I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I went through some of the links from the article, and there was an update pinned in one of them:

    https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-this-inaturalist-and-generative-ai/66140/431

    @procyonloiter and I just had a 3-hour in-person talk with @loarie and I am delighted to say that it has completely alleviated my concerns around this entire issue. I went into it seriously contemplating deleting my entire account and many years of work, and I have come out of it feeling like a massive weight has been lifted.

    This whole thing has just been very poor messaging and some serious miscommunication, and DOES NOT indicate any actual shift in how iNat is planning to operate.

    • The lack of communication updates has been because everyone on staff is freaked out and overwhelmed by the amount of backlash, and in a bit of paralysis about how to appropriately respond. There is no nefarious reason for it.
    • The grant from google is indeed a grant, and they are not receiving any data or anything else in exchange for it (I’m sure they’re scraping and stealing stuff anyway but that’s true for anything posted online)
    • The “generative AI” mention in the grant is badly worded corporate buzzspeak, and doesn’t accurately reflect anything that will be used here - disregard any association to what you normally expect from those words
    • The vast majority of the funds will be used to cover normal operating costs of what iNat does every day. A small amount will be going to some specific grant-related projects, which, again, are not actually genAI. There is no guarantee these things will even be implemented on iNat in the end - if they suck, they’ll be tossed out.
    • The staff are very receptive to user concerns, and there will be a chance for people to speak to them and ask specific questions - since it’s a friday and everyone is in different time zones, the details haven’t been fully organized yet - I suggested maybe a drop-in zoom call, or something, where people can join and leave throughout a set time period, so it’s not overwhelmed by a ton of people all competing for talking space at once.

    That doesn’t completely cover everything we spoke about, but I’m going to post this now to get it up in the thread- please feel free to ask any questions I might be able to answer!


  • But in this context you’re referring to the prevention of fascism as “unproductive”.

    I’m saying that if the candidate listened to the protests and addressed the issues that were brought up, they may have gotten more votes. Arguably, having MORE protests may have helped them win if it could convince the leadership to make changes.

    Outcry from supporters is what convinced Biden to step down, which I think helped the Democrats come closer. Protest is important if it can help a party make the right adjustments in their campaign.

    Telling people to stay silent is unproductive.


  • I find this unproductive. People SHOULD ask their elected representatives (and candidates) to improve. I want people to point it out when my preferred candidate does something wrong, because then they’re more likely to address it before the election.

    That is exactly how it works. Criticizing the better option of the two will reduce turnout for that candidate. That’s the whole purpose of political campaigns.

    I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, but I don’t think a significant number of people changed their mind about voting for her because of the protests.

    • Option 1: Politically engaged people don’t point out a problem -> The candidate doesn’t address the problem -> The average voter doesn’t vote for the candidate because of the problem

    • Option 2: Politically engaged people DO point out a problem -> The candidate addresses the problem -> The average voter is more likely to vote for the candidate



















  • I’d make a recommendation: have some sort of cross-pollination tool. Basically, pull the database of all subscribed communities on Lemmy.ca and have a bot subscribe to the same on PieFed, and vice versa. Probably easy to do if you have server-side access.

    This is actually somewhat built into PieFed. Users can import from a lemmy account, and admins can do a bulk community import of the local communities on a particular instance (filtering by number of posts and users in the past week in those communities). However, it’s buggy. Eventually it would be nice to have tools to synchronize administration between the instances so that we don’t need to repeat actions on both instances.

    Furthermore, in the ideal world, “Local” from the Lemmy instance includes the piefed.ca local commuities. This might be a harder ask. The reason would be to prevent bisecting the Local feeds.

    Agreed :) PieFed does have a ‘popular’ feed, so another solution would be to have a default feed that we have more control over (ex. picking specific instances or communities). As long as the exact breakdown is communicated to the user, perhaps as a ‘learn more’ button in the existing “Create an account to tailor this feed to your interests.”, I don’t think people will mind the admins customizing it to fit the instance. We’ve discussed in the past whether it is better to have the default logged out view be ‘local’ or ‘popular’, and this might help with that problem too.

    Finally, ideally there is a community migration tool, to cross between Lemmy and PieFed if a community wants to move from one side to the other

    This actually exists for the Lemmy -> PieFed direction! @blaze posted some information about it here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/16976004

    It could be better, since right now while the PieFed instance does get a copy of all the posts, the Lemmy instance doesn’t know about it. Hopefully the various platforms can coordinate some common solution.

    Also happy cake day! 🥳