400 cycles? So, a year? One year.

I’m really excited to get time to check it out. Maybe this weekend.

Oh, interesting. I honestly just glazed over that every time, but you’re right that that’s a step in the right direction. What I’d really like is for the instance to go the next step further and merge the conversations visually.

So in my mind, at the top of any individual post you’d see the thumbnail and the link title; and then underneath that, as a special-looking top-level comment, it would show the post title and OP text for each incarnation of the post across various instances and communities. The replies to those individual posts are then all rolled up under their top-level comment.

You could roll Mastodon (and other Fediverse) posts in there, too; they would just appear as their own top-level comment, just like replying to Lemmy posts on Mastodon works currently.

Good to know. I want to use webapps rather than native apps as much as possible anyway, so this is probably good.

On Reddit, I kinda get it. You wouldn’t want to connect the same link across (for instance) /r/antiwork and /r/conservative; the crosstalk there would get horrifyingly bad. But on a federated platform, when you could have multiple /c/antiworks on different instances, it fragments the conversation.

Apparently! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Gonna check it out!

Oh, fascinating! I’m going to have to take a look. Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement.

What I really want out of a federated Reddit-like service is link consolidation. I don’t want to see the same link posted on five different communities; I want those to be consolidated into one topic, with the OP text and comments from each threaded below it. It’d clean up the interface and make it work a lot more usefully.

In fact, this would make pretty much everything in the Fediverse better. Let me sort my timeline by URL or hashtag, so that I can see what is being said about a certain thing and not make the same observation or joke that a dozen others already have. Put that functionality into an RSS reader, so that I can see the discussion without leaving the article. Or, even better, merge the two into a single feed, tying threads together based on the URL that’s being shared.

Now that would be an “everything app” worth using.

EDIT: Apparently they’ve already made the first leap there! Everyone’s talking about topics and feeds, I didn’t know they’d made that advancement. Looking forward to trying it out.

Have you checked Artstation?

I know it’s a joke, but: a really small sail.

No problem! This is the sort of thing I think everyone will have to learn how to do sooner or later. Viewing source, checking archive.org, and such are just going to be a part of evaluating a site for legitimacy. I’m happy to help make it seem more attainable!

Definitely fake, imo. They don’t pass the sniff test for me.

1. The design is identical on all four sites, with the exception of the logo. Now, this in and of itself isn’t a smoking gun: the design appears to be the WordPress default design from 2024. But it was the first thing I noticed, and with everything else…

2. The subjects are all the same but the copy is conspicuously different–if you and I were to each write an article about the same ramen, we wouldn’t write the same article, but we would probably come up with a couple of similar sentences or sentence fragments. These are intentionally making an effort to be as different as possible, but with the same title and topic.

3. I checked the Whois of each site you linked, and they’re all registered through Reykjavik despite having nothing to do with Iceland. Three of them are even pointing to the same Cloudflare servers.

4. The relationship between the “writers” and the content here make no sense. I could potentially see the Alabama Delta Gamma chapter posting some of these reviews, but Ninjago? Men’s shirts? Shadow the Hedgehog soft toy? “Evan Feinberg” says that he’s an advocate for “limited government,” and “his” photo is of a white dude, so why is “he” “reviewing” women’s fashion and Korean music? What does Cap City Energy have to do with any of this stuff?

5. By looking into the RSS feed, you can see that most of the articles on a given site were published within the same hour: Evan Feinberg’s articles were all posted between 0800-0900 UTC on June 13, 2024. There are only seconds in between them.

6. Subjective: The content feels very much like slop. Not even current slop, either, but year-ago slop.

7. Also subjective: The Cap City Energy site doesn’t seem to know that “Cap” is probably supposed to be short for “Capital.”

If you look in the Internet Archive, you can see that a few (maybe all?) of them used to be real, legitimate sites. Bama Delta Gamma has an archived version that even links to an Instagram that certainly seems to actually be for a sorority. I think that whoever is behind these waited for a URL to become available, snagged it when it expired, copied some of the details (maybe the logo and some images), then fed it along with a list of topics to an AI, and plugged the output into a WordPress site.

Those are silly folks lmao

Eh, I kind of get it. OpenAI’s malfeasance with regard to energy usage, data theft, and the aforementioned rampant shoe-horning (maybe “misapplication” is a better word) of the technology has sort of poisoned the entire AI well for them, and it doesn’t feel (and honestly isn’t) necessary enough that it’s worth considering ways that it might be done ethically.

I don’t agree with them entirely, but I do get where they’re coming from. Personally, I think once the hype dies down enough and the corporate money (and VC money) gets out of it, it can finally settle into a more reasonable solid-state and the money can actually go into truly useful implementations of it.

This is one of the few things that AI could potentially actually be good at. Aside from the few people on Lemmy who are entirely anti-AI, most people just don’t want AI jammed willy-nilly into places where it doesn’t belong to do things poorly that it’s not equipped to do.

I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.

Oh geez you promise?!

Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.

(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)

Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.

Definitely agreed.

I don’t think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.

By contrast, the microblog “like” (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn’t do anything other than express appreciation.

Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They’re hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).

(Edit: by “don’t they have votes?” do you mean polls? Because that’s a completely different function altogether than the Lemmy/Reddit vote.)

I’ve been calling them “Redditlikes” or “Reddit replacements” in ordinary conversation. We won’t need terms like that forever, though.