James R Kirk

That was actually super helpful, thank you.

That’s cool, it just… does those things? How does it connect to those apps? I can’t even get Gemini to set a reminder and that’s on a Google device.

Just curious, what does “some automation” entail? I thought LLMs could only work with text, like summarize documents and that sort of thing.

There’s an easy solution to that: I’m pretty sure on Lemmy (not sure about Piefed) admins can see who downvoted. So it’s just a matter of mods/admins having and enforcing rules that facilitate conversation.

Just report it when you see it happening!

I’m not talking about engineering a problem away. I’m saying it can’t be engineered away and requires human adults in the room (moderators in this case) to handle bad behavior.

Accepting the presence of toxicity as a fact of life does nothing more than attract more toxicity.

I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but it sure seems like you’re saying that toxicity can inevitably be found in every little gesture in our daily life, including internet platforms, which is a narrative I disagree with.

People can have a fight on the street, or in a pub, in a shop, at work, or wherever

Pretty much all pubs and shops I know quickly expel and ban people who fight there. If those places allowed fighting (as many internet platforms do) users looking for a fight would eventually gravitate there, and people looking to discuss peacefully will go elsewhere.

Do you really think tech is the issue?

No, I’m saying people are the issue. Toxicity is not something that can be found everywhere, it only pops up where it’s allowed to flourish.

My belief is that toxicity online is like building a six lane highway through a residential neighborhood. If you build the infrastructure to support more cars, and the law allows speeding you’re going to get more cars (and more car accidents).

If you build platforms that don’t allow cars/limit their behavior where people are trying to have a polite conversation, you’ll see quiet more thoughtful modes of transportation and fewer innocent bystanders get hurt.

Wow that analogy worked pretty well.

Beehaw’s admin and mod team is a great example of how strong moderation encourages, not discourages, good conversation.

I’m not positive that you can do much outside of simply (temporarily or permanently) banning people who are acting shitty.

You can also ask that your admins defederate instances where shitty-acting people are allowed to set up shop.

Well fucking said!👏

We really need to grow beyond the idea that blocking is “censorship”. That only (arguably) applies to large centralized platforms. The fediverse allows all voices to speak but it doesn’t force everyone else to listen.

The fediverse gives us huge individual and collective power and we can use it to grow beyond the constraints of the old platforms.

…What’s the different opinion Anakin?

I don’t buy this narrative that toxicity is inevitable. That’s the narrative pushed by Reddit/Xitter/Meta because toxicity causes engagement which makes them rich. They don’t want to delete it. It’s only inevitable if admins allow it to be.

That “rule” don’t apply on Fedi where we can simply join an instance that actively bans all the bs.

And report content you don’t like to your admins!

Block and report. We’re all in this together!

As you said, decentralization is key. Highly active human moderation is the only known solution to keep communities free and tolerant, and human mods have a relatively low limit as to what they can handle without making it a full time job (or burning it out)

The Lemmy network is still centralized enough that many smaller instances make the calculus that it’s better to be federated with the large weakly moderated instances than to lose access to the many small communities on those instances.

But increased decentralization makes more granular defederation possible. A weakly moderated instance can simply be blocked.

I think we’ll get there in time.

This may be a dumb question but isn’t OTA TV still basically exactly what you describe?

CWA largely removes the need for running Calibre.

I use CWA for the main book “hub” and upload everything (audiobooks and comics too) to it. Then I have audiobookshelf scan the calibre directory, and Komga do the same because the app I use for comics (cdisplayex) doesn’t sync with Koreader yet.

On the client side I use Koreader, Lissen and Cdisplayex.

It works fine but it would be nice to have one app that syncs all progress. And my holy grail is one that can sync ebook and audiobook progress like Amazon’s whispersync!

Booklore was discovered to be vibe-coded and riddled with security issues. The dev shut down the project when discovered. Best avoided for now.

KOReader is not “fake epaper”, it’s an app designed to be used on ereaders which means it’s UI is high contrast. FWIW I agree it’s not ideal for an OLED phone screen, but it’s definitely not fake epaper (more like the opposite) and makes me think you might be accidentally using something else?

(Also KOReader is not for “certain” devices, it’s FOSS and installs on basically any ereader, including Kindle, Kobo and anything running android like Boox).

What CWA does is it integrates a KOreader sync server (can also be ran independently). In future updates CWA’s web reader will sync with this progress, but for now it only shows up in the UI like this:

THAT ALL SAID, if you are only using the WebUI and don’t want to wait for CWA to update their web reader, Komga is a simple app (originally designed for Manga but will work fine with books) that has a web reader that will also remember your progress (and fwiw there is a KOReader plugin in case you want to sync that progress with an epaper device in the future).

It was the UI he didn’t like so it’s not going to be much different.