I don’t have that alt text field for post images on Boost, will check the web UI.

In the web UI it’s between the language and the community, not even next to the image. Not great or obvious but it’s there once you upload an image.

And yes, I can speak as moderator, but I can’t pin other people’s comments.

Sorry, I misunderstood again! No, I don’t think you can pin other people’s comments in Lemmy (or PieFed, as far as I can tell).

I think people took your comment wrong. If I’m reading correctly, you’re saying maybe she is the incompetent one, which I think is a fair comment to make, even though there’s no evidence. It’s definitely possible?

but Lemmy does not prompt you for one when uploading a main image to a post,

If you’re adding an image post there is an alt text field, but it doesn’t show until the image is uploaded, and Lemmy doesn’t try to bring attention to it. Mastodon is definitely better in that regard.

And yes, I’m aware of “feature in community”, but isn’t that only for posts?

Oh sorry, I misunderstood. You can use “Speak as moderator” and I believe this pins a comment for the Lemmy website, but may have sporadic app support.

The thing Luxon has failed to see, is that a small party like Opportunity does not get to implement all their policies. There’s no way National would go for this policy, it’s a pretty firmly left wing policy. But they can work with Opportunity on other policies. That’s why they have a bunch that cover all their bases.

Not sure what you mean. TOP have never voted, they haven’t been in parliament.

The idea of TOP is to give something that is an alternative to NZ First. I don’t agree that their policies are a version of National, for one all their policies that I’ve seen have some sort of evidence rather than the vibe-governing that National does. But they aren’t there to replace Greens, they are there to try to work with either side. They need policies that either side would work with.

My first thought was “they can?”, then I saw “New polling from 1News-Verian shows a Green surge and the left bloc able to win government - presuming National refuses to work with the Opportunity Party.”

I love it. The media telling Luxon that his refusal to build bridges is going to cost him the election.

As bad as it sounds, I feel like it may be better for the objective of Opportunity if they end up siding with National. They can help limit the impact of Act, and they won’t get typecast as part of the Left.

Not OP but I use an Enterprise version that is fine, I guess a different release branch. My mother doesn’t have the enterprise version as she works for a small business and it broke.

Looking at last year’s survey, the number of self-hosted devices has 2-3 first. And Raspberry Pi is most popular.

I wonder about this, because I have Pi for Pi hole, and one for Home Assistant, each dedicated. Then almost everything I self host is on a different server. But this still represents Raspberry Pi twice as much as the main server. I think Pis may be most popular because there’s many single-purposes uses for them.

Lemmy does have a feature to “Feature in community”.

I’m here to support the encouraging of all images having alt text. People with low vision may not get the same view of the image, but without alt text they may not even know what the image is at all!

Alt text for pictures of pet dogs should also be more than just “picture of dog”. Whatever is important in the picture should be included, e.g. “A picture of my golden retriever sitting on a couch, looking at camera with happy look on her face”.

This way someone who can’t see the picture well can still participate, e.g. “Oh I love golden retrievers, I have three and they are always chewing up my slippers but I love them anyway”.

I’m here fighting for us to get better at alt text as it’s something Lemmy does poorly compared to Mastodon.

It’s mostly vibe coded but I’d be interested in knowing if noise cancelling is better. It’s one thing I feel the HA:VP struggles with and I’m not sure if that’s a hardware or software issue.

Piefed and Lemmy can both import your settings (including subscriptions) from another account.

Piefed can important Lemmy subscriptions/settings as well, but Lemmy can only do Lemmy I think.

You can’t bring your posts/comments but you don’t have to start from scratch.

Edit: typo

I’m not them but I grabbed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

On a whim I also grabbed Middle Earth: Shadow of War since the bad reviews are about it being woke or having black characters, so I figured it’s worth playing.

Clair Obscur: Exposition 33?

There used to be one like that a few years back! From memory I think it was on the German feddit that doesn’t exist anymore.

How about pointing them at Piefed instead?

You could point them to the instance chooser. It’s on every piefed instance but is decentralized so may be different on different instances, here’s piefed.social: https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser

Piefed has all the same content but a different feature set and worse app support, but app support is growing.

