this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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I see you out there. Posting. You should post here too. Why aren't you? Genuinely curious actually.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Honestly, I've always hated the twitter/microblogging format; and would go back to phpBB if it was feasible or populated in this day and age, but unfortunately, I have to make do with what the masses have elected as "the new format".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I am literally translating chinese posts with one click, this is posting heaven. Hexbear can be a little fun sometimes but it's just goofiness, dooming, or aggregation. It feels like there's something actually happening there. Half the time I translate chinese and it works PERFECTLY now (maybe the guy hosting me is using deepl pro or something else idk) I just learned way more than i knew there was to learn about the discovery that tea poured into milk turns out differently than milk into tea

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I feel like I missed something, what platform or instance is this that supports automatic translation? That sounds like an incredibly useful feature.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

mastodon and misskey and their forks do this, not every server uses the same translation service or even provides it. it loads almost instantly underneath the original text with one tap. yes, i am serious, chinese that is written in non-shitpostese translates immaculately. we are living in the future. oh, you didn't know there are chinese shitposters on the federations? :3

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That sort of machine translation is something that I've always wanted from Lemmy, since I am very interested in the idea of writing more posts and comments in languages other than English, but I also feel like most people wouldn't want to bother copy-pasting the comment into a translator. But if on Mastodon or Misskey it's just one click to translate, and it loads instantaneously, then... Well, it gets me curious, even though I've never been the type for microblogging, regardless of character limits.

Hexbear itself doesn't even let people select a language other than English when writing comments, which has always bothered me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Piping jlai and other foreign language posts into Mastodon etcetera is preferable to me anyways since there are loads of other features like watching threads, actually getting notifications further down a thread from you, muting a thread, filtering posts for files only, or hiding replies from the timeline. But yeah it's worth it for the translation, since you all work with an allowlist thing I'd recommend just using a microblog instance already favored by others here, and ask the admin to set it up to fetch all the posts from some lemmy instances. It doesn't really have a lot of problems except Misskey hardcoded their check for image thing so it fucks up on the Lemmy posts. Might be fixed soon. Lucky I was mainly using Mastodon when I made my whole lemmy relay and rss server combo otherwise I would have run into more issues.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Well maybe I'm an insane person, because it turns out I love it now that te charlimits are exploding from 5,000 to 50,000 lol. What was twitter? SMS style 160? Fuck!!

The point is they're all just timelines of posts with replies. No idea why you guys want to click on next page and expand post hundreds of times when you could literally have auto scroll auto refresh and 6 parallel timelines. It's like TweetDeck but free.

Misskey forks are getting into actually usable territory, I would try that before you write off the whole software and posting format. Go look at how the Japanese people on there post, it's insane. Coming back here is like seeing American infrastructure after traveling, complete with people arguing with you about why it should be that way. That being said someone on https://tech.lgbt/ just exposed how bad Msky's code for defederation is lmaooo

Also good to point out the libs technically have us in our containment zone and the creation of mutual containment zones is one of the features of federation. 🤠 But Mastodon and Threads definitely are chonkier. We are creating a network of thousands of websites with hundreds, thousands, tens, even hundreds lf thousands of non-bot non-alt active users, where people are free to speak the truth. I'm not super good at figuring out digital activism strategies anyways, I am a better organizer imho. I am fine at creating online analysis spaces but that's not a proliferating thing. It's a place I work on reading guides and articles with friends.

I'm not saying every space should be about letting everone in, I'm saying there are places on microblogging instances that would play well with you all. There are also blahaj-zone type weirdos to be fair but seems like a minority to me.

I think Hexbear would be fine if it kept the same hyper-restrictive federation but incorporated microblog posts. Not in the terrible way KBIN/MBIN does. Also their userbases are all lemmy.world-core as hell

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

also I must add you might hate it but it's the only activitypub platform that actually caters to disabled people jnstead of just paying lip service, with alt text and accessibility features rather than adding extra clicking to receive new posts because taking that away would be "too online"