instances is different from logging into Facebook and MySpace, or Twitter and Threads.
"how does it work? aren’t they different sites?’
“you know how you can have a gmail and someone else can use an outlook email but you can still send emails to each other”
done. even 70 year olds would get it. problem solved. easy, approachable analogy.
Exactly this. The second you utter the word “federation” you can see people’s eyes glaze over in real time. The email explainer is good but it really needs to be a short sentence and that’s it
I now after many years of living understand most people don’t care or even want to understand how anything works. It completely baffles me.
Everyone I know says I’m smart but nah, I was literally in special Ed classes in school. I’m proven slower than the rest, but I am just curious and want to understand how things work which no one else does. It blows my mind how uninterested people are in the things they use everyday
You might be slower than the rest, but still smarter than them. Hare and turtoise kinda situation. Nothing wrong with being a slow learner, the willingness to learn is where it’s at.
I am just curious and want to understand how things work which no one else does.
It depends on how interested you are in a subject. Everything is interesting, but you may not find everything equally interesting, nor do you have time to know everything there is to know about everything.
For instance, if I fly somewhere, I have a general idea of how wings create lift. But if you try to explain it to me in detail, I’ll tell you to piss off because all I really want to do is travel from A to B.
But I know plenty about other subjects that I’m really into, that I could bore you to tears with and you’d end up punching me in the face if I tried to explain them to you.
It’s not okay to not know anything about something. But it’s okay to know enough.
That’s fine but when people use technology every day, their phones, computers, ect… and not know what a web browser is that’s a whole different level of ignorance. Not just computing tho also cars. I barely know much about cars but I understand the idea of an engine, like you said it’s okay to know enough. If something breaks on my car I look it up on YouTube and learn a little more slowly. Some people tho will drive a car everyday for their entire life and not understand what a piston even is.
You sound like someone who would enjoy The Secret Life of Machines. I’ve never met anyone else in real life who wanted to watch it with me, for the reasons you mention.
I’m really disappointed with Lemmy’s idea of federation: all it is is a bunch of servers mirroring one another, but the user accounts are server-bound. No jumping instance and taking your identity seamlessly with you.
This isn’t really Lemmy’s idea of federation, it’s just ActivityPub, the underlying protocol. Having a mechanism for jumping servers is unfortunately quite complicated and it isn’t clear how it should be done or if it is even possible.
Lemmy does allow you to export and import your settings though, so you can kinda do it but you lose your history.
AFAIK the Nostr protocsal sorta let’s you hop around, but it’s full to the brimwith cryptobros, and I’m still not sure how moderation works there.
Yea moderation becomes a big problem once you can’t actually block people. I don’t like that Nostr describes itself as censorship resistent or even censorship free, that’s not a good quality.
…
I’m not very familiar with Nostr, but knowing other distributed protocols, you can just hide messages from selected users in client.
censorship resistent or even censorship free, that’s not a good quality.
Also, wtf did I read?
Censorship-free implies that moderation is impossible. If you don’t have moderation, your social media will turn into a Nazi bar.
you can just hide messages from selected users in client
That’s not good enough. First of all, users don’t want to have to block people before having a good experience. Users don’t want to deal with moderation themselves, but they also don’t want mean people, harassment and nazis. It’s not easy to recruit moderators for online forums, not a lot of people want to deal with that stuff.
But secondly, client-level blocking is not effective. It does not stop those bad users from continuing their bad behavior. In the case of Lemmy, it also doesn’t stop their votes from still affecting your feed.
So yes, censorship-free platforms are not good because censorship-free means moderation-free, and users don’t want that.
If you don’t have moderation, your social media will turn into a Nazi bar.
Worse, it will immediately devolve into a CP haven. The dark web is dark for a reason.
The dark web is dark for a reason.
Yeah. The reason is Google doesn’t care about them.
I think you (and the Nostr people as well) are just muddling terms here. Censorship is about an external 3rd party (usually the Government) preventing you from seeing things you are potentially interested in, not (as in the case of Lemmy) your service provider and their trusted moderators helping you curate your social media experience. If you are unhappy with the moderation you can easily switch to another instance and use other communities.
I mean I don’t disagree, but that’s clearly not what Nostr means when they say censorship resistent, cause by that logic, Gmail and Facebook are as censorship resistent as Nostr is.
I don’t think there really is a great difference either. Censorship and moderation are just two perspectives on the same thing. One has bad connotations, the other generally good connotations.
First of all, users don’t want to have to block people before having a good experience.
In general conversation in distributed protocols is opt-in, not opt-out. If you see something you don’t like in Briar/Tox/Jami, then it is only because you actively seek it.
Okay, but that is not how the fediverse/Lemmy works at all and I don’t think Nostr works that way either. You can easily see content that you did not explicity ask for (i.e. comments/posts from any user) and I don’t think Nostr is different in this aspect (though I could be wrong).
Why do CryptoBros live rent-free in your head ? One of Lemmy’s donation methods links to a Cryptocurrency wallet So are you gonna leave Lemmy ?
They’re annoying yes, but can be ignored
ActivityPub spec allows content-addressed IDs, just nobody implemented them and now it’s too late.
The problem as I understand it is basically that user IDs in ActivityPub are intrinsically tied to the domain on which the user registered, so you can’t really move a user from one domain to another.
It’s not true, all ActivityPub IDs are URIs
Yes exactly - those URLs contain the domain name, so you can’t change servers for a user as their ID is tied to the domain.
They can be URNs (like magnet:), as shown above.
Well no they can’t, because that’s not part of ActivityPub. In fact ActivityPub mandates HTTP URLs. Of course, any extension can choose to change that, but since nobody is actually supporting magnet links, it’s not relevant.
There once was a discussion going on to implement DIDs in ActivityPub.
Unfortunately you can’t just change the ID format as it would require a breaking change to the protocol.
pretty much. That’s why the discussion is still on draft.
This is exactly like email though.
