It feels wrong to hit the “block” button for something I’m simply not interested in, but ever since I started using it to curate my home page, the content has become more relevant to me. Personally, I never had the patience to get into coding, so I block communities about it. I have nothing against it, and I love that coders have communities they can take part in, but blocking that topic means more space for things I like when scrolling through All.

I think Lemmy’s still in the process of maturing. I would love to see the kind of niche communities that Reddit has, where the topic of the sub is oddly specific yet not polarizing. I even have an idea for one that can provide some of that energy, but I’m trying to save up more content for potential posts before taking the leap to create it.

I feel like the lack of karma adds in to the civility, but I can’t say that for certain. On Reddit, seeing someone’s karma count seems to sway people’s opinions before even reading what that person says. But here, those votes don’t carry over. In other words, each comment offers a “clean slate.”

There are a few usernames I see and interact with here often. Sometimes I agree with a comment, sometimes I disagree with a comment, but without a total karma count tied to every user, each comment is free to stand on its own regardless of who said it. One bad take doesn’t spoil a person’s reputation. Vice versa, having one fantastic take doesn’t automatically elevate a user who might post something toxic in the future.

Except when it hallucinates, draws from biased sources, or straight-up responds with false information.

I’d rather look through the available links myself and research the direct source things came from. AI isn’t trained to look specifically for factual information. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t trained for that, either. But we can still educate ourselves. Relying on a bot is putting one more space between the information you receive and the source that created it.

I’d rather get my information from as close to the original source as possible. Only then can I determine if the source is even worth trusting in the first place.

The cool thing about Wikipedia is that if you have expertise in a topic and find something incorrect on it, you can edit the page to be more accurate. The trickiest part is finding and adding relevant sources. There’s a learning curve to it, but at least anyone who’s used to writing research papers should have experience with that already.