In perusing the Lemmy community list, I've noticed several times the dormant !ukraine@lemmy.ca community mentioning a consolidation with !ukraine@feddit.kyiv.ua. As the latter instance has since gone offline, I inquired with the !ukraine@lemmy.ca moderator about switching the consolidation to one of the other two active Ukraine communities.

I was subsequently informed that the change had indeed already been made, but that the version of the community on lemmy.dbzer0.com didn't reflect it. As the updated version is visible on both the original lemmy.ca page, as well as the lemmy.world version of it, is there a reason our version of it is out of date?

Edit: Seems that subscribing to the community to federate it updated it successfully.

In maintaining my Lemmy blocklist, I noticed that I was unable to block the thunder@lemmy.world community, despite it seemingly existing if I look for it on lemmy.world directly.

As it doesn't load when accessed via this instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/thunder@lemmy.world), has it been defederated?

Was replying to a now-deleted post in which the poster asked for feedback on the contents and phrasing of a message they had used to promote Lemmy on Reddit. As the crux of my reply was recommending an instance other than lemmy.world to send new users to, I thought I'd rework it as a post of my own.

While @Blaze@feddit.org came up with good criterion for determining which instances should be recommended to newcomers, it seems that neither sopuli.xyz nor discuss.online has native third-party frontend support, something that may increase the likelihood that new users stick around. Although I don't think Mlmym should be recommended—despite being an easy switch for users of the old Reddit interface—due to it lacking recent updates, thus likely to break if not updated for Lemmy 1.0, other third-party frontends such as Alexandrite, Voyager, Tesseract, and Photon may serve new users better than Lemmy's default user interface.

Although country-specific, lemmy.ca is arguably the best option in this regard, supporting all five third-party frontends listed above. It's also one of the longest-running instances, dating to June 2021, and is defederated from lemmygrad, hexbear, and other instances on the Fediseer censure list.

If a non-country specific instance is preferred, I also went through the instance list further to find another general purpose instance with a neutral name, sufficient defederation list, and support for multiple third-party instances. Endlesstalk.org is the next most active instance to meet those criteria, with support for Mlmym, Alexandrite, and Voyager.

As communities are only federated with this instance when at least one of its users subscribes, new and small communities are at an inherent disadvantage in terms of discoverability. While not a problem unique to this instance, Lemmy Federate is used by several other instances to have a bot temporarily subscribe to communities from federated instances until at least one actual user from the instance subscribes.

Although the federation of additional communities means that users who curate their All feed via extensive community filter lists will have to filter more communities, I think the benefits to the discoverability of communities across Lemmy, promoting their growth in the process, would make it worthwhile.

As I was made a moderator of !palestine@lemm.ee without being asked first, and can't seem to find a button to demote myself, could a lemm.ee admin remove my moderator role for that community?

Edit: Issue resolved via solution suggested in comment below.

Edit 2: For now at least, there seems to be a problem with self de-moderation across instances, as my moderator status returned after I tried removing it. I thus subsequently contacted the person who promoted me to have the moderator status removed.

Although personally in favor of Palestinian independence and critical of war crimes committed by Israel in its siege of Gaza, I attempted to explain in a back-and-forth discussion with a user (only afterwards learning was one of the community's two moderators) why protest voting in the 2024 election to "punish" the democrats in favor of the republicans harmed the ultimate interest of reigning in Israeli violence in Palestine.

To further emphasize the damage caused by such a protest vote, I argued that not only is Palestine worse off with Trump elected instead of Harris, but as are a myriad of other social issues. The other user disagreed, arguing that Trump's return to office facilitated the ceasefire, rather than my argument that Netanyahu deliberately delayed it to help Trump get elected.

After my fourth reply post in a reply chain that stemmed from my initial reply to the moderator's comment, I was banned from !palestine@lemm.ee. Having at no point advocated in favor of the violence perpetuated by Israel in Gaza, I think the ban was unjustified, and demonstrates a bad precedent for maintaining echo chambers of moderator opinions, rather than communities that foster discussion.

https://gaming.amazon.com/bioshock-2-remastered-gog/dp/amzn1.pg.item.8337f2b5-26f9-47fd-be10-1481062d64d6

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599

Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.

While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.

To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.

In the months since I deleted my Reddit accounts and joined Lemmy, the lack of user base growth has made it clear that we need some users to stay on Reddit as a means of shepherding more users over on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, Reddit simply got what it wanted: less users who make a fuss about how it manages its platform without losing users en-masse.

In doing so, however, does Reddit shadowban posts that mention or promote Lemmy? Googling mentions of Lemmy on Reddit mostly brings up posts from around the time of the blackout, suggesting that mentions of it since then have been suppressed. Before I return to Reddit to promote Lemmy, does anyone know for certain one way or the other?

In the past I've chosen I've often kept AC3 audio tracks thinking that their substantially higher bitrates made them better than the AAC tracks I compared them to. As I've since learned that AAC can be comparable to AC3 at a substantially lower bitrate, to have a means of comparing the two codecs, what would the AAC-equivalent bitrates be for 224kbps and 640kbps AC3?