You have a gmail account that is tied to google. You have to login to gmail to access your email but you can email anyone in the world. Some people use different providers so they have different email addresses.
If you want to change providers there is no easy way to do it. You can use imapsync or export to pst and import to new provider and so on, or maybe your new provider gives you tools for importing mail from your old mailbox but it’s not a feature of email protocol(s) to do this.
In my experience, the majority of people doesn’t have the slightest clue how mail works. Somehow you type it in and provide it with an address into one of the three indistinguishable fields that are titled “To”, " CC", “BCC”. And by some black magic it either appears on the screen of the other person. Or it doesn’t. That’s about the amount of knowledge.
So comparing something to this is kind of meaningless.
Yup, and people younger than a certain age think email is as archaic as the pony express.
Hilariously, fax machines are as archaic as the pony express. They were invented around 1850.
Abraham Lincoln could have literally sent a japanese samurai a fax.
And we still don’t have any worthy successor. In contrast to the pony express.
In my country, people above a certain age think sending an email is impressive
As a younger tech person, I definitely don’t get a lot about email. It’s old and weird and arcane and half it’s features that match newer services seem to be built on top of hacks that are enforced through convention alone that will break if I decide I like to format my titles a little differently. Third party clients work, but the main providers, Gmail outlook use some proprietary api to make sure their own works well while everyone else gets stuck with shitty imap. There’s endless little incompatibilities. It all just feels like delerict tower held together with miles of duct tape. Oh and I still haven’t found a good answer to why calendars are so tied up with email.
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I mean it’s one thing when you bring together a bunch of services that have no interest in being compatible, verses a bunch that are all conforming to the same standard.
Ironically it is often that way with Lemmy as well, outside of Lemmy.World. You write up a post, maybe it makes it to its destination, maybe it does not (for several days, after which point extremely few people will see it when it suddenly appears, but down among the older content no longer listed as “new”), maybe people write comments into it, maybe they don’t but who even knows if you aren’t able to see any of them to be able to respond.
This is definitely a monthly or almost weekly occurrence, even if not quite a daily one, though it depends strongly on what instance you are on.
Also, whether it makes it to the destination or not depends on which server you try to view it from.
And I haven’t even begun to start into the defederation artifacts yet!?
Right. Learning Lemmy and the Fediverse takes some effort. The onboarding isn’t super smooth and flawless… I think we all know this. I’d still like to see a few design changes. I think generally we’re headed in the right direction. Albeit kind of slowly.
I haven’t noticed any federation hiccups in quite some time. There was some debacle with two updates. But since then it’s been forwarding posts within seconds for me. At least on the last two instances I used.
Almost every single one of my posts has had major issues. Even those from other instances. e.g. Rimu messaged me about this one that did not federate for 2-3 days, and consequently was seen by very few people. And here’s one from a difference instance that made it to its destination on !tenforward@lemmy.world, but from its originating server I could see none of the comments, and had to respond from a third account involved in that 3-way attempt at communication. (a post talking about such federation issues on that same server) So to be very clear, I am not saying that instances running PieFed software are having issues, but more that the issues are with Lemmy regardless of software type run.
Uh, right. Sorry, I did not notice you were from Piefed… I was talking about the times when we had the borked Lemmy updates… Did you ever debug or resolve your issues? Is there a way to tell something didn’t federate? And is this an issue specific to Piefed? Or to the whole Fediverse? I’m not sure if I’m affected. I occasionally check my posts from another account and it always seems okay. But I mean I don’t do it very often.
Yes often I’ve chased it down to some small degree. The one that Rimu messaged me was near a time of great instability on piefed.social and I got a bunch of gateway errors even so much as trying to reach it as a user (having nothing to do with posting I mean). This instance has calmed down a ton since then and works perfectly these days, but things happen from time to time. Likewise the incident with StarTrek.Website that I mentioned and provided a link describing more.
Other occurrences have still other causes - e.g. a few of them in one community seems to have been due to my posts getting “locked”. I have no idea why - perhaps the new mod was just fat-fingering the button? I did not ask. But now the vote counts vary GREATLY (192 vs. 183 vs. 98 vs. 0 etc.) depending on which instance you view it from. If you want to test for yourself, a good one to use is https://piefed.social/post/330559 - though I notice that (fairly recently created) community !tech_memes@lemmy.world does not appear at all on your instance.
The primary cause though was a limitation in how the ActivityPub protocol was implemented in the Lemmy codebase, and not having anticipated that ~80% of the entire Lemmy-based Fediverse would concentrate itself onto a single server, Lemmy.World. So how it works is that any “action” - a post, a comment, an upvote or downvote - will be federated out to all the other instances world-wide at a rate of 1 per second. However, if the ping from the other servers to Lemmy.World is itself a significant approximation of that, then the list of actions to be federated will fall behind and take longer to catch up. Eventually after more than a week it gives up entirely, but in the meantime an action can be delayed for days. Poor Aussie.Zone - geographically distant from the EU - has been really having a hard time of it ( https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 ).
Fortunately this problem has already been fixed in the Lemmy codebase by allowing multiple actions to be sent in parallel (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623) - however, what causes the continued problems nowadays is the fact that Lemmy.World is still awaiting that upgrade to 0.19.6 to make use of that change in the codebase (release notes) (actually now 0.19.7 is already out too, having come less than a week after the former, and representing just a few bugfixes, release notes). When Lemmy.World upgrades to one of those, a good deal of these systemic issues should calm down, by a GREAT deal, if not entirely.
Afaik, there is nothing particularly special about instances running PieFed having troubles connecting to any Lemmy instances. In fact it seems rather stable compared to many (even most!) others - particularly StarTrek.Website that has poor uptime. In fact, https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list reports that piefed.social has a remarkable uptime rate of 99.89, which I very much believe, compared to the aforementioned StarTrek.Website’s rate of 98.20, although a year ago when I left it it must have been significantly poorer b/c it would be down for days sometimes, and every single action took like a minute sometimes, back then. Your own instance reports 98.60 - does that sound right?
