I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz
Just seems like everything is "this company did this to their employees" and less about "this novel messaging protocol offers these measured pros and cons." Or similar
And yes, I could post things, but I'm referring to what hits the top, 12h.
Can anyone rec communities with less of a biz and politics and wfh vs in-office vibe?
Please stop reporting this as "not tech related, rule 2", we welcome the feedback.
Our stance has been, if it's in a gray area of "tech" such as tech business related, and users upvote it: that must be what the majority wants.
We will be discussing this more, as it seems some people want strictly tech related content and none of the gray area content.
Didn't know how to make a meta post, or similar, thanks
But if this community community isn't flooded with tech business articles, where are people going to post insightful comments like "fuck Google" and "switch to Firefox"?
My bugbear is all the Linux circle-jerking. I get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious. Yes, Linux is great for those that have the time or inclination to learn swathes of new terminologies and procedures just to achieve the same level of productivity that the equivalent commercial data-harvesters offer in a more readily-accessible UX, but the vast majority of users simply don’t care.
This old meme couldn’t be less appropriate on Lemmy.
Edit: Not wanting to poke the bear, but the accusatory phrasing in a couple of the responses below (“you obviously haven’t used Linux in 10 years” and “you don’t really understand the motivation behind FOSS”) go some way towards emphasising the point of this comment.
Since when do people need to take into account if anyone else cares when posting to social media? They're not content creators serving an audience.
I get it's obnoxious sometimes but people are going to sound off about the things they care about on social media. That's the whole point.
i get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious
I genuinely don't understand why people think this is odd. Think for a second about what the fediverse is and what it represents.
Why are we here? Why are we on the fediverse and not reddit or twitter? They both have more content, more intuitive systems, and more mature (if terrible) UXs. So why are we here?
The fediverse represents the same basic thing as a Linux OS for the average consumer: an escape from corporate controlled, locked down, and increasingly bastardized ecosystems. An open source alternative that, while taking a little more effort, rewards the user with relief from the bullshit they want to escape.
Of course it's popular here. How could it not be?
You'll also find early adopters tend to be more willing to put in the effort to learn new systems, and we're barely out of the early adopter stage for the fediverse.
IMO it's not the "switch to Linux" sentiment itself that's so tedious, it's that it's just so damn oversaturated. It's like that guy who posted "if buying isn't ownership then piracy isn't stealing" like 20 times in one thread the other day. I 100% agree but OMG we get it, kindly stop saying the same damn thing over and over. It's just annoying that every post even mentioning Microsoft or Google devolves into a sea of privacy complaints and FOSS evangelizing to the point it's difficult to have any real conversations.
I mean you are trying to poke the bear. And you’re pretending that people don’t constantly make recommendations all the fucking time. They do. Everywhere about everything. That’s how marketing and grass roots campaigning works. What I think is more interesting is why you’re doing these two things - is your shame of being nerdy so deep that you prefer to try and shame others for not being ashamed?
software tech – the whole programming.dev instance
We also have impeccable uptime as you'd expect.
Not to mention most of the commenters just hate on the technology too, every article about any type of transportation that isn't trains people just shit on it in the comments. "How is this gonna save the planet?" "Why does this need to exist?"
Hating technology should be its own community.
Quite candidly, it's not articles selling the spiel of tech bros that is going to help us. I'm one of those commenters and I also wish "Technology" was about technology instead of trying to sell the latest gadgetbahn or a solar road or self driving cars.
EDIT: It's not technically about "helping us", but more specifically about the kind of spiel those "articles" are trying to push. It may very well be about technology, but it's misrepresented as something that could help us and save us in the future while in reality, it's just marginally interesting, Think about how many articles there has been about bitcoins, NFTs, AI and crap like this, coming from techbros and their simps. That's why you'll see the sort of comments you complain about. It certainly is tech, but it's more like tech they're trying to hype, misrepresent and sell.
I love tech. I work in IT. But I can also smell BS and will not hesitate to point it out.
Well said. I like how the communities on Lemmy have a lot of tech and FOSS people who are able to recognize (and call out) a repackaged sales pitch. I understand most mainstream publications have to pay the bills, but so many of the "journalists" are just caught up in the hype cycle.
