I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.

This is why I don’t want Lemmy to become mainstream and would rather see another Reddit clone pick up the slack.

Lemmy is like circa 2010 Reddit, minus the jailbait, creepshots, incest-posting, racism and all the other degenerate shit.

I’m curious, what led to the December user spike?

I’m not worried about Threads joining the fediverse. They can’t even properly implement hashtags and trending topics, which already puts them far behind Mastodon and X.

Also, how would users on a microblogging platform be able to interact with a Lemmy instance? I’m a bit confused about how ActivityPub works in that respect.

The ‘they can farm our data’ argument is a bit moot when Lemmy is already publicly accessible, and it makes us no better than Spez if we are trying to combat people for 'data scraping"

I’m not too worried about Threads joining the metaverse. What Mark Zuckerberg has failed to realise is just how barebones his Twitter clone is.

Mastodon has support for trending topics and hashtags. Threads doesn’t. Lacking such an absolutely basic feature that any microblogging platform would otherwise support is why Threads dropped from 500M active users to just a fraction of it.

I joined it near launch, made a few posts and then stopped. There is nothing worthwhile on Threads and I don’t think leeching on to the fediverse.

Also, I can kinda understand why you all rushed to defederate from Gab when they tried to jump on the federation bandwagon, but not Meta.

Zuckerberg doesn’t need us to overtake X. He needs to actually make a functional social media app first, then put more resources into moderating it.

X is still on top despite Elon Musk’s stewardship because his competitors are either too small (most federated instances), require too big of a technical hurdle for the average Joe to use (the fediverse in general), or are downright incompetent (Threads.)

This is why I believe federation should be an opt-in process rather than servers being federated by default.

Some of you may remember when Lemmy World was flooded with CSAM by other hostile instances and had to temporarily disable image uploads.

Hentai depicting prepubescent girls. That shit is highly illegal in the UK, Switzerland and some US states and is punished as severely as CSAM.

I’m contributing because I’m a bit of a meme repository and I get a more positive reception here than I do on Reddit.

Lemmy is in a healthy state.

Is this why I couldn’t upload a meme to the Lemmy World servers earlier today?

Fuck…

Child sexual abuse material, a.k.a. child pornography.

Apollo going to Lemmy would be the ultimate middle finger to Spez, especially with the false accusations of blackmail.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll keep using Sync as it’s actually good.

I wonder how the graph will look in a month’s time now that Sync is in open beta.

Gonna play devil’s advocate here.

If Elon is truly able to turn The App Formerly Known As Twitter into an ‘everything app’ that’s actually worth using, this could be a bone-headed move that pays off in dividends. It depends on what he plans to introduce to X within the next year or two. Transforming X into a messaging app won’t be enough.

Musk’s line of thought here isn’t completely asinine. Let’s not deny that superapps like LINE, WeChat, Alipay, Taobao and others exist, and absolutely dominate the digital landscape in their own regions.

Problem is, Twitter already has stiff competition. Threads is by far its largest competitor, and the moment Zuckerberg implements hashtags and trending topics, X is going to hemorrhage users.

This is honestly the direction Steve Huffman should’ve taken with Reddit instead of jacking up API prices and gouging every third-party app out of existence. Imagine if RPAN became a legitimate monetized mobile livestreaming platform instead of some dumb social experiment with seriously limited broadcasting times/broadcasters at once, or if Spez allowed content creators to sell access to premium content á la Tumblr Post+, Fansly, Patreon or OnlyFans. Enough e-girls have been astroturfing the shit out of Reddit to plug their paywalled collection of nudes, so may as well cut out the middle-man and drive OF out of business.