Rather, it is Lemmy instances - particularly smaller ones (e.g. https://lemmings.world/post/14171987) - having trouble federating specifically with Lemmy.World.
And then recently there were a bunch of instances having troubles connecting to lemmy.ml too (https://lemmy.world/post/22196027) - though this one is more expected as that one is administered by the developers of the Lemmy codebase, and thus that is the place where they test out all of their new code in beta, prior to deploying it across the entire Fediverse. Sometimes that leads to some REALLY odd behaviors, such as entries disappearing from modlog files that were extremely concerning to people, but it is par for the course with that highly special instance, which is unique in its manner.
Edit: ah and I neglected to answer one of your questions: as you said, the way to tell if something federated properly or not is to check the instance - specifically the one hosting the community that you are sending it to. So e.g. to check a post to !tenforward@lemmy.world, I would visit Lemmy.World. If it is there but not on your home instance, then at least that particular message packet got sent, even if the message packet from Lemmy.World to your instance got lost or fell behind in its processing backlog somehow.
Thank you for all the detailed explanation. Seems I wasn’t aware of lots of current events. Especially regarding Lemmy. I always thought it can’t be too hard syncing posts to 45k (monthly active) users… I guess there’s still some way to go.
By the way, Piefed does not pull in remote communities by default. It only does it once a local user subscribes. And that’s why a lot of them are missing on my own instance. I skipped quite some of the meme communities when I switched. And I’m already trying to foster smaller instances. I don’t subscribe to communities on lemmy.ml and I’d like to have an alternative to lemmy.world. But you’re right. A lot of the activity here happens on lemmy.world and we can’t do without.
And last Lemmy instance I used was discuss.tchncs.de which always seemed fine. But it has a very capable admin and is located in Germany, so probably not too far out.
My uptime should be less than other servers. I’m using it for testing and development. And sometimes I break stuff and it’s down until i figure things out.
By the way, Piefed does not pull in remote communities by default. It only does it once a local user subscribes. And that’s why a lot of them are missing on my own instance.
Oh yes absolutely - and Lemmy is the same way, so this too is not something specific to PieFed. For instance, that post I mentioned previously where my vote counts are all over the place, when viewed from StarTrek.Website has zero comment associated with it, and no upvotes beyond the default - and I have another post that is the same way, though it seems like later that same day someone subscribed and from that point onwards the community starts to have comments and some of the votes seen from other instances.
Or perhaps it is that these posts were locked somehow / for some reason? Which looks to be accidental from a new, inexperienced moderator in this brand-new community, and it was reversed a couple of days later - although that fact again depends on where you look. With an account at StarTrek.Website, I look at the post moderation history and it says that it is still locked: https://startrek.website/modlog?postId=16510256. However, with an account on DiscussOnline (substitute with whatever other alt you may have - hendrik@lemmy.ml?) I see that not only was it unlocked, but that unlock event happened 7 days ago: https://discuss.online/modlog?postId=13575162.
Even so, the post when viewed from DiscussOnline shows 98 upvotes and 8 comments, but when viewed from Lemmy.World (where the !tech_memes@lemmy.world community is located) it shows 191 upvotes and 9 comments (or I think it’s 193 upvotes and 2 downvotes, but the web UI no longer shows those individually, unless you jump through many many, undocumented, hoops - e.g. I think I can see those broken down into their individual components on a mobile device in Firefox, possibly solely when viewing a individual users list of posts but not when looking at a post directly or in the standard community view, and definitely you cannot see this breakdown from either Chrome or Firefox on a desktop, etc.). And since it has been 7+ days, this is now enshrined in stone, and we can be confident that having not caught up by now, it never will. A decade from now, if e.g. DiscussOnline is still with us, it will show this post as having 98 upvotes rather than the true value of 193, and StarTrekOnline will still show the default upvotes=1 and no comments, thus providing 3 different stories for this same identical post, depending on how you try to view it - and only one of those stories being explanable by the fact that nobody on StarTrek.Website had subscribed to the community yet (MAYBE, b/c there are 2 other posts that are even older in that community, which have +1 upvote added!? so perhaps this is a complex mixture of that + the locking effect, with the unlock action having not been propagated correctly).
The above stories reveal - federation is NOTHING AT ALL LIKE EMAIL. In the latter, the message either gets passed or it does not, whereas in federation, you can see partial messages as I’ve shown. And this has not even begun to delve into the variety of defederations that further complicate any mess - especially with a unidirectional defederation where one account can talk to someone on a server that has defederated from them, though the recipient will never be alerted to that fact nor have the capability to respond. Thus it is my opinion that trying to fit the square peg into the circular hole is never going to work - the email analogy is hopelessly simplified, so much so that as soon as users begin to encounter such complexities when they make their posts, especially the content creator types that we very much want to come here, they may outright leave, and moreover be very vocal about how we are not what was promised to them. So while we could say “it’s a little bit like sending email”, I don’t think we should push too hard on that avenue, making it sound so simple, b/c it’s really not!
Lemmy.World is still awaiting that upgrade to 0.19.6 to make use of that change in the codebase (release notes) (actually now 0.19.7 is already out too, having come less than a week after the former, and representing just a few bugfixes, release notes).
On the other hand, 0.19.7 still has a picture issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5196
Ah, so is this what happened to lemmy.cafe?
And will Lemmy.World wait until that is fixed do you know? MrKaplan said perhaps a week ago that they were not ready to announce any plans, but perhaps you’ve heard something since then. I don’t know how stable 0.19.6 itself is in that case, or if they need to first wait until 0.19.8 and then wait further for the bugs in it, like 0.19.7 (and 0.19.6 too), to be discovered and patched.
Edit: in any case, thanks for sharing!:-)
Me, explaining how Lemmy is similar to email…
Don’t explain anything, there’s literally no point. Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
Just tell people to make an account on any instance, whichever one you like best, and let them experience federation. Even if they never really understand what is happening they can still use the service. It’s not like any of them understand how email works, and yet they all use email. Understanding is worthless. Stop being nerds.
Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
Because technology forms the basis of the online environments we inhabit, and gives us the tools to tell how, say, our data is stored and processed.
If you’re going to get in the water, it’s probably a good skill to be able to swim. If you’re going to drive a car and don’t have the faintest idea how the engine works, you’ll be at the mercy of manufacturers and mechanics.
The solution to your issue is not that everybody should conform to the lowest common denominator of technology literacy, but that the general internet user should get a fucking idea of the environment they navigate.
Stop being nerds
Never.
Nerds don’t just want to teach people to swim. They want to teach them about hydrogen bonds and the mineral contents of the water, the processes of water treatment, and the technical requirements for a functional pool.
Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.
If you want people to swim or drive or use the fediverse you skip all that shit. Normal people do not care.
Stop being nerds.
Nerds don’t just want to teach people to swim. They want to teach them about hydrogen bonds and the mineral contents of the water, the processes of water treatment, and the technical requirements for a functional pool.
And I think that’s beautiful. There is nothing like watching someone explain something they’re passionate about.
There’s something wrong with hurting other people’s ability to access the fediverse with insufferable nerd explanations that have nothing to do with posting.
“hurting”? someone yapping about the fediverse is a minor inconvenience at worst. A TON of people that are on Lemmy don’t know how it works, or even care about how it works, and that’s perfectly OK. Nothing wrong with going on !cat@lemmy.world and upvoting the cute cat pictures.
Well, apparently you consider basic maintenance like changing tires superfluous to driving. Says all I need to know about your mindset on the other subjects.
Stop being
nerdshelplessly unskilledFTFY
The majority of people pay other people to do that stuff. Normal people don’t care about your nerd shit.
I change my oil, oil filter, tires, battery, wipers, all that shit. It doesn’t fucking matter though, it’s all superfluous.
Stop. Being. Nerds. Just let people be basic, stop insisting that they know everything before they’re allowed to drive.
Those other people are nerds too, now you’re gonna tell them to stop being nerds ? Why should incompetent people be rewarded ?
Rewarded?
This is about what is best for getting more people in into the fediverse. I’m telling people to stop being nerds and chasing normies away.
Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.
Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn’t have as much global warming denialism.
Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn’t come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.
But I think you’re right though. I’ve given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it’s clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it’s better to use an electric car if they’re not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it’s better to be vaccinated if they’re not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they’re unwilling to understand what federation even is?
I think one of the main reasons why the fediverse didn’t blow up much bigger than it did over the past couple of years is because of the weird and insistent need to explain how it works from every possible angle with seemingly every possible analogy. It’s information overload and it only confuses the shit out of people who do not care in the slightest how it works.
Hmm… maybe if we tell the nerds that they need to add an “abstraction layer” to their explanations that might motivate them to simplify?
People have been using email since they were five and all modern lives depend on it. If they don’t understand federation they will just be confused why they can’t see the content and leave. “I didn’t understand it and it didn’t work” is one of the more commons reasons I’ve seen on Reddit for failing lemmy
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Doesn’t it default to All? Or at least Local? Shouldn’t they just see a feed of everything if they go to the main page?
The experience is almost exactly the same as Reddit if you don’t worry about federation or technicalities.
I think admins choose, but tbh reddit is also pretty algorithmic these days
But they should still see content, even if they don’t understand anything.
The only way they won’t is if the admins decided users shouldn’t see anything without first subscribing to something, which is a terrible way to ease people in to the service. There needs to be a default feed so normies can use it too!
Unless an instance enrolls in Lemmy-federate, the default behavior is that a user, even on the /all view, will only see local communities, and outside communities that another local user has sought out and subscribed to.
If a newbie joins a small instance and doesn’t know how to seek out communities that interest them with lemmyverse.net, they would likely have a very small range of content in their feed.
Lemmy-federate helps by auto subscribing an instance to participating communities, seeding a wide range of content immediately.
A large instance would offer a good experience either way, but would encourage centralization without Lemmy-federate existing.
Why on Earth would a newbie join a small instance? How would they even find out about one?
Assuming they search Lemmy, and one of top results is the join-lemmy page (second result for me, below Lemmy.world), the server recommendation tool can suggest small instances with only a couple hundred members. For instance, if one selects Art as the topic and English as the language.
Wife had to do this the other day. She catches me trying to explain and convince tech basically recommending something with an open door to say no or disagree why you like it. She says just tell them to use it and if they love you they will.
And it’s true. I have my extended family on signal.
Work on it, don’t only complain.
This is how you get people whining about there being 8 different “Politics” groups, and insisting they should be allowed to erase the identity of the hosting website.
The patchwork nature of the fediverse is baked into the technology. If people don’t at least have a basic model for how it behaves, then they’re just going to get pissed off at it and leave.
Ypu don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive, but you have to understand how driving works, both from the perspective of operating a car, and from that of the conventions of the road.
“Just find a pretty car and hop behind the wheel” is bad advice for everyone.
So Cars are designed & built by nerds, so are you gonna stop driving cars ? Imagine telling people that you shouldn’t bother trying to learn
I’m telling people that it’s okay to be a normie.
And it is.
Car nerds can be car nerds to support the normies who can only drive.
Strong agree. Just tell people to go to feddit.org and call it a day
In general, wouldn’t one of the English speaking instances be a better choice?