Totally agree!
"Here's some incremental progress that is a possibly interesting technological improvement."
" Omg it isn't literally perfect and exactly aligning with my interests. Literal capitalist trash, zero value, no one wants it"
In my experience it's been quite the opposite. The press release will be "here's some shiny new big deal" and the comments in this community will point out that it's not only nothing new, but often actively working against users' interests.
Like Meta totally joining the Fediverse or Apple ""fully"" adopting RCS despite both those companies having a long history of anti-interoperability practices. There's a lot of BS that comes out of silicon valley, and there aren't a lot of good journalists able (or willing) to rightfully understand what's being said, so they repeat the big claims without proper context.
You forgot to call it fascist. That’s a word people with that attitude tend to throw around a lot.
I think this is a flaw in the current state of Lemmy. There's so few posts compared to Reddit that random people will find your 3 upvoted post in all. This leads to people outside of the community dominating the discussion.
You can also see this with other communities. Everytime I see the conservative one in All it's a non conservative OP being insulted by other non conservatives, because they assumed OP must be a conservative to post there.
There being an anti tech community won't solve this issue. I think the most accessible solution is moderation.
Check out Ars Technica. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that the are more technical than average news sources. For example, when they report on a software security vulnerability, they’ll actually go into the command line and try it for themselves. Pretty good reporters which more than basic tech knowledge, if you ask me…
I liked them until they started posting clickbait.
Some of their headlines can be shitty, but I find that most of their articles are great once you dive into them. Except for their Wired cross publication stories, those mostly suck.
Eric Berger’s space articles are fantastic. Well minus a recent article of his where he hand waved away Elon being a shitheel. On a technical level they’re great.
Great, now I just read an article about no printers and am so enraged
And they're on the Fediverse! @arstechnica@mastodon.social
It would be nice if there were separate Tech Industry and Technology News communities.
Totally agree
There is a "Business" community, ideally the mods should remove any links that are "company a lays off workers" or "Elon Musk is stupid again" and re-direct them to Business, where the business decisions belong.
Honestly, we need tech business news vs technology in general, but technology also probably should be split between hardware and software. Or maybe computer vs the rest.
Computer vs the rest.
I'd love to see posts about new materials, manufacturing processes, waste management, engineering techniques, mechanical designs and tests.
But nope, it's just computers computers computers. If you can't do it on your PC at home it doesn't count as tech, apparently.
I sometimes read ieee spectrum for that stuff
There was a r/HardwareNews on Reddit.
We could implement it but I have not the time nor the will to moderate a community.
I bring this up all the time when I can be arsed and people always rebute with "but it's about a company that makes/uses tech", completely missing the point I was making saying that shouldn't be the criteria for content here. It's exhausting.
HackerNews(ycomb) is a veritable gold mine but I find the community to be a bit caustic at times.
There is a HackerNews mirror on Lemmy here that I like but not too many people comment. If I saw more activity I'd probably comment more.
but I find the community to be a bit caustic at times
I find the same can be true around here too, though.
But HN is also mostly tech biz.
I really don't find that to be true. I see lots of toy implementations, general philosophical discussions, hell even just man pages.
Wayyyyy too many libertarians on hacker news who have experienced a lot of personal success in their life and have transformed that success into an utter lack of intellectual maturity or ability to empathize with others less fortunate than them.
Good info, but wow I have read enough hacker news that I have almost zero interest in talking to tech people in real life at this point, they can be so aggressively naive and are always focused on incredibly narrow visions of the future that as a rule don’t center humans as the most valuable part of society/economy. If aliens came to earth and offered them a new algorithm in exchange for enslaving all of the planet, they would shrug their shoulders and say “We can’t stand in the way of progress, I might as well do it, somebody else will if I don’t!”. It makes me thankful a physicist developed the nuclear bomb not a tech person or I am sure we would all be dead right now.
Good info though and fun to troll libertarians if you are into that kink.
Repost it here if you find something interesting. I read a little ycomb but it's a firehose and discussion is typically bad as you said.
Lemmy needs more reposting from other blogs. Filtering content is useful. Not everything needs to be original.
There is a HackerNews mirror on Lemmy
Mind sharing?
