We both know that this audience is not the same as the one at those places. Still, point taken, my objection here was a bit weak.

I just ran over the last 20 posts. I’d say about 4 or 5 are obviously popular opinions (eg. the one on organ donation), a bunch are blah-neutral (eg. the one on space terminology), and only about 4 or 5 are obviously unpopular (artists and AI etc). Actually, a really unpopular opinion was the one I posted - but I just noticed it broke rule #1! You should have deleted it! I’m completely serious.

You think I’m annoying with my “gatekeeping”, I get it. And yeah, you saw me doing it in !Showerthoughts, where the mods are AWOL. Eventually I gave up and left.

The reason I do it is that is that I want Lemmy to succeed. That means quality control, which means gatekeeping. It should really be done by the moderator, but in a bunch of communities the mods are completely out to lunch. You are not - so thank you. I know it’s a thankless task, as you just proved by telling me to “knock the fuck off”, which definitely breaks rule #2 (but I forgive you).

Another popular “unpopular” opinion!

Electric ones mitigate many of these problems and are hugely more energy-efficient than car transport.

The fact that this is assumed “unpopular” is itself an indictment of the particular subculture that frequents these communities. In plain English: I agree with you.

Nothing you say contradicts my point. Answering political questions with violence is a road that leads directly to civil war, wherever the road starts. This finding is about as reproducible as findings come in political science. And it’s what the assassination-cheerleaders (in this community and others) do not want to engage with.

Congratulations, this is a genuinely unpopular opinion. I know that because I agree with you and I regularly deploy the exact arguments you have just made. Individual humans have a deep aversion to accepting that they - personally - are part of the problem. It’s completely irrational and something of a mystery to me.

Amazing caricature of a comment. A single word (“whiny”) triggered you to jump straight to vulgar insults. If you had bothered to get try getting over your irrational anger and (what appears to be) insecurity, you would have found I basically agree with you. Your whining was justified. It’s only a word.

That was quite the whiny rant. But you know what, I agree with you. I’ve noticed all these things too.

My own pet peeve is off-topic garbage. Have you seen !AskLemmy? There are constantly posts about US politics even though it’s right there in the community rules: “No US politics”. Even worse is !Showerthoughts, which should be renamed !EverythingButShowerthoughts - basically every post there breaks multiple rules, the mods are completely AWOL. I would always get downvoted for complaining so in the end I unsubscribed. The garbage party won, congrats!

The only possible solutions to these problems IMO are the same as for any virtual forum:

• clearly defined subject, if possible niche rather than lowest common denominator like politics
• activist moderation - i.e. more than just deleting and banning and pissing people off, but actually getting involved

Check out Hacker News for a community which gets absolutely everything right. The only one I know of, personally. But yeah, it’s techies and the mod is literally paid.

Okay. Admittedly I still don’t quite get it. No matter how much I read about football, I’m never gonna be interested in football. Maybe I’m just not open-minded enough.

I used to single-handedly keep the Jazz sub afloat, but I’ve given up, I’m not going to be the guy that posts 100 pieces of quality content, and nobody else even bothers

So why not consider posting once a week instead of daily, for example? That way you’ll keep it alive in case others turn up. Jazz is a pretty niche interest, it’s gonna be hard until the R-site implodes. But even if you only get 5 or 10 others, that could make for a nice intimate community.

I see this argument a lot and I still don’t get it. Do you literally have zero interests? Follow your interests.

Realistically, there’s going to be no way to stop this. It’s too useful. It works and most people appreciate it. I know this because I have visited southern China recently. I’ve seen the train stations and coffee shops where people now think nothing of leaving their belongings completely unattended. This level of surveillance effectively makes petty crime impossible. It’s widely seen as progress, in a way it is progress, and there’s no going back.

The challenge remaining is to keep some level of democratic accountability over our governments. That’s feasible but it’s not going to be easy.

Indeed, confusing terminology. I consider that collaborative document editing is the activity, cloud hosting vs P2P is the technical implementation.

Like it or not, nobody much is doing the latter because it’s much harder to set up and the available cloud solutions provide a much (much) better user experience. I don’t say this a better situation but it’s the way things are.

Yes, in theory, although tricky to set up. What it cannot do, at least not without fiddly modules, and even then nowhere near as well as the cloud competition, is any kind of collaborative document editing. Which is where the world is at today.

Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.

The pernicious side of social media in microcosm. To say “it’s not collaborative” is somehow understood as shilling for big tech. Always the worst possible interpretation of every remark.

Agreed as to vim.

Yes yes. The issue here being that in the real world nobody much is doing the latter. But we’re getting off topic, LibreOffice is neither.

Yes, true.

My single personal spreadsheet is (uh) a CSV that I edit with vim. I don’t want to have to fire up a monstrous GUI app just to view a table. But sure, count me as eccentric in this way.

Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are for work. For what I consider obvious reasons, they’ve been cloud-hosted for literally decades now.

Honest question: who would use a non-collaborative standalone spreadsheet in 2025? I don’t get it.

Very useful concrete example of how these changes might be a problem. Thanks.