Long story short, there is no ideal generalist instance. If you open the top 20 instances (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/)
- Lemmy.world is too big
- Lemm.ee is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad, something that is not very welcoming to new users (see this thread: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28798607/15305964 )
- sh.itjust.works names contains “shit”, which can deter users
- lemmy.ca is Canadian-centric
- feddit.org, as you mentioned, is German-centric, but technically English speaking too
- dbzer0 federated hexbear
- programming.dev is topic-centric (and has a database corruption for the last month https://programming.dev/post/20515601?scrollToComments=true)
- blahaj is queer-focused
- discuss.tchncs.de has a difficult name
- lemmy.sdf.org does not defederate anyone
- lemmy.zip is federated with hexbear and lemmygrad
- sopuli.xyz doesn’t have “lemmy” or “feddit” in its name
- beehaw is way outdated
- infosec.pub is topic-centric
- aussie.zone is country-centric
- midwest.social is region-centric
The next page has reddthat.com which is known to have federation issues with LW due to its location in Australia, and lemmy.today which does not defederate anyone
Honestly I’d say lemmy.world is probably the ideal for redditors, I agree it’s too big, but it’s probably the safest option for people without a lot of knowledge. sh.itjustworks is also IMO fine if you know the person isn’t offended by language.
I agree it’s too big
That’s the main issue. Its size creates 5-days delay with some instances
The issues have been here for months, are not going to be fixed any time soon as the latest Lemmy version still has issues like the pictures one: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5196
Some additional details:
Don’t explain anything, there’s literally no point. Why are nerds so insistent that people understand technology?
All people understand Ohm’s law now. It took only 150 years of explaining.
I promise you that if you collect 10 random people and ask them what Ohms law is, at most you get 5 that knows it’s something about electricity. You are lucky if you have one that knows it.
Yeah I know it has to do with resistance but I couldn’t quote it to you rn, I’d have to look it up. And I’m vaping rn at .4ohms lol.
It’s taught in every school… At least in Europe.
I can only speak for myself here but… A lot of things are taught in school. Most of them weren’t something that I use everyday and thus have forgotten about it (some more than others, of course).
Ohm’s Law would’ve been taught to me sometime during highschool (as the other commenter mentioned, I can tell you it relates to electricity but without looking it up I couldn’t tell you the actual principle behind it) - I graduated from highschool 10 years ago, and have not had a reason to “flex” that memory ever since then.
Great. So is history, trigonometry and literature.
It doesn’t mean adults know it. Most of what you learn in school will be forgotten unless you have a reason to keep using it.
as soon as you say “make an account” their eyes will glaze over. if not, as soon as they hear “instance” their eyes glaze over. if not, as soon as they hear “whichever one you like best” their eyes will glaze over.
Sorry, you misread what I said 😅
You, the recommender, are the one picking the instance. Whichever one you like best! Don’t bother telling them anything about instances, that’s a waste of time. Just say “go to lemmy.world and post” and don’t bother explaining anything else.
Oh, gotcha, that would be more successful for sure.
LW pretty much made the Lemmyverse almost centralized, thanks to people like you.
And yet I’m the one on lemmy.ml and you’re the one on lemmy.world 🤔
no, I migrated away from LW a few months ago. I am currently on discuss.tchncs.de
I think you confused my current account with the inactive one on LW that I only use for moderating in asklemmy sometimes.
Oops, embarrassing. 😅
I have not been convinced lemmy.world being the largest instance is actually a bad thing. It’s bad for federation, I suppose, but they’re all Redditeurs and I appreciate having a containment zone for them.
I have not been convinced lemmy.world being the largest instance is actually a bad thing. It’s bad for federation, I suppose, but they’re all Redditeurs and I appreciate having a containment zone for them.
Most people here are from reddit or other centralized and enshittified platforms such as Twitter.
LW got recommended often and it created a snowballing effect, which is why it became the biggest lemmy instance. Unfortunately people keep doing it and LW admins refuse to close down their registrations temporarily to allow other instances to get some traffic as well. That’s why some people (like me) advise people (like you) to stop recommending LW over other instances.
And LW is not a “containment” zone for former redditors.
I don’t expect non-tech people to ever come to or care about this place, or Mastodon.
Part of social media is predation. There is a draw to Facebook, even if it is the endless sea of bullshit emanating through it, the marketing of products and echo chambers.
people would love to be entertained by our intellectual discussions!
They watch Adam Sandler movies, lad. We’ve already lost.
It’s a draw. We have no draw, other than being DIY NPR (now with 5% more tankies). It’s a draw, but it won’t draw them. It’s not what they care about.
They all complain about “Muh Open source UI bad” Ok then what is considered a good UI/UX according to you lot (Not you lot in particular I’m not trying to start any beef here)
& how does one decide that particular UI is User-Friendly ?
One button to expand pictures similar to RES would be a big improvement
Built-in keyword filters are another one
And of course, multi-communities
Those are cool ideas honestly
A UI can be measured in a bunch of different ways, most of which should be measured and balanced against each other.
I recommend this video essay, where a UX professional (formerly at Microsoft) took over the UX for the FOSS music composing app Musescore and shares a lot of the lessons learned along the way: https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ
a user friendly user interface is one that the user is already familiar with. It is subjective, determined by the user, and will vary from user to user.
Think about the placement of face buttons for an xbox controller vs a ninttendo switch controller, specifically A and B. The function of menu accept is always on a, and menu back is always on b, but the physical placement of those buttons are opposite on the competing platform. Now think about a playstation controller, and where it puts menu accept and menu back. The glyphs are different, but a nintendo player will find it intuitive while the xbox player will be confused.
Juat copy what is most used so people dont have to learn anything new ever again
I think people can handle a simple series of instructions, like (1) download the Voyager for Lemmy app, (2) click the middle button, then click…
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren’t even sure that they want to join yet.
At the risk of bringing up unwanted drama, 100% of the time whenever I mention Lemmy to someone, they have admonished me for having done so. But putting myself into their shoes one day, I did a Google search (🤮) for “Lemmy”, and aside from the singer, the top hit to an actual instance is… surprisingly to me, lemmy.ml. Next I note that the default search method there is “Local”, not “All”. NO WONDER they were telling me how politically “extremist” it (Lemmy) is! They see NONE of the posts from Lemmy.World, sh.itjust.works, etc., unless they are submitted to a community on lemmy.ml. Instead, what someone would see by default is “death to landlords” and all the other posts promoting the violent upheaval of Western society, as ofc capitalism is to blame for literally everything (well I mean…), except somehow only the Western variant is in the wrong and everything done by the likes of Russia or China or North Korea is absolutely fine.