Https://news.ycombinator.com is the gold standard, there are some Lemmy bots following it as well
Wow, it's been a while since I've been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it's filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you'll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.
One of my hats os interviewing senior engineers, one of my warm up questions is to ask where they get their news and stay current.
Hacker news is a very, very, common response.
In fact I don't have a better news source to offer you.
I worry about dismissing the discussion as tech bro and businessy... As real engineers use the site, I also worry about dismissing people as tech bros, it's not a great term, and I think unfairly applied to engineers because they are often not neural typical.
I like hacker news but have had trouble figuring out how to actually like...follow it. There is a shitty Android app. They don't have an RSS feed best I can tell. How does one actually consume it?
Hacker News has an RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don't really surface that anymore I guess?
They also have like different filtered feeds for things with like a certain number of votes or something, which I have seen people using.
You could just use !hackernews@derp.foo
I know it's a bot driven community but somehow they actually pulled it off. Lemmy users are actually leaving comments and voting over there.
There's also !hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans but it seems like a less active version of the same thing
Check this one - https://hnrss.github.io/. It has urls with different topics.
I use Harmonic It has a pretty decent ui, but i use web version if i want to search something
Good call I'll spend more time there
On Reddit we had r/hardware which was great for this
Here we have !hardware@lemmy.ml but I haven't checked it out much yet
And there was r/gadget . Funny thing, I went from r/technology to r/gadget for the same reason : r/technology was 90% business news
Looks like it's mostly PC hardware
Blogs are really the only way now. At least in my life, it and RSS are making a big comeback. So if you know of any good blogs let me know
RSS has been coming back for me big time too. Which blogs do you follow?
my list:
share yours now :)
I also am curious about this.
RSS is awesome and it's one of those generic technologies I am talking about on my blog. I already covered RSS, PGP, FTP and F-Droid, and there are plans about SSH, git, KeePass and Delta Chat.
We need webrings to come back for better discoverability. Also, how do you consume RSS?
Bleh, consume sounds like an icky word here. But if you want to set up an RSS Feed, get an RSS reader (I personally use NewsFlash, but use whatever you like) and then simply add feeds to it. You can find them on quite a few sites, the icon looks kind of like a wifi symbol. Optionally you could also just install a plugin like Awesome RSS, which automatically finds feeds on the site you're currently on, which can be useful if it's kinda hidden on the site itself
RSS yes. I love it.
Blogs...eh. the only time I read a blog is if it contains a solution I've searched for.
You are not going to get that at any of the larger communities. We'll need to grow the niche communities instead, more specific to your interests.
Could you please take a look at https://fediverser.network to see if gives you anything interesting?
It can definitely happen. This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.
It degrades to the lowest common denominator. This was seen across reddit, constantly.
It happened on lemmy in record time due to a lack of default outlets for the low quality content.
I was on reddit for a very long time. And this is why I started to bemoan when communities would celebrate that they passed some number of subscribers.
/pardon me as I yell at the clouds. Stop now unless you want to read a completely unnecessary rant.
Two of my favorite niche subreddits were absolutely ruined by getting big: mindfulness and foodporn. The former was primarily a discussion about practicing mindfulness, there were even a couple of buddhists who actually deeply studied the tradition that provided very good non-western insight. It was a good place to go get help, albeit occasionally got a spattering of stupid memes, but you could easily get past them. As it grew it turned more and more into just memes, and then was just over-taken by new-age nonsense and pseudointellectual quotes over pictures. Food porn (while never exactly what I wanted) went from often having well-done pictures of good food, to shitty cell-phone shots of oversized hamburgers, half eaten food, and plates of food sitting on counters with all of this shit in the background.
This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.
This is just another way of saying "having mods enforcing super strict rules", which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.
Unfortunately, the way to avoid "lowest common denominator" issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.
If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into "deteriorate fast" territory.
The problem is all the s*** we really want to hear about all the companies are keeping close to their breast.
Then, when something actually novel and interesting comes out it ends up being polarizing. We can only consume so much Chat GPT Gemini Bard crap.
