even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear

Yes, as I said, that’s the only thing I’ve done myself—in particular, at times I’ve run it off of my main desktop, and at other times on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive attached—but that’s specifically not what I was asking about because the previous comment was specifically talking about non-developers who might have that basic HTML understanding and just want a server where they can throw up an HTML file and have it served up. A goal that’s more technically involved than a wordpress.com site, but less involved than self-hosting a LAMP stack and running the Let’s Encrypt certbot.

(Plus, of course, the growing prevalence of cgNAT making self-hosting impossible for many people necessitates the use of a hosting company or user-friendly web service.)

Yeah I learnt static HTML and CSS circa 2007, but even then it felt like what we were being taught was very out of date.

I’ve never actually used any form of hosting for my own pages. I’ve run the LAMP stack on my own local server, and I’ve used services similar to WordPress, but never dealt with static web sites hosted by someone else. Do they not make TLS really easy for you in that circumstance?

I’m not talking about WordPress.org, but WordPress.com. The basic blogging service. It’s all WYSIWYG.

Fwiw these days balance bikes are considered better than training wheels for people learning to ride. Training wheels are ok if you actually need to go somewhere accompanied by an adult on a bike, but they’re terrible for learning. They don’t teach you how to steer or balance properly; a balance bike does. In fact, training wheels can teach bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.

Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.

Reverse image search says yes, Singapore.

That bastion of socialism.

Oh interesting. I’ve never used the “thumbnail URL” field on a submission before. But yeah it looks like it messed up before and was treating it as the main URL instead…

It’s a shuttle run. You’re not running laps of a track, you’re running back and forth between two cones placed 20 metres apart.

Oh I used to love doing the beep test! I’ve only gotten to do it 3 or 4 times but it was a great fun challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epvLrK6Mhd4

Normal YouTube link

What exactly about 4chan are you looking for?

How does 4chan’s design differ from traditional forums, really? There’s less moderation and more anonymity than you might usually expect, but the very nature of ActivityPub means that aspect doesn’t really make as much sense in a federated forum.

So do you just want something like Lemmy but without nested comments or upvoting, and only sorting posts by new and comments by old, the way a traditional forum does? For that you might be able to try LemmyBB which is a front-end to Lemmy that says it’s supposed to look like phpBB forums. (Unfortunately I can’t verify because the two domains its Readme claims run that software are both no longer active.) Or you could try Morum, forum software based not in ActivityPub but Matrix. There are also plugins for non-federated forum software, like Discourse which aim to enable ActivityPub integration with their forums.

Is there some other feature of 4chan that you want to see?

Yeah it’s officially built in to Lemmy’s web UI too.

Yeah! Fuck fun!

Unless there’s room to back the trailer further in, I don’t think parking a car in front of it is an option. You’d be blocking the footpath.

IRC as in the old-school chat protocol?

It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things

Even the world wide web felt like that until shockingly recently. I remember circa 2005 just typing in random words .com and seeing what you’d find, or discovering a cool new website by word of mouth at school.

I remember vising pig.com and discovering a delightful page consisting of nothing more than a giant picture of a pig and the text “this domain is for sale” that lasted years. These days it’s probably one of those shitty for sale landing pages.

Reddit is notorious for astroturfing

The worst is when a business are the moderators of the subreddit about their business. This used to be against the rules, I’m pretty sure, but was never enforced and I think at some point they silently dropped that rule. It creates a gross conflict of interest.

I’m not sure I agree that disabling downvoting really solves the problem. It might help, but not a huge amount. Because you still end up with people upvoting stuff they like and not upvoting stuff they don’t. So instead of being +1/-1 it becomes +1/+0. The stuff that they would have downvoted still ends up sinking towards the bottom, just perhaps not quite as quickly as otherwise.

I do think your thoughts about quote Xits are really interesting though. It’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, by amplifying what you’re disagreeing with you do also provide an opportunity for more people (rather than less, as on Reddit) to be exposed to it, potentially changing their mind. On the other hand, it’s a tool ripe for abuse and creating more harassment, especially since the people you’re amplifying it to are usually primed to agree with you.

On Lemmy the safeguard to mod abuse is instance admins. On Reddit this can take place, but rarely does. The only time admins on Reddit really step in is when mods are allowing illegal behaviour on their sub, or when mods are protesting against their own shitty behaviour. But on Lemmy it’s much easier to reach out to an instance’s admins if something is going wrong. Mod actions are all public, so you can create a post explaining what happened and it’s not just a “he said/she said” situation.

If they aren’t being responsive to feedback, the appropriate response is to start up a new community, preferably on a different instance. Or, in the extreme case, to block that instance entirely. You can even build a consensus to doing this with a “panel” consisting of…every user on the platform. That’s essentially how !tenforward@lemmy.world became the de facto Star Trek meme community, rather than !risa@startrek.website, after the mods of the latter community were shown to be abusing their powers and the instance admins refused to take remedial action.

I think you missed their point. Yes, the specific beliefs held by the Reddit hivemind are specific to that platform. But the idea that Reddit has a hivemind is a natural human factor. So Reddit’s hivemind might be a centre-left liberal hivemind, HN’s might be more libertarian, and Lemmy’s is more leftist. But there’s some degree of hivemind on any platform that exposes users too each others’ content and where participating in those public discussions is the point.

A site like YouTube or Facebook lacks as much of a hivemind effect, because people aren’t on there for the discussion. They’re on YT for the videos, or on FB largely for their friends. Though both YT and FB comment sections are also proof that lacking a hivemind is also not a sign of quality.