Here’s an old example I just happened to have handy:
(setting aside truth or falsehood, it definitely has a bias to it, as in both sides were equal, and yes this was prior to the USA election)
The #2 search result by DuckDuckGo btw is Lemmy.World (the #1 is ofc the musician:-), probably bc it has ~80% of all Lemmy users on it, so that is appropriate.
We need to put ourselves into their shoes, not our own as if we were ourselves on the other side of that conversation, but appreciate how they will approach the issues. And the methods used by more mainstream people differ from ours.
Either that, or accept that we are strictly another forum community used chiefly by Linux users, and that we will never be more than that.
To clarify why lemmy.ml is one of the first results: it was the first Lemmy instance. It’s only the second most populated instance, but I imagine the relative age of the site (5 years, as opposed to lemmy.world’s 1 year) has something to do with it.
It also sucks that join-lemmy.org, which comes up before lemmy.ml for me, defaults to recommending random instances. It really ought to recommend making your first account at lemmy.world and switching to a different instance after you’ve gotten used to the platform. I know it’s not ideal to put all our eggs in one basket, and there is a reasonable effort to move communities away from both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, but for new users it might be kind of confusing seeing people talk about sh.itjust.works and lemmy.dbzer0.com and programming.dev as if they’re more or less interchangeable
I get the age requirement - as you say it makes sense - though it makes less sense why it isn’t up to date information. Anyway regardless of the why factor it helps me understand where people are coming from when THAT is what they see, which is different than what I do, or what I would see if I personally (who would use DDG rather than Google) would see if trying to look up such a thing today.
I also get why they would want to see an example of a working Lemmy instance, before looking at a website called “join Lemmy” - they aren’t interested yet in JOINING Lemmy, or information related to that, until they have seen what(ever) Lemmy IS first.
One correction: lemmy.ml has now fallen to fifth place in terms of MAUs (Monthly Active Users), with only 2165 compared to Lemmy.World’s whipping 17195. The second place is lemmynsfw.com with 3288, so definitely a steep drop-off from the #1 spot to all others, then #3 lemm.ee with 2996 and #4 sh.itjust.works with 2392. So even just with respect to these top 5 servers alone, ignoring the entire rest of the Fediverse, lemmy.ml makes up at most 7.7% of the Fediverse, which falls further behind with each server added to the consideration (including the one I am on now:-).
I sorta get the historical argument, but isn’t that a bit like saying that an actor is alive bc at one point they were, despite how they are currently dead? Or saying that Russia has not invaded Ukraine, bc at one point that may have been true, though it has not remained true for quite a number of years now. Or saying that Nixon is the President of the United States of America, bc at one point that was legitimately a true fact (yet is not a current one). Google results just seem so hopelessly wrong these days, telling people to put razor blades into their pizza and the like, and that if you stand more than 6 feet away from a nuclear blast you’ll be fine to survive it safely. There are REASONS for all of how those answers came about, but it definitely highlights how they - and therefore by extension Google results (tbf the AI ones in those latter cases) - are incorrect. But that is what mainstream normies are most likely to use regardless? (Even if they ignore the AI garbage)
Also, those instances sorta are interchangeable?:-P Somewhat at least, which is by design of the ActivityPub Protocol that anywhere you are, you can access mostly the same content. That said, I like where you are going with that: in one sense they are, if not “the same” then at least they are interconnected, yet in another sense they each have a distinctiveness to them, with unique local content (which if marked “local-only” cannot be accessed from the outside, without an account on that specific instance) making them different from all others. And distinct admin+moderation practices, and account creation procedures, etc.
Less like email and more like a fleet of pirate/free trader ships each passing their messages to all of the others (excepting defederations), but remaining distinctive entities unto themselves with their own flairs and styles. And anyone can spin up their own ship and tap onto the Fediverse network to become one of them.
What they likely get confused about is the plethora of choices, especially when they aren’t even sure that they want to join yet.
Then we need to provide them a single recommendation
While we are talking, a small update on lemmy.cafe: I liked it for a few weeks, but the images stopped showing up properly since a week: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9986198?scrollToComments=true
I now use feddit.org as my default recommendation
Oh no!
That link that you sent me, are you still able to see that post? For me it shows an error, like what happens when a post is deleted by the OP, but I wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only, and if that requires a lemmy.cafe account to read, b/c otherwise I don’t even know what their main announcement community would even be. It might have gotten deleted entirely and/or merged into graybeard, or statecraft, but both have not had posts for a long time (unless they did and whatever problem is affecting the database lately has messed up new posts in it as well).
Well that’s sad.
If I were you I would ask feddit.org to switch their default sort behavior from “Local” to “All” so that it will be a more welcoming experience for the wider Fediverse looking to see memes and such from the likes of Lemmy.World etc. and not just itself.
It at least defederates from 2 of the big 3, though it also defederates from lemmynsfw.com, which I don’t know why so many people (from Reddit in particular) insist on having that in their same account but I bet some people will be resistant to it, but oh well.
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation? It has 4.5x the userbase as feddit.org (the same MAU, just 4.5x more accounts total, so I guess a bunch of lurkers or inactive accounts, but it is at least the same size), 5 admins, already has its default sort set to All, doesn’t defederate from lemmynsfw.com, and seems to take user feedback e.g. this recent thread questioning whether to refederate with hexbear.net but based on user feedback deciding overwhelmingly to not. And especially if people in Reddit tend to be from the USA, it would be geographically closer and not confusing to e.g. first describe things in German, then in English.
Hopefully the issues with lemmy.cafe are temporary, but on the other hand communication about such matters is just as important as not causing them in the first place, plus if it’s been a whole week and it’s still that way… that does not bode well for the future.
I wonder if that is what happened or if lemmy.cafe has switched its main announcement community to be local-only,
I just checked, it is local indeed
May I ask though: why not use lemmy.ca as the default recommendation?
The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians, which is partially true when you look at the sidebar
it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by Canadians. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!