We should start a tech community on the federal verse about technologies people are passionate about. Get some people to talk about cool s*** they've done with Wyoming, Piper and whisper. Maybe have some people talk about their local mini installs of LLMS, for how they're getting the most out of stable diffusion. Maybe some people looking at Obsidian or Anytype, maybe some NixOS
There's lots of cool stuff out there to cover there's just not a lot of news about it these days. If it's not AI they're afraid people's eyes will just glaze over.
You are allowed to say "shit" here
Voice dictation. I need the censorship on for some places, but the setting is buried enough that turning it on and off is arduous. Unfortunately that means that gracing the world with my profanity is only for a times where I can be at the keys.
I don't agree with your first two phrases but strongly agree with the later ones.
Fair
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I don't think people should have to put extra filters to get what they signed up for when they subscribed to "technology"
Blocking "Musk" has made Lemmy much more enjoyable for me!
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Elon, Musk, and Twitter are my three banned words at the moment. I would add X but I'm weary of the false positives.
What? I can't hear you.
I can post any technology related outside of tech biz but mostly it's not a popular thing here, many of articles are too technical, hardly any discussion, even worse there are articles that you won't like it. For example, I can post the good thing about EVs today and another day I can post the downside of EVs battery to environment, and I get the heat.
Posting in niche community? Not enough MAU, I'v tried in c/collapse, c/cybersecurity etc, no discussion.
c/technology is just a mirror of r/technology
This is the correct answer. More folks that subscribe here are the ones who interact and upvote the political ones.
Fucking A OP
It's off site, but hackaday.com is great for (mostly) electronics and computer tech articles.
Most technology news your average layman is interested in is ads for new products and how tech companies turn out to not be so great to work for. I think that's why most news that appear on top don't really cover the fun stuff.
Hey, if you don't like it you can get the hell out of r/Elon, we don't want you here!
oh...wait
@GBU28 I see what you mean!
The smaller tech communities seem to have a better signal to noise ratio, I was in !technology@kbin.social the other day and it's mostly posts about actual tech.
Fantastic! Thank you! I have subscribed there and unsubscribed here.
That’s just what’s happening in the tech industry right now. Loads of firings and other issues. That’s the human factor of tech.
That's all well and good but I want discussions about tech itself. Tell me about your latest achievement while building your robot.
This is one of the reason that I think the @L4s@lemmy.world bot should have retired a while back. !technology@lemmy.world already the biggest comm on this platform that it doesn't need a repost bot from reddit, and having it around inevitably turns this community into a duplicate of r/technology which is more tech business and privacy than it is about interesting tech.
However, you can say that this is also an advantage of Lemmy over reddit, since if you don't like the content of !technology@lemmy.world, you can always use another technology comm like !technology@lemmy.ml or start your own, instead of making something like r/truetechnology or something like that as on reddit. (This is also the reason why I don't think community merging is a good idea on the server side.)
BSkyB
Get rid of Capitalism and it'll happen
Yawn.
Exactly what I don't care about discussing.
No this would still be an issue. Actual technology is, well, technical. Not a lot of people here would be able to read a direct medical study and then discuss it.
"I wish there were more articles about the shiny emeralds and how valuable they are and not about the dead, exploited children working in the mines"
You see OP, that's you. ^
Both articles are out there, one is just more important as prevalent topic right now because of the human beings in the mix.
Nah. Tech biz is not tech.
Both are important, interesting topics.
With all due respect, fuck the dead children, I came here for the shiny emeralds. If you want awareness for your mining kids you can go to c/deadbabies and cry about it there.
I'm with OP, I came for interesting technologies not all the other bullshit.
Talking about protocols seems pretty technical to me...
Uh, yeah, that'd be great
I just checked the front page of this community (as sorted by active) and none of those posts were about protocols, so...
GBU_28 has made exactly zero posts, besides this one.
Dude, you can help fill the place with tech articles.
I said that in the post text, and indicated I was seeking communities where more actual tech discussion is found. I received it.
As I said, I'm interested in places where the top, 12h content is more tech oriented.
In general I consume from this place. I'm not interested in building. I don't care your opinion on that engagement pattern, only your info on other communities if you have it.
You don't have to justify yourself to them lol. You already are being the change they allege you want to see. And in the process created a resourced for others of like mind to find sources of news that doesn't focus on tech business. A great first post.