We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities;

That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option. Plenty of people want their social media to have options for being relatively closed or relatively open, and I think it’s healthy to provide those options.

I hear you though on the lemmy-world community closing possibility (and similar) … that would easily be an abuse IMO and it’s not entirely clear what would or could happen.

To be fair though, the whole lemmy-world instance (or any other for that matter) could simply turn federation off at any point to the same effect you fear, so it’s arguably just part of the federation flexibility. In this case, any community mod has their hand on the switch for their community, which means we’ll probably see it get used in controversial circumstances at least once. But for any given community, going either private or local-only is sure to drop user engagement or be a PITA regarding managing the “approved users” list, so I can’t see it being a popular action TBH.

I really don’t think this video is click bait. It’s reason for existing might be the media hype and clickbait crap that has been produced … but all the video does is dig into the published science and generally dispel what all the media hype is probably saying. It’s the opposite.

At some point, if anti-clickbait behaviour is going to be sufficiently superficial, it’s likely as bad as clickbait itself (not unlike an auto-immune disease).

All good … the whole post was started by me misreading in the first place I think!

I think it’s a good option to have. Most who start communities want reach and engagement. But for those situations where you want a more in-group vibe, something like this is essential.

It’s sorely missing in the fediverse and a rather good form of social media TBH that the fediverse, until now, has ignored (while it has kinda taken off on discord etc).

Private communities though are intended to federate, just with gated membership. And they could be useful for particularly niche communities that don’t want to be disturbed by those who mainly use the All feed.

It will be interesting to see how it interacts with federation/defederation dynamics though. Lemmy-world for instance, could easily start going local only because they kinda already think they’re the whole of the threadiverse and are certainly big enough to sustain themselves.

Right, so you didn’t watch the video … it’s about the paper that’s getting so much media attention and why most in the scientific community don’t think much of it and what challenges to the initial paper have been made in subsequent publications.

The video is solely about published work, by a publishing and working scientist, and not at all some mainstream media stuff.

Gotta say, at some point, if downvoters are operating at such a superficial level, their reason for existing basically disappears. Like an AI would have done a better job here. The quality of the video is precisely because it nicely dispels whatever media hype might be out there.

Ha … it seems like it at least.

I think I was being dumb in asking the question actually.

It’s really just about the circle of users to whom the community is visible.

Local-only … visible only to users of the instance. I’d presumed that it could be writable only to users of the instance such that only users of the instance could post/comment there. But double checking, no, it’s only visible if you’re logged on with an account on that instance … so pretty private in the end actually.

private communities … which are apparently coming … are visible only to approved users, whether on the local instance or not.

And presumably, these will be stackable, so that a local-only + private community will be visible only to approved users from the local instance. So getting pretty closed.

Cheers for the response! Interesting to see that we generally align pretty accurately over this. I wasn’t clear we would and half expected you to come in and say “fuck that, I just don’t like lemmy world”.

I did think of making a separate post of my rant, but figured it’d just get downvoted and there wouldn’t be any point. After this, I’d be happy to put it up.

Also, I’ve just posted in the meta community about this, generally poking around the issue and what happened and how better administration might be possible.

Yea interesting. I have no numbers and I’m not really “plugged in” at all … but I’ve certainly heard of smaller places doing layoffs after Google etc. No idea how widespread that is though.

I’m a little late on this thread/issue, but I agree with @sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al .

I’m also inclined to push back on the anti-lemmy.ml stance being pushed here. And to be clear, While I’m on lemmy.ml, I joined before “the migration” when it made sense to join the “main” instance as it then was and I have no particular affiliation with them or their politics.

Inline with what sabre is saying, I think there’s a certain degree of political entitlement and “defederation-fever” creeping into this general sentiment. I think the communists/tankies should be allowed to do their thing without it being an issue, just like any other niche interest/viewpoint that can build a space here.

I suspect there’s some dangerously presumptive politics at play here … where moderation action is presumed to be “power tripping” mainly because the moderator’s politics is presumed to be completely wrong. How about, “yea, that’s their thing, it’s unlikely something productive will come out of speaking flatly critically about china on lemmy.ml … their moderation can go overboard sometimes, but their defensive about all of that … if you want to do that, you’ll need to go to a more western instance/community”

Building different spaces with different rules, vibes and beliefs, while simultaneously committing to inter-connectivity as much as possible … is basically the idea of the fediverse. It allows us to talk to each other without being stuck in one group’s (or corporation’s) policies and world-view … and more idealistically, allows us to see different world-views more clearly as we contrast the different spaces we can be connected to. If everything were on lemmy.world, it’d be hard to see the world-view (ha) that the mods/admins and even majority there impose on the rest.

That’s the idealism, and I think it’s very real.

But the pointy end of the stick is disagreements which lead to downvotes and moderation. That’s what enables the creation of a particular space, and needs to just kinda be accepted a bit more.

That’s the part not stated enough IMO … at some point, if you’re going to be committed to the inter-connectivity part, you need to be respectful of the fact that another space exists and can be antagonistic to some of your views. That’s fine. On reddit, we’d just steer clear of a particular sub-reddit and maybe disparage them elsewhere. De-federation or targeting an instance as plain bad or wrong is a useful tool that the fediverse provides but which, IME, can easily become over zealously embraced in a sort of dog-pile behaviour. A more useful behaviour, IMO, is to try to work out ways that the fediverse can persist with such antagonism and disagreements.

