This is a discussion to have with professionals in a professional setting. No one here is responsibly equipped to answer this in a chat forum. This obviously includes me.

That being said, I do not think about the future - live your life second-by-second.

Despite what people say, life is not meant to be enjoyed. We live in a time of lawlessness and over-abundance, so people often equate life with enjoying things. At your core, you are a biological package of electrical circuits and tools. When you do something your body deems beneficial, you enjoy it (as in signals reward your brain).

If you want to enjoy, then a general tip is to return to the fundamentals. Eat healthy food, exercise, explore, learn, and talk to people in real life. If this doesn’t work, then you need to speak with a professional (probably a therapist) to find what does.

Hating humans is not viable, you simply need to stop that. This is not to say let yourself be abused and runover, but you need to form bonds with people - this is our inescapable nature.

Google does not automatically mean bad. It is dangerous precedent to blanket ban and remove nuance.

8.8.8.8 is an excellent service, and provides genuine privacy gains. The largest downside being that it is such a massive target for bad-faith and ignorant actors - like the Italian government.

Tor itself has a pretty good routing scheme that seems like it could replace DNS entirely. There are obvious (but surmountable) UX issues and there may be scalability issues - but it is 100% worth investigating.

Until the community supported platform becomes an advertiser supported one. Remember they said this same exact thing when moving from Facebook to Reddit.

Running is not going to save the online community. People have been running for the last 30 years, and it led us to some of the darkest times we’ve seen in 100 years. Instead we need to fight back and strategically retreat. Change the incentive structure - make advertisers absolutely miserable, and those who leech from advertisers should be similarly flogged.

Acceleration-ism does not work.

If the USA has not taught you this, after this reckless takeover, nothing will save you.

The more likely outcome is for Chrome to become a North Korea RedStar equivalent, where you cannot freely access the internet without Chrome. And if you visit a resource with wrongspeak, the resource will have all its finances taken away (see the legislation surrounding section 230); with you being sent to El Salvador.

Too many people overestimate the actual capabilities of these companies.

I really do not like saying this because it lacks a lot of nuance, but 90% of programmers are not skilled in their profession. This is not to say they are stupid (though they likely are, see cat-v/harmful) but they do not care about efficiency nor gracefulness - as long as the job gets done.

You assume they are using source control (which is unironically unlikely), you assume they know that they can run a server locally (which I pray they do), and you assume their deadlines allow them to think about actual solutions to problems (which they probably don’t)

Yes, they get paid a lot of money. But this does not say much about skill in an age of apathy and lawlessness

Thanks for hosting your instances. I use them often and they’re really well maintained

Will do, thanks for the heads up

[ update ] I did not end up finding what I was looking for, so I made a community instead. As this is a new venture, and I plan on being highly experimental, it will take some time for the vision to be fully realized. But I am honored for any and all support.

If you have any suggestions, DM me or leave a reply on this thread (for open discussion).

I am a dev. The example I gave was meant to be a POV, but in hindsight this was not clear. Because of this, I cannot meaningfully answer your question.

This topic still deserves genuine and transparent research. I have no doubt there are people already working on this, but I have not seen any notable results.

[OFF-TOPIC] To be completely frank with you, I’ve think that our communities (federation and open-source) are too splintered. Not in the sense of head count (this is good) but in terms of duplicating and abandoning work (this is bad). We really need a way to get a community-pulse on what is generally needed/wanted. I am not sure what the solution for this is, but I know there is one.

We actually agree here. I am not sure what to reply since there’s nothing to talk about. I will concede that my example wasn’t the best.

As I said prior, people should come with a well thought out hypothesis - those that do not will be filtered by downvotes. And if anything, having so many different perspectives (because its the internet) would eliminate edge-case hypotheses.

Obviously this is assuming everyone is acting in good faith (which is extremely unlikely) but, as I said prior, this is what mods are for.

I’m on the 411 because I was curious if anyone figured this out and had a functioning community around it. I think Lemmy, and the internet as a whole, would really benefit from a community like this existing.

You make an excellent point, and I’ve never thought about it this way before.

Devs are not newbie friendly at all. We were all noobs at some point and (if we’re being honest) remember the excruciating pain it took to become versed. Most people are not going to go through this, so FOSS naturally loses a lot of non-tech talent (including UX).

What I didn’t think about is that there really isn’t a way for UX people to contribute at all. GitHub Issues, at most, allows for people to make feature-requests - but beyond that it’s just not viable.

For example, I am a UX designer and would like to contribute or iterate a layout. My demonstration includes several images and a video. First off, where do I do this? I could use GitHub Issues, but this is an extremely painful process that is likely far removed from my normal workflow. I could use YouTube, and then link on GitHub issues - but then I have to jump through several annoying hoops for a still sub-optimal workflow.

Git itself also has worked very poorly with binary files (png jpg mp3 wav…) until the recent advent of git-lfs. Binary iteration using base git is just a non-starter.

I am shocked to say it, but I cannot think of any development UI that is actually decent for non-tech people. If anyone does FOSS UX, and I am wrong about the tooling, please correct me.

This is a great suggestion and really scratches a lot I was looking for. I also stumbled across archives of the original blog - which were excellent.

The only issue is the perspective things are told from. People come there with solutions but it’s more of a “talking at you” than “building a solution together”. If I had to make an analogy, it’s like shareware versus open-source - both great, but distinct.

It’s not quite what I’m looking for, but I still highly recommend.

TIL, thanks for the heads up.

I am still interested in the concept of cataloguing threads from really intelligent people - like Wikipedia for Lemmy. Have you ever seen an insanely helpful thread and been like “this needs to be archived”? I have at least a dozen times.

A magazine is a really interesting concept, I will keep that in mind.

The problem with hyper-focused communities it is not generally focused on the problems people face. This is not to say that it isn’t important, but it is harder to “connect the dots” or “get the big picture”.

Thanks for the suggestions, I checked them out

nostupidquestions has the spirit of what I’m looking for, but isn’t quite there (lack of scrutiny).

Yeah, it is quite discouraging. I feel this is what the internet was made for, but I have yet to find anything like it anywhere. I will also admit that upkeep of this type of community would be challenging considering bad-faith actors, bots, and ragebait being so effective.

What I am looking for does not seem to fit neatly into any one category, so I’ll try to use a POV. I am a person, and see something in my community that is a reoccurring problem. I do not know how this can be fixed or what steps I can take to try to fix it, so I go to _____ on lemmy to ask.

My example was not the best. I thought it was straightforward, but can now see that it can be interpreted in many ways - I’ll probably update it.

You are correct, but I am not attempting to avoid poltics. I just wanted to make clear that r/politics is not what I am looking for

I am going to assume you are disgruntled, and answering in good faith.

Perceived issues are the point. People do not necessarily have to comment on said issues if they are not affected or interested. This is not to say things cannot get off the rails, but this is what community culture and mods are for. Do not forget science only exists because practical people perceived issues.

Picking a hypothesis is the point. People will be discussing why the problem is occurring. There ideally would be scientific evidence or real strong correlating factors on why a problem is occurring. It is the communities job to downvote abysmal hypothesis. I would like to point out this is exactly how academia of all types function.

Once there is a hypothesis (or hypotheses) that people agree on (filtered by upvotes/downvotes) the community will discuss potential solutions to the problem.

This type of community requires some maintenance to work, but that’s why I am asking if it exists.