Hey, my sincere apologies for my other reply. I had too much of Lemmy yesterday… after several DUMBASS replies trolling me (like putting words into my mouth, then ridiculing those straw man concepts - really though, I should have known better than to say that I like Mac OSX, even in a non-Linux, general-technology community, anywhere on the Fediverse, as that never fails to bring out the trolls from under the bridge… whenever will I learn!?:-P), I started to presume guilt everywhere I looked, and essentially unwittingly fed forward that negative behavior onto you, so again my apologies. This community I hope will remain better than that.

Thank you for the feedback.

But this graph goes back to 1950? So like, did that data point exclude it, and then the 2100 one… who knows? It seems to bring up far more questions than answers.

Not sure if this is correct or not, but https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/HKG/hong-kong/population says that the population is only 7 million, despite being so dense but also overall the geographic area is small, and used to be like 2 million in 1950. Which is only 0.007 billion - not really significant.

Taiwan is more so, at 23 million, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/taiwan-population/.

But the two of them together are only 0.03 billion - and as you mentioned, why include another sovereign nation into China’s figures? It demeans Taiwan, appeases a country that may use violence to take it over… well anyway my original point that I need to stick with that if the goal is to avoid politics and convey information most accurately, then this disclaimer still seems to single out China, to the exclusion of every other nation in the world that might make a claim on other areas as well. And despite how the HK situation that was mutually agreed upon for a time and is more significant, the Taiwan situation is what seemed to bring “politics” into this, whereas I mentioned possibilities that would have made it more truly apolitical, and removed the focus from specifically China to highlight how most imperialistic nations have such territories associated with them.

Where are you seeing “Latin America” - wait for it - as a continent, on this graph?

It is to the left of North America, and to the right of Africa, itself after Asia and Europe. In other words, that entire line is the list of continents.

This is known as the “legend”, which is placed there in order to explain the coloration. e.g. all Latin American nations (consisting of only Brazil & Mexico in this map of only the “biggest countries”) are purple, b/c ‘Latin America’ is colored purple in the legend. And Asian countries are green, USA is red, Africa is orange, European ones are blue.

Do you see “Latin America” anywhere else, other than the legend? I tried & tried but could not…

So mystery solved I suppose.

If you were joking, that was not clear to me.

I see that part of this was explained in another comment already, or I would still have been very confused:-).

Right, well… also distrust your own understanding of everything that you read too!:-P Examine from every angle, if that helps, and then let Occam’s Razor be your guide.

From my POV, I presumed it was common knowledge that the USA has never had a billion people, even in the past (even before it was the USA). Nor has any nation on earth, excepting China, and India is much worse, at one point projected to be on track to reach 2 billion by… well now I forget, but anyway, those two are well-known to be isolated having BY FAR the largest number of people than have ever existed on planet Earth before now (that we know of, or have even the remotest shred of evidence for or is even thought to have the tiniest likelihood of having been).

Which is kind-of a big deal when combined with issues of e.g. climate change. China may not have handled it perfectly, but at least they tried SOMETHING, with their various child restriction policies, whereas India’s stance that is of a more religious nature, very often prohibits any form of birth control (it’s more complex than that b/c there is no singular religion or even vague category of one there, yet many of them share that stipulation, including Catholicism and much of Hindu, and portions though by no means all of Buddhism, and some of the more conservative sects of Muslim & Mormon, etc.).

Um… are you joking?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

Also, even in just your link alone, 300,000, in units of thousands, is still 300,000,000, hence 300 million. They should have used a better unit there imho… knowing that it would lead to exactly this misunderstanding.

Always distrust everything that you read - you are right about that!:-)

I never realized that the USA was in the top 3. Wow, what a rapid drop-off then, from roughly a billion or so people to a mere ~0.3. India and China truly stand apart, towering above so many others combined.

Since that is the case, it might be neat to show the EU then, if that helps close the gap to make them more comparable? But maybe that would be too improper a comparison.

I think it’s odd to see how China does not include Hong Kong or Taiwan. Like… of course it doesn’t!? I kinda get why someone wants to be precise to say that, but also it feels like giving in to a grumpy toddler child who claims that the whole world belongs to them - just bc they say it, doesn’t make it true!? Maybe there’s some other way to convey it that avoids that stigma, like “China refers only to the Mainland areas” or some such.

Or even more generally, “imperial powers like UK and China do not include their territories or projections” (whatever that last word should be). Similarly, does “USA” include things like Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, etc.? Maybe the population numbers don’t statistically matter for those situations, but then do they matter for China? It’s odd to see China uniquely called out then, like someone going out of their way to not anger Pooh-bear, when there may not even be a need to say anything about it at all?

Most things on the Fediverse are limited by someone willing to put in the effort to make them happen. Create it, populate it with memes, and it will exist. People will still post to the larger communities though, bc they are more well-known.

The effectiveness of the removedheadiness is a separate matter from its identity:-). If someone were to say downvote literally everything you ever did, within seconds of you doing it, and regardless of content, then that would be a removedty thing to do.

Ah, mods only, and then only for their own communities - well, still, that’s something (though I’d prefer prefer it opened up for everyone). Thanks for the link.

Being able to see the moderation history linked directly to a post was added then - but I don’t see vote viewing nor recall hearing about it, which would have been a huge deal.