Not being surprised that communists are hard on criticism of communist countries seems like a start to me (where, TBF, such criticism is pretty wide spread in the west to the point that I don’t blame them for being cranky about it). Being open to the idea that you can get along with same communists on just about any other issue is a good next step. It’d be the same with criticising tech workers on programming.dev or trans/gender/queer issues on blahaj.zone or criticising western imperialism and capitalism on lemmy.world. Though I suspect the lemmy.ml admins could do a better job at sign-posting their politics/policies here.

These are spaces with particular sensitivities. Antagonising them indifferently is kinda rude at some point. Demanding that they not have their sensitivities is kinda against the fediverse at some point. Interestingly, the admin of lemmy.ml, dessalines, basically said the same thing recently.

Now, to be fair, I haven’t looked into the moderation stuff that seems to have precipitated this conversation and I’m certainly open to the idea that the lemmy.ml mods overstepped (mods tend to do that IME). But my general view is that, as communists living in the west, they’ve probably come against a good amount superficial criticism and frankly prejudice that us general westerners wouldn’t really notice, and so have pretty sharply guarded boundaries around that sort of dialogue. So they’ve built their own space (well platform actually), that is generally geared toward FOSS and privacy about which many of us have shared interests … but they also have some pretty clear policies around communism that are clearly very personal to the admins that are better respected than exiled or antagonised.

Also, none of this is to say everything should be on lemmy.ml. Quite the opposite. Diversify! That’s part of my point. But away from lemmy.world too, and with the understanding that part of diversification is enabling niche spaces that can cause friction and said friction isn’t, in itself, a problem. Instead, IMO, we tend to get a bit feverish whenever these sorts of things spark up. Anyway … rant over!

Oh I hear you. I’m in no way celebrating any of these dynamics or the white collar focus of “how to run your career advice”.

AFAICT, lay-offs are pretty widespread. Sometimes the bigger employers just give the smaller ones “permission” first.

Don’t know! AFAIK, some stock options do partially vest before two years. But this isn’t just salary, it’s career advancement, which means seniority and arguably experience, all of which tend to stay locked in for the rest of your career and lead to more stock options should you arrive somewhere you’re willing to stay longer at.

I’m not sure what you’re saying. The size of the labour force and the way salary “growth” relates to employer movement rate seem to me relatively independent dynamics. Moreover, I’d imagine increased layoffs positively correlate with the advantage that regularly moving employers can provide.

Am I missing something?

Backing up “word is” by an article that says “word is” is kinda meager though.

Well I’m relaying what is basically common knowledge in the industry shared by people in the industry. The thing about promotion/hiring budgets is something I know directly or through people at their companies.

Sure, it may not be industry wide, of course, but I’ve not seen any hint of a countervailing trend or pattern. What’s more, in the tech industry, it makes sense. There’s a fair amount of pivoting which is often deemed to be done best by hiring (at least some) new staff with the required expertise/experience. And maintaining existing/legacy systems is often de-prioritised such that those who’ve been at the company for a while who understand the existing systems well are not as valued as those who may help the company “grow”. Which is why I bring up the possibility that these patterns may spread to other industries.

That being said, word is that in the tech industry at least, hiring budgets are clearly higher than promotion budgets and that moving every 2 years or so is clearly the best strategy for career advancement.

Just one industry, of course, but the pattern certainly seems to have settled in there, and it may not be a stretch to speculate it will spread to other industries perhaps under the shitty influence of AI.

You need to see it to believe it I think. I was generally on the side of “too complex” but then came across instances perfect for it and used it right away and found it pleasant.

I’m still generally on the side of “too complex” though, and think there are probably better things for PSF to work on (cough packaging cough).

Wanting to talk to some people about a relatively niche topic, where I felt confused but had no one to work through my confusion with … learnt about Usenet, and quickly found myself talking to people from around the world about the topic.

For me personally, apart from the interactive data visualisation moment around D3 ~2015, and of course watching funny videos back before YouTube, the internet hasn’t really gone beyond that experience.

Kinda funny, not too long ago it was a fun mental exercise if you were paying attention to the tech industry to try to think of the ways in which Google or MS could fall.

Now, AFAICT, neither are falling any time soon, but there certainly seems to be a shift in how they’re perceived and how their brand sits in the market (where even so I’m still probably in a bubble on this).

But I’m not sure how predictable it would have been that both would look silly stumbling for AI dominance.

And, yea, I’m chalking recall up to the AI race as it seems like a grab for training data to me, and IIRC there were some clues around that this could be true.

Yea, sometimes you don’t have many options and that’s just kinda life. But if you don’t have to commit to a situation, project, job etc … I think it will always help to at least try to come up with an exit plan, because even if there isn’t a good one, it helps you frame everything in terms of trade offs and understand that most things, at some point, just aren’t worth it because there are always other options (at least that’s how I see things now, as someone who hasn’t valued being flexible and agile in life nearly enough).

Always have an exit plan.

Not sure it’s really a quote, so maybe it doesn’t count … but it’s such common wisdom that it probably should count.

I never really appreciated it until I went through something where the wisdom of it would have made the difference. The slightly more precise version, IMO, is that whenever you’re in a position where something beyond your control can have a substantial influence on the outcome, you need an exit plan before you commit to that position, where that plan includes the definition of the conditions which trigger both the preparation of the execution of the plan and the time to actually exit.

The whole idea is to be prepared to not get fucked by other people or bad luck. And half of the benefit of having the plan is in the perspective it gives you. Instead of having Stockholm syndrome or suffering from the sunk cost fallacy, you naturally assess your situation as the set of trade offs that it is and more naturally perceive the toxic people that are essentially stuck in their worlds and either hold others back or propagate the culture that holds others back.

Make sure you have the plan, including the trigger conditions, formulated ahead of time, and regularly think back on the plan as you’re going along, adjusting or reassessing as necessary.