I could understand why non-Canadians would rather join another instance
I just checked, it is local indeed
How very interesting… beyond lemmy.cafe then, this is probably how Lemmy implements “local-only” in general, restricting access purely to those who have accounts on that instance. I would have hoped for a more nuanced take than simply seeing an error screen for me who lacks that, but it is what it is.
The .ca domain and the logo could deter non Canadians by giving the impression that the instance is geared towards Canadians
Yeah, I get that and thought the same, but otoh at least it is a straightforward and easy-to-understand bias, explicitly stated outright (unlike e.g. “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”). If we were to follow that logic though, the rather high predominance of the German language over and above the English one, the latter of which in particular often is left out, is also quite off-putting to me. e.g. see this page: https://feddit.org/c/fediverse, which does not have a German explanation first and then an English one, but instead offers purely a German one and then… that’s it, it stops there. English-speaking people are not only after-thoughts, but often not thought of at all. Which to be clear is fine btw - it’s their server and they can do as they please with it - but I would not want to use it as the front face for all for all of Lemmy, for that reason, especially if that is a kind of signal that they are sending that similarly to lemmy.ca others are “welcomed” but they aren’t the primary focus. And then the default sort being set to Local rather than All just compounds the issue all the more - other instances are again an after-thought, rather than the primary focus.
In contrast, “Canadian” is at least North American, but more importantly so long as it is using English rather than French, lemmy.ca is not as off-putting as feddit.org is, imho. Also, after the elections, A LOT of more liberal/less conservative (including “centrist”) minded people I bet are going to be okay with a Canadian social media rather than a “murica” one.
Especially when the choices are so limited.
- lemmy.sdf.org has only a single admin
- beehaw.org has very restrictive moderation practices, and they do not want a wider audience increasing their workload further
- Lemmy.today does not defederate from… anything it would seem (and I confirmed that I can access ChapoTrapHouse from it, so it is not merely missing a Blocked tab in its instances list, it’s real)
- startrek.website is themed and consistently has many federation issues, probably stemming from hardware ones (its uptime is not ideal)
- ttrpg.network similarly and significantly worse reported uptime
- discuss.online is quite nice actually, and I still use it as my primary “Lemmy” instance, though it only has 2 admins, who were balancing running it and trying to develop Sublinks, though it does not defederate from hexbear and that’s a dealbreaker right there (imho), much less lemmy.ml
- and then everything else after that, sorted by MAU and restricting country=United States on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, is at least half as small as lemmy.cafe
I think we should keep Discuss.Online in the back of our heads moving forwards - although otoh it might become an unstable/experimental instance if it were to suddenly shift over to use Sublinks ahead of any other Lemmy instance. Otherwise, the only advantage of e.g. lemmy.ca or feddit.org is that they both defederate from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, which lemm.ee has a firm resistance to ever doing.
It looks like you have an account at lemmy.ca - did you like it? It seems to offer roughly the same uptime as feddit.org.
Discuss.Online
They don’t block hexbear: https://discuss.online/instances
One other aspect against recommending lemmy.ca as the one recommended instance is that some Canadian users would prefer the instance to stay local: https://lemmy.ca/post/23600231
Which makes complete sense to be honest, speaking English does not mean that any English speaking user should come to their server while it’s specifically country-named and focused.
I tagged you on my other post - I need to focus more on my job right now, but I’m glad that I can help out that much so that you don’t have to do literally everything:-). It was only after that when I finally discovered this post (b/c previously I had used a browser search for the word hexbear but that only looked at titles), and yet even so I think I covered what jgrim was asking for - actual reasons to do so, not just “hurr me no likey dose others over der”.
If Discuss.Online (DO) were to defederate even only hexbear.net, much less lemmy.ml, I think it would work fantastically well as an option.
That argument pushed against Lemmy.ca (CA) though - I do not agree… mostly. For one, that instance has literally ~1200 MAUs, yet only 21 upvoted that post? And even then, the top community on that instance, mentioned also in that post, is !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K MAUs, which obviously is going to show up quite often in the All feed. The solution to that though is to either browse by Subscribed, or else continue to browse by All yet after blocking unwanted communities. If they had wanted to remain Canada-focused, well that ship has already sailed, long ago.
And it is not the only such community either - !fbstolencontent@lemmy.ca (1.79K) and !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca (1.64K) and !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (1.58K) all are geared more towards international (than Canada-only) audiences. That person’s argument was a nonstarted even back then, and since then they have definitely lost - though they can (re-)make the Fediverse into anything that they want by configuring their tools to show only what they are (most) interested in. Tbf, otoh there are also some posts that have a tiny bit of an anti-usa stance, like this one: https://lemmy.ca/post/33447213, though I would hope not a deal-breaker.
The only way to know for sure would be to create a post and ask if the admins were okay with you using their instance as the default recommendation for Redditors to flock to. That would also hold for feddit.org though, or Discuss.Online (if they were amenable to blocking hexbear.net and especially if they would also block lemmy.ml), the latter of which I at least got the ball rolling for you:-).
Reading through their “welcome, new users!” post, I came across this very interesting comment. A lot of comments express similar thoughts. So while I think that DO would be a better match than CA (and I would guess that you agree? again, after HB were defederated), CA would still be a good match overall, imho. Not perfect, but especially considering the lack of any other options.
However, feddit.org (FO?) has even more of an offputting “vibe” imho than CA. First, I mentioned that it sorts by Local rather than All, which exagerates even more the focus on German-speaking than English-speaking ones. While many posts seem attractive to a USA audience - e.g. “‘Would you survive 72 hours?’ Germany and the Nordic countries prepare citizens for possible war” and “History will judge German chancellor Olaf Scholz for not giving Taurus missiles to Ukraine, the country’s former foreign minister says”, many others would act more as a deterrant e.g. “XXL-Leben: Der Fluch des großen Penis” with pictures of men’s bulging packages not marked NSFW, and a post about Georgia but it’s the country rather than the US state, but mostly I mean that overall on the front-page feed right now I counted and nearly all of the other posts besides those 2 mentioned above (+1 more) are in German. 4 from iech_iel that have the language embedded in an image so not easily machine translatable to other languages.