The issue is that currently someone can behave as a removedhead via voting, even if not comments, with little fear of reprisal or even discovery.

If OP mass-downvotes you, then ban them. As it is, you have the ability to mass-downvote them, without them even knowing that it is you doing it. Or maybe you wouldn’t do that, but some would - I hope you see how unequal that relationship is.

The developers of Lemmy do not seem interested in anything less than banning people instance-wide, even from communities that they have never posted in before, so ironically shadowbanning is too subtle for them.

But I thought the only way someone could be shadowbanned now is at the individual user level? It would be nice to increase transparency even further - e.g. a message pops up if you try to reply to someone saying like “this user has blocked you” (possibly everyone from that instance) so that people do not waste time trying to get a message across that the recipient will never read.

The version code hasn’t even hit 0.2 yet. Lemmy was founded by people who got banned from Reddit for being too toxic & extremist leftists, so went off to make their own replacement. They do what they like, and bc Rust is a difficult language to work with, not that many are willing to help.

Then after Huffman’s debacle, we started to see Kbin, Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and perhaps more - but none even as advanced as Lemmy yet.

But more to the point, that’s just the nature of an open network. Wouldn’t Wikipedia suffer from the same issues? Though less of an issue than a social media framework I would wager.

I want to have the ability to turn on my echo chamber, when I want it, and also to be able to turn it off, when I want to step outside of it for awhile. This doesn’t have to be a toggle - it could be having an alt on a different instance.

I don’t want this choice made for me by people who think they know better how to run my own life than me. They can write an appeal that I will consider, but ultimately I want to make my own choice.

Having votes be publicly viewable allows us all the freedom to do as we choose with that information - including to ignore them entirely. What I would probably do with it is make large block lists of people on lemmy.ml, since it turns out that user blocks of an instance don’t block all that much. Fwiw, for everyone I’ve blocked in the past, I look through the post history to see if they merely are being disagreeable on a particular matter but overall are capable of contributing something substantive to a conversation, or are nothing more than a troll, setting out to vomit their emotions upon everyone worldwide across the Fediverse.

I’ve been a mod before, on Reddit, and am under no illusions anymore that everyone is worth listening to - a downvote from someone rational I will give serious thought about, but an idiot is an idiot, even if a community mod hasn’t banned them (yet?).

It’s like autocorrect: feel free to make suggestions, but it would be nice if I could have control when I want it, including/especially not wasting my time.

Unlike commenting and posting, which offers the who, what, where, and when parts of the message passing process, voting on Lemmy (now, for non-admins) is inherently an unequal process. Imagine if someone could send you an email whenever they wanted, but you were prevented from knowing who or even from what instance it is from, or when it was sent, do you think that could open up a potential for some variety of abuse? Or texting, phone calls, showing up at your door, etc.

Knowing the identity of the voter is an important part of properly receiving the “message”. It also increases freedom of choice, b/c otherwise the only way to prevent such messages (if, let’s take it as a given that some people find them annoying) would be to turn off voting entirely, either by going to one of the instances that does that, or just ignoring all (down-)votes yourself.

If we want the Fediverse to grow, and in particular to include less emotionally stunted humans that actually care when someone says something about them, good or bad, this will be a necessity. (Also, I was speaking tongue-in-cheek there, but genuinely social standards do vary across this wide world, and it really would increase content if there were not only more but different types of people, especially those most likely to generate quality content.)

And as other non-Lemmy methods of access to the Fediverse provide that feature - k/mbin, piefed, sublinks - Lemmy will fall increasingly behind if it were to ignore this very basic feature.

Making the votes public also increases honesty, since they are already public now. And if you don’t want to know who down-(up?-)votes you then… don’t look? But for those who want to know, it will be a great feature to have.

I am glad to see this level of interactivity. At the same time, I hope it doesn’t try to do too much at once - like trying to be all things to all people holding it back too much from moving forward in any one lane, if that makes sense?

On the other hand, the developer can do whatever they want, so I totally get working on the exciting stuff, especially if they (unlike Ernst) are amenable to allowing others to flesh in the details for the stuff that they enjoy less.

Wow, the more I learn about it, the more exciting it seems!? Thanks for sharing that.:-)

Oh wow, community wikis with version history even - that’s fantastic.

Best of all though seems to be that it is in a language that people actually use - no disrespect to Rust bc it’s arguably the best, certainly the hottest language right now, but it definitely seems to be limiting progress that so few people are willing to learn it.

Thank you, I keep mixing it up with Pixelfed in my mind and forget that it exists:-).

It looks both really primitive (e.g. comment from Rima about lack of moderation tools) yet also extremely sophisticated at the same time. Like for me the upper right hand menu bar disappears entirely in dark mode (Android Firefox) - it seems still fully functional but I could not see it to know to click under most conditions - but those category arrangements and how they improve discoverability, it just makes so much sense!

Wow, now I’m as excited about this project as about Sublinks:-).

Pretty much, as others have explained here. I wanted to add that in addition to its fork Mbin there is also the Sublinks project to make a new implementation of the ActivityPub protocol and thus surf the Fediverse independent of Lemmy. https://sublinks.org/ (link to GitHub there too)