I think it also fundamentally changes the conversation. Valid but “unpopular” comments can’t get buried in downvotes. The voting system on Reddit was based on a sane logic that totally neglected to consider how people actually behave… the idea of up and down votes to crowd-source relevance and quality of content makes sense, but all anyone did was use it as an agree / disagree button which broke the idea entirely.

Kbin has entered the chat

Lol I jest especially as Kbin and Lemmy play nice with each other too!

If A goes down or if I lose interest in it, I’ll need to re-establish somewhere else and resubscribe everything

Correct, as of now, but the point is that you can resub elsewhere. This is entirely impossible on centralised private platforms like Reddit.

Your ID doesn’t need to be tied to any given server. You can move around and change your “home” server at will. Or if preferred you could stand up your own server for your usage, hold your identify on there, and still engage with the rest of Lemmy / fediverse.

It’s less a design mistake and more a technical constraint. A users identify exists as, at a minimum, a database entry. That database needs to live somewhere that the various fediverse servers can talk to. But you have complete freedom in where that database entry is, and can change your mind later.

So it already doesn’t matter if you’re on beehaw, lemmy or some random mastodon or kbin server - they all federate with each other (to varying degrees but that’s a slightly different conversation)

We had a Google speaker thing. Got rid of it because it was crap. All we could reliably use it for was asking it to play a radio station or play Spotify, but frankly it even got that wrong enough that grabbing my phone and connecting to the Bluetooth speaker was easier.

Even privacy invading problems aside they’re just a little bit rubbish.

Seems a fair balance!

blocking public posts makes no sense

Don’t entirely disagree, the content is still easily visible. But it’s not about blocking content from being seen, Musky baby, it’s about blocking accounts from hurling abuse at the poster.

needs … a stronger form of mute

For just public posts? Block feels like a fairly comprehensively strong form of mute…?

I like the idea of Downvotes. The principle was a good one but it neglected to consider that people, on the whole, don’t look at vote buttons as up vote = relevant content downvote = irrelevant (their original intention, essentially crowdsourcing moderation / content quality control). Rather they look at them as agree / disagree, like / dislike.

I’m the end I think they hurt the conversation. People can just downvote with ease instead of having to put the effort in the say something, leaving that space for those who had a strong enough drive to be snippy or nasty to full it.

Upvote only still allows a mark of quality / relevance from the community without making it so divisive.

Absolutely. They’re great for when you don’t need to federate and just need a place to chat and share with a given community or set of friends.

I hope more come back. I’ve recently joined https://ukretro.online/forum/ and while it’s slow going I hope it gathers up a little community there.

Forums can be great, fairly easy to manage, spaces for people to gather in a way that they control and own. Even out here in fedi we don’t (most of us) control or own the servers we’re using and running mastodon etc… isn’t especially cheap. PHPbb needs chuff all server to run so it very very affordable to run as a personal thing.