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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 16th, 2025

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  • Music that hasn’t been compressed to hell and back.

    If the music is interrupted by anything, then that needs to be:

    • brief and preferably informative. Queue position is useful; how valuable my call is is not.
    • infrequent. I don’t need to know my queue position that often, and I don’t need to know how important my call is ever.
    • clearly not someone picking up my call. Fade the audio out nicely and then immediately start the voice part with no silence, so I don’t start listening to see if the talking is a call handler. Ideally, just do this at the end of the song. See above.

    Most hold systems play a short piece of music where everything outside of 300-3000Hz has been obliterated so it sounds like absolute ass, interrupt it every 30s or so to play the same pointless speech clip, and initiate that clip with some silence and clicks that sound like someone picking up a phone.



  • I would like to stand up for the real meaning of the word “algorithm” - there’s a sorting algorithm which shows you the most recent posts, for example. Indeed, the default “hot” sort is already a more advanced algorithm which uses votes and time to show you what is likely to be “good” as decided by users. It’s just not driven by AI or subtle data about how you navigate the page.

    I actually think Mastodon could use a better algorithm to help old but interesting posts get a chance since I’m not checking it every minute… But how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck is hard. Of course, there’s an easy way to avoid it becoming a dark pattern, which is to keep it fully optional.



  • The beauty of federalisation is that you can have both. But we should be honest - maintaining a community with closed registration processes takes effort, so it’s always going to be smaller than open registration. For people unlikely to get punched, most are going to end up in the soup of generally-federated instances, rather than in a more closed-off but safer network.

    And since we’re not really talking about people called Mark getting punched, but trans people being exposed to transphobia and things like that, there’s also an important distinction that is worth remembering: being exposed to hateful statements is horrible, but not as horrible as being punched. So some trans people do end up staying on lemmy.world and that’s also OK.