It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.
Probably the federated nature of it… i know the whole point of it is decentralisation but with the likes of reddit or discord at least you could attempt to have all your content salted or deleted (whether it actually is is another story) from a single server. Knowing anything and everything you post on here will stick around forever no matter what you do, by design, makes me uneasy.
I agree. My politics, thoughts and feelings change over time and it makes me uncomfortable to be potentially judged for things later and not be able to delete that isn’t ideal, even if I’m the only one reading it.
What I don’t like is that so much content is spread between so many different places, this along with the complexity of it all as a new user is intimidating.
I think we’re asking a lot of non technically minded people to use the fediverse and that is hurting adoption.
Having said that something I like about it is that it’s smaller and people actually “communicate” with me here which isn’t really a thing on reddit anymore.
it makes me uncomfortable to be potentially judged for things later
“I’ve changed my mind on that and I no longer think this way.”
I absolutely hate the amount of leftist infighting.
I miss polandball.
Without leftist infighting, Lemmy would be a boring ghost town.
Once you’ve moved from amorality and imperialist propaganda to basic morality and human decency, there are still many details to iron out, I guess. 😅
I find it “interesting” the same way a slow motion train wreck is
Tankies with incoherent ideology, “AI is bad, except if I self host a FOSS version that’s just as bad for the environment as the corpo one, then it’s good actually”
The damage to train the AI is already done. Running it locally on your own hardware and not supporting the mega data centers is better than using it online with all the surveillance and, well, using the data centers, no?
I thought the issue was how much energy it takes to run, not how much it takes to train.
And if the problem is how much it takes to run, a data center will likely be better because they have an optimized environment for it and economies of scale, running it locally will likely be less efficient and take more energy.
Both use a lot of energy, but operation accounts for the majority not training.
Running a (relatively) large model on your own PC’s GPU is energy-intensive compared to typical household electronics, but not compared to driving a car. People don’t usually object to someone playing a AAA game at 2K240, which burns energy just as fast as running inference on the same GPU.
A typical prompt and response uses maybe a quarter to half a Watt-hour. That’s like using an LED light bulb for a few minutes; it’s the scale that makes these things problematic.
And how many prompts per minute can be sent?
To a datacenter, tens or hundreds of thousands, which is my point about scale. One person using an LLM isn’t wasting any more power than they would be gaming on a PC, but a lot more people are using LLMs at any given time than are gaming.
I’ll admit my understanding is not deep, but this is how I understand it. Please correct me kindly where I’m wrong.
To get the speed of processing a prompt, it always will depend on the hardware running it to be super simplified. Whether that is run in data centers that serves thousand of people at the same time and you can get as near instant result, or you can run on just a measly consumer hardware that will take longer to process your prompt and get your result.
Data centers take a lot of power to run, so it will disrupt the power grid if it’s not able to cope with it, and increase your power bill.
It takes a lot of water to keep cool, and from what I understand produce water that needs to be treated again to make it safe for consumption. Multi billion dollar corporations are well known for following environmental and safety standards.
It needs a lot of space to build and destroy environments or take away zoning. All those AC will produce a lot of noise pollution
Contrast with running your local machine. Say take a 5090, running with some kind of high end CPU. All those are still running in the confines of your own home. It can not reach the heights of consumption for the infrastructure to support using AI online by the big corporations.
If you’re using a model that a big corpo trained, they are more than likely using the big power hungry data centers. That’s power already spent so going forward I think it’s best that IF you want to use AI, better run it locally that’s on less power hungry “infra”.
My understanding is relatively deep, so let me explain.
Don’t you think that if everyone used their own hardware for it, it would use at least as much energy? There is nothing inherent about data centers that make them consume more energy. Processing is processing and it needs some amount of power to run a transistor, which does not majorly change, unless you use very old hardware without certain technological advances, which is much more likely with hardware at home!
In addition, what you’re forgetting as well is that not everyone has even close to the required hardware to run these models. They require a certain amount of RAM, and if you don’t have that, you’re out of luck because it is so slow to run without enough RAM as to be useless, and most people do not have that amount necessary.
So, if everyone switched to running their AI locally, there’d be a lot more graphics cards and other computer parts bought, which guess what, need resources to be produced, resulting in potentially other kinds of environmental damage, along the same way as new data centers, but obviously some kind of different damage.
And then the data centers use their hardware all the time, while if you run your model at home, your hardware is only used occasionally and otherwise just sits there, so you need a lot more hardware in general because of all the unused capacity everywhere.
