Haha good call. What about “that works the way I want it to?”

What’s the monkey’s paw when simply adding “that works how I expect it to” to the end of any wish?

I found this: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/the-end-of-divest/23396/43

I’ve worked on this project a decade. That is a long time and I need to move on in life.

Sounds like a single person maintaining such a large project for such a long time means eventually you have had enough. I get that.

They have talked a bit about what they are trying to do. It’s backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Eron Wolf, and he has talked about his frustration with everyone putting their blood, sweat, and tears into the software and then someone like Facebook comes along and makes billions from the work of others.

I get it’s frustrating, but personally I think it fails to see that Facebook is part of the ecosystem, but also so are many small companies, and many of these are contributing back to the software. If you remove the companies then you have removed a significant source of help. Eron wants to replace this with an expectation that people pay for their software, he wants to normalise paying for OSS so OSS doesn’t have to rely on the companies. You can see this in how FUTO keyboard using language implying you need to pay to get a license, but also it holds no features back from you and doesn’t nag if you don’t pay.

Personally I welcome new ways of thinking but even if the pay for your OSS thing works I think companies are uniquely placed to contribute in ways that a small team relying on purchases is never going to be able to replicate.

I don’t hold any ill will though, I think their heart is in the right place, albeit having missed what makes FOSS special.

Haha yeah I do find the licence a bit weird. Kind of a non-commercial licence but there are definitely some parts that I don’t quite get.

I have seen Eron Wolf talking a bit about what he is trying to do. I get his frustrations, but am not convinced their licence helps with those at all. You can’t really take open source, take away some freedoms that are sometimes taken advantage of, and pretend that removing those freedoms didn’t remove the benefits that are the reason those freedoms existed in the first place.

Typically licenses not OSI approved are referred to as “Source available” rather than “Open source”. This is one reason FUTO (who make Grayjay) refer to their license as “Source first” and not “Open Source” (though they did call it that for a while before clarifying and switching to the new term).

Sounds good!

Perhaps take on board the comments on this post, draft up a proposed template on the repo, and then perhaps do a new post asking for feedback? Is it worth creating a community for those interested to follow if they want to discuss, ask questions, propose ideas, etc, or is that better done on the repo?

I’m wondering if the git option is best? A public github repo is a bit more permanent, means it stays available into the future even if it stops getting maintained.

The main issue with that is the technical hurdle for contributing, but I don’t see why people can’t comment on this post or future ones with comments if they don’t want to do a pull request.

I prefer that over the Google docs option, and Lemmy comments are good for discussion but I think we need an “official” place to point people to. We can still discuss on Lemmy before making updates.

I’m going to be away for a few days, but I’ll see about listing out these new questions and other changes. Maybe we can put them somewhere to make it easier to collaborate and track changes?

That sounds like a good idea. Any thoughts on where?

For our census I self-hosted Lime Survey (using this not-official docker image). Took a little bit of working out but I think the survey worked out quite good. There are lots of options to pick through, including various levels of privacy settings, and I’ve also run some other community surveys using it in the past.

I like this idea. Getting some sort of insights into Lemmy.

I saw another comment suggesting various things that it would be fun to know about the community. These surveys aren’t just a view into an instance, but the lemmy.ca and lemmy.nz surveys have been cited many times as they are some of the only info we have about Lemmy as a whole.

I was thinking we should have base questions, ones that we want to watch for changes over time. And then others that could be a snapshot insight that give us a glimpse into Lemmy with an understanding that people don’t want to spend an hour filling in the survey so we can’t ask everything.

I think the question list you have is a good set of base questions, and I don’t think there are any you’ve suggested that shouldn’t be asked each year. So I propose we pick a couple of extra questions. I think it would be nice for everyone to use the same questions and see differences across instances, but also using different ones per instance gives us wider insights. So I could be persuaded either way. The kind of things that @hendrik@palaver.p3x.de suggested, like whether people mostly use Subscribed, Local, or All feeds (mindful these might have different names in different apps/frontends). Or OS they use, etc. Just making sure it’s only one or two questions so it’s not putting people off doing the survey by making it too long.

Now to your question:

For self-identification, free text means people are more likely to write what they actually want instead of trying to push themselves into the box of listed options, even if there is an Other option. However, it’s also a lot of work to group things, and things need to be grouped to make any decent result visualisation. Plus people should be allowed to group themselves instead of me doing it. So I suggest a predefined list with an Other free-text option.

I think this is the case for the other similar things you list as well. For ethnicity, for our survey we used the actual list from the NZ Stats department. It has been carefully refined over years, there’s no reason to think we could do any better. But of course our list would not be very helpful for other countries, so for region-based instances, maybe something similar can be found from that region.

The disability question was quite tricky to work out how to put into a chart. People can have multiple, but then you don’t really want them showing 10 times. I think I’d like to have a pre-defined list next time, with an Other free text option as well. Let people put themselves into their own categories instead of me trying to push them into groups.

For the fun question, what I like about Favourite Dessert is how groups of people are likely to tend towards certain answers, but different groups of people can tend towards quite different things (especially when it’s regional). Favourite Comfort Food could be a good one, but it might be nice not to do food again. I’ll let others suggest some things. I will note that I think this Fun question is different from the suggestion above to have snapshot questions to get insights into Lemmy. Having “What OS do you use” is a census question, “What is your favourite dessert” is a fun question. I think we should have both.

Cheers for tagging me, I’ll have to go through my stuff from when we did it and see if I have any feedback.

Fewer random comments from me when reporting the results. I looked back at them afterwards and thought they might be a bit much.

The random comments were very helpful and influenced the questions we used on lemmy.nz. I also think it’s good to understand how the data has been analysed to highlight potential biases. i.e. don’t feel bad about your rambling or I’ll feel bad about mine 😆

Check out the join site here: https://joinmbin.org/

There is a list of servers there to check out.

I believe the current state is:

• Mastodon users can participate on Lemmy
• Lemmy users cannot follow Mastodon users

So you may see comments or posts from Mastodon users who have posted to Lemmy, but if you want to follow Mastodon users you’ll need a Mastodon account.

There is a middle ground. Mbin allows you to participate on both Lemmy and Mastodon.

We don’t lie, and talk about “who is going to be Santa this year”. Treat it like a game. I don’t think the youngest quite understands and we don’t purposely ruin it, but that the adults are Santa is openly talked about.

Recently one of my kid’s friends got an elf on the shelf, and my kid asked what it was. I think that if other parents lie to their kids that’s for them to sort out, we can’t be expected to lie to our kids to keep up another lie. So I straight out told them what it was and that some parents use it to try to trick their kids into being good. They replied “can I have one?”

It’s a philosophical argument, not directions for how to live your life!

I think it works better for giving others the benefit of the doubt instead of blaming people who have made poor decisions for not “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”. But you definitely should not try it in reverse, “I’m gonna go get addicted to drugs because it’s not my fault” 🫤

If you think back a step, think about why some people are the way they are. Is it because of their genes? Because of a teacher or role model they had growing up? Because of the parenting methods or advice they got from those who raised them?

People are who they’ve because of a number of factors that at their heart are all random.

There’s a town in New Zealand called Rotorua and is famous for its hot pools and geysers. It definitely smells.

There are other places around New Zealand with natural hot water that doesn’t smell.

I guess it varies?

I’m pretty sure the idea is that you shouldn’t avoid buying the best because of the cost. Not that you should buy the most expensive, because it’s often not the best.