The linked post given on the second point is a bit flimsy. It’s basically saying that if you use evidence published by a person with shitty views, you must have them too. To me, that’s absurd as claiming that referencing FBI statistics makes someone a federal agent.
It was made very clear from the start that .ml was not meant to be a ‘default instance’.
The fact that Lemmy doesn’t calculate and show a user’s total post score is proof itself that it doesn’t reflect Lemmy’s political leanings.
I don’t know enough to say if it’s more insular or not, I don’t know how common it is to have the default sort as All, but we’re definitely worldly enough for other instances to have some users pushing stereotypes on us when we comment.
You do have some point about lemmy.ml having enough instances that you can get by with Local as default, but I assume most people would be subscribing to or exploring other instances too? I really don’t know.
Honestly, it depends on your circles and network. I only remember seeing The Picard Maneuver maybe twice, didn’t know of them before this week. I’ve seen your username far more, for example.
and especially here
Good to know that old post is still useful. (It’s also nice to see that wolfballs, bakchodi and exploding-heads all died.)
well I’d say since non-federated Lemmy is just a forum with a bunch of stuff for federation that you won’t use
It’s not the same as every other forum software, or even every other content aggregator.
with only one instance, it’s little more than a mediocre forum.
What would make it mediocre or not is the community, and pre-federation Hexbear, or even reddit itself, is proof that you don’t need federation to have an active community, it simply makes it far easier.
Federation doesn’t make the rest of the software worse.
It’s not like wanting a car to solely generate heat with the exhaust, it’s closer to using a four-wheel-drive car on regular city streets.
I haven’t checked around since the reddit API fiasco, but there were unfederated Lemmy instances. As Diva mentions in more detail, Hexbear used to be unfederated and it was the largest of all instances. Even without federation, it’s a viable, actively developed content aggregator. So I wouldn’t call it silly, it’s a valid choice.
and