And even more so than CA that at least has some non-Canadian communities, the communities on FO are even more German- or EU-specific - the top one being !Europe@feddit.org with 3.87K MAUs, which is a bit smaller than !pcgaming@lemmy.ca with 4.84K, and like even !technik@feddit.org that while not unwelcoming to posts in English, the very name of the community itself looks to be in German, as are a large fraction of the posts therein too. I don’t know how receptive to a large influx of English-speaking Reddit users that FO would be… but just purely from looking at the communities and posts that are already there, I don’t think it’s a good “fit”.
To attempt to be crystal clear, obviously the above is all perfectly fine and people on FO can do however they please (and on the international stage, Georgia is a nation/country, not strictly a USA state:-P) - I am talking here strictly about the “fit” for average Americans.
Damn, I’ve hit a character limit:-(.
If you aren’t too annoyed at a much too long comment, here is part 2 of 2.
I get that you are frustrated with lemmy.cafe, and I whole-heartedly concur that it is for good reasons, but in case it helps, I do think that, based solely on what you’ve told me here and what I can see, CA might be a significantly better fit to Americans than FO would be. Not that either would be horrible ofc:-), I’m just talking about absolutely minimizing any potential friction.
Though DO would be so much more amazingly a perfect fit, and now that I’ve found that previous post, I do strongly think that it will happen (even if lemmy.ml is too much to hope for, though neither FO nor CA defed from it anyway). So if I were you I would use CA for now, but then be ready to switch to suggesting DO very soon? :-D And I hope that I’m helping by saying all of this, rather than coming on too strong like I’m trying to tell you what to do? Rather, I’m trying to emphasize that it is my strong recommendation, as a non-German-speaking American myself perhaps that gives me insight.:-)
Thank you for that post on Discuss.online, let’s see what the admins say.
Between feddit.org and lemmy.ca, both have their issues indeed. Let’s hope Discuss.online can become “the one”, but it would be a bit ironic to recommend the one instance managed by people who created an alternative to Lemmy
I honestly think it stills explains it pretty well. Most casual users will not download a specific client and will be fine with the whole idea of an instance being tied to its user interface. It still explains pretty well that it doesn’t largely matter what instance you sign up for and that any instance can talk to (mostly) any other instance, just like with email.
So yea, I still think it’s a good analogy. It’s not perfect but yea, that’s to be expected from an analogy.
I’m pretty tech minded and I have no idea what the hell any of y’all mean when you say it’s like email because I don’t know the technical details of how email works. I just know how it’s used.
You think non-tech people are gonna understand that? They’re just gonna assume it is email, in the way it is used; not how the shit works under the hood.
When I make the analogy, I just mean the fact that a Gmail account can send emails to a Yahoo account or any other email provider. In the same way, a Feddit.dk account can talk to a yiffit.net account. There is not a single company controlling email and there is not a single company controlling the fediverse. That’s really all there is to the analogy.
They don’t care how it works under the hood. They just want to know what I’m laughing at.
You think non-tech people are gonna understand that?
Yes becase they’re not looking to understand the protocol behind federarion anymore then you dowbt understand the protocol behind email, so they will grok better then you how it works bybusibg the email allegory, sending from gmail to outlook works for them.
I also use the phone network as another allegory if their eyes do glaze over, i can be with one phone company and phone somone on another companies plan. They have little idead of the prorogation of radiowaves etc that makes that all work.
If you tell someone that fedi instances are like email providers and that your instance is transfem.social, that creates three expecations in your audience:
1)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a desktop is through the transfem.social website.
2)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a smartphone is through the transfem.social app. This app is completely separate from the apps that could be used to access a fedi account on another instance.
3)The primary difference between transfem.social and other fedi instances is the UI of the website and app.
Frankly, I don’t think this is that big of a deal. First introduce them to an instance, then once they figure that out, show them the apps and other ways to access that instance.
It’s also not even close to how email works and plenty of people use email apps that aren’t tied to a provider.
The app I’m using today has nothing to do with the instance I use.
Just like email… clients just speak a protocol, and use a particular manner of presentation.
That’s literally my point.
Most people know that email isn’t tied to a provider app.
Woosh! Your point went right over my head there! Hahaha, my bad
Apparently I phrased it badly because every vote on it is down lol.
So it’s probably my bad.
I have seen people not think someone with a gmail email could email to someone with a yahoo email
I have also seen teachers who teach ICT be confused when seeing a email that isnt one of the popular ones
I really think there is no problem here. There is one side that screeches, “We need more people in Lemmy! Lemmy is too obscure and hard to use! We need better UX and less techno-babble when people are trying to sign on!” We also have the opposite side saying, “Fuck the normies! I want my federated server @tek.know.kult for the most austere obscurantists only!”
Let’s be real, guys. If your federated server is weird and obscure, the normals are not going to really encounter it, and they’re not that into all the federation beef. They want to go to lemmy-website.com, put in a username and password, and fuck off to look at funny memes and rage at news stories.
I would say I am at least on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to tech literacy, maybe even the top quartile, and I only sort of understand how the Fediverse works, and no offense guys, I don’t really care that much. I looked at Reddit for the funny memes and to rage at news stories, and when they took my favorite app away (Sync for Reddit), I couldn’t be fucked to get advert-aids on the official app, so I jumped ship. Lemmy is just a bit less engaging, just a bit less addictive, and frankly I’m perfectly happy with that. Huzzah for having a bit more of a doomscroll-life balance.
People will come along with FOSS as well as CS options for joining the Fediverse, things like Threads and Voyager and BlueSky, and the culture of Lemmy will shift likewise. The great news is that with Federation, it will be easy to create islands of autists and weirdos to keep their purity cults as funny as they want them to be, and I think that’s beautiful.