It’s the same principle as other environmental relief efforts, if everyone needs to buy their own car and drive it, that is much worse than just everyone using public transportation. Once you make something communally used, it requires less resources per person, even though for example a train is much more expensive than a single car. But same as you’re not serving a single traveller per train, a single data center does not serve one person. So theoretically, data centers are the better environmental choice.
What the real problem is, is not these data centers, data centers in general are good. The problem is unnecessary data centers, same as an individual buying unnecessary hardware for themselves. If you use AI, you don’t save any energy by running it yourself. The only argument for running it yourself is the increased privacy and not supporting these big corporations that do actually build unnecessary data centers, because AI should not be used for so many things that it is used for. So running it yourself is probably still better, but only if you already have the hardware anyway, but not because of reduced resources, but other reasons.
Everyone complains about it being empty and not many want to do anything about it. I’m not sure if this is even because of the user number, because I’ve been on forums with just a few users that were very active. It often seems like too many people here are waiting for a large influx of users so that others can do the posting. Also people try waaaay too hard to copy Reddit 1:1. They have this one very specific community with certain content and try to copy it here. If there was a subreddit for a 1998 version of an obscure computer game, they want this very same community to exist here. Instead of discussing said game in a more general community.
The default web interface is ass. Voyager kinda sucks too.
Try Blorp
The niche communities are so fragmented. One post every few months or just abandoned compared to hourly posts on reddit, examples like gaming subs for specific games.
I mean tbf more people really should participate in posting in those comms. Me included.
1 or a few person posting daily with zero interaction other than up or down votes will burn out eventually
At the very least I try to comment on the posts if I can’t post myself
As a daily niche subject poster, yes, please participate, even if it’s just something simple. It makes me feel like I’m not just talking to an empty room. Upvotes are fine, but I post to try to get you guys enthused and taking interest in the subject matter.
Not enough users. Mostly it is only a moderator + a few other people who are actively posting something. Sometimes, it is only a moderator. And a comunity becomes more like a personal blog.
There is no roaming user system. One where you have the same user in PieFed, PixelFed, Mastodon, … And if you have to change instance you only have to sign in into another one with that system and can migrate all the data at once.
On the second point, Lemmy/piefed have the ability to export your profile to be imported into any other instance. It allows you to keep your subscriptions, favorites posts/comments, and blocked users/communities.
You can find the export and import section in your account settings page.
I know. But what I mean is some kind of automatic system that, when you set your main instance, the data is migrated.
People who post Ask Lemmy threads then delete them (or their whole account) a day later.
Apparently that’s most likely bots somehow
This can also happen because they are banned for some reason.
My beef is that too many people are grinding Karma by posting the same crap to as many communities as possible, even though there’s no Karma system, but they aren’t there to discuss anything. So my feed is just all these OPs with no comments on them. Like you want me to read an article, or god forbid a 45 minute YouTube video, but you’re not gonna start the conversation? Or reply to the people who do reply to you? Too many people looking for an audience; not enough people looking for conversation.
Pretty much just that.
I block most posters that post more than once a day. Some people have 3 month old accounts with 4k posts. No thanks.
It’s not karma farming there in many cases, it’s just trying to support the Fediverse.
Lemmy doesn’t have this problem, but mastodon needs algorithms. Otherwise, discovery is more difficult and you must be around at the same time people of interest are either there or being boosted. People leave thinking it’s boring.
Tankies and random Ai stans once in a while.
Not enough artists posting their weird shit. Analogue Nowhere rules but i need more
Lemmy? the politics.
the fediverse? I know I’ve said this like a billion times to the same five people who come on here, but federated platforms still ape the format of big social media platforms, and inherit many of their pitfalls. I want long-term discussion and human connection, not an endless waterfall of content that quickly gets swept away.
Concern trolling about the fediverse or lemmy.
It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media.
Reddit circa 2010 was very male, nerdy, and often misogynistic. As it gained popularity, the community became more diverse. As it got more traction, these issues abated somewhat. Once it hit critical mass and became totally mainstream, the audience was diverse enough to make most people forget how it used to be. I miss when Reddit was at the “sweet spot” of being pretty diverse, yet not corporatized to shit.
Lemmy/Fediverse is still in its “early Reddit” stage now. It shows great potential but its basic premise and design probably prevents absolute mainstream adoption. Which is probably a good thing, but I would like to get closer to the sweet spot.