How do we know Dr Pepper is a person doctor not a vet?

Or maybe Dr Pepper has a PhD?

You make a lot of good points, and I think I agree with your overarching theme - we don’t really know.

Piefed does a lot better job of not recommending the weird instances, and I do hope it overtakes Lemmy because ultimately Lemmy is built by a fringe group so they aren’t going to stop recommending fringe groups.

I think that people are unlikely to keep using both Lemmy and Piefed long term. Piefed is new and exciting, in another year we should see people settling into an account and hopefully we’ll have a better idea at whether the threadiverse is growing or shrinking.

For one thing, Lemmy used to have 65K at its peak, so yes we definitely have dropped since then.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. That wasn’t natural growth turning into natural decline, that was a giant influx of users that, even at the time, people were expecting only 10-20% of those would stay. It’s kind of impressive we are still at half the peak.

Like lemm.ee used to be one of the largest instances - so where did that traffic “go”? Moreover, is it still being counted now, e.g. as part of the 65K total, or with the entire instance having shut down, are its counts now removed from both the numerator and denominator?

I specifically use MAU as the measurement so that we don’t have to worry about that. When an instance shuts down like that, you will see the total users drop a lot. But with MAU, after a month you’re back with reasonably accurate figures, because users cannot be active on a shut down instance.

Total accounts is pretty useless. Early on after the big reddit influx, most instance had open registrations. You could see the millions upon millions of new accounts being added, but most of those turned out to be spam.

e.g. I know that I personally make up at least 2 of those MAUs

Many people have multiple accounts, but if there is nothing causing people to create more accounts, if the proportion of people with multiple accounts stays the same, then that shouldn’t affect the assessment of whether or not the platform is growing.

For example, read the comments

Whether on not we are only retaining 10% of users doesn’t really affect whether we are growing. If more people are joining than leaving, then we still grow. I remember being on Digg all those years ago, and I didn’t really “get” reddit until I was forced to. What does it mean when reddit users come and see all these posts about beans? It’s an inside joke that would make new users not feel like they belong, but also “getting” it is something that helps retain people.

not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️

Like one of those comments says, Lemmy probably will never be reddit. It’s nature is that there are fringe groups that would shock people. When I go to Fediverse.observer, it recommends I join Hilarious Chaos because it’s hosted near to me, but that would be a huge turnoff for most people.

On the other hand, the flagship instance of Piefed is more centralist, more aggressive with removing detracting users, and piefed in general has better onboarding and more tools with finding and dealing with problematic users. But it also makes it more reddit like, more censorship friendly. I think this means Piefed is likely to grow into a more reddit friendly platform. Currently Lemmy’s new users seem to be a lot of people banned from reddit (rightly or wrongly), and I think we need the people not banned from reddit if we want a more welcoming experience.

But I also think we should feel comfortable being our own thing and not trying to grow into a huge reddit monstrosity. Many people like that they don’t spend as long on Lemmy as they did on reddit, due to the lack of addictive algorithms and I’ll argue, the lack of content to keep you busy 24/7.

I’ve said this before, I am happy with what appears to be slow natural growth. I don’t think we need or should target massive growth. Our shareholders aren’t all that interested in growth.

On the one hand I agree with you as for the curated experience, on the other hand echo chambers are unhealthy.

My suggestion is to block bad faith participants. There are lots of conversations I have with people who disagree with me and probably can’t be convinced otherwise, but they are still enjoyable conversations if they are had in good faith.

To be honest I don’t block that many users, I am able to spot bad faith participants and not reply to them, and if they reply to me I don’t reply back. But if people are having trouble with the argumentative minority of Lemmy, I think blocking them is important. There’s no point being here if you’re not enjoying it.

I think to survive on Lemmy (all social media tbh) you need two things.

One is the ability to disengage when it’s no longer fulfilling. I see reports from people saying they are being harassed by someone in a thread and I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t stop replying to the bad faith comment about 17 replies earlier.

The second is that you should block what you don’t want to see. Block communities where you know you’ll never be interested. Block users who reply in bad faith. Block instances where you see bad faith commenters a lot.

Do these two things, and comment a lot, and I think you end up with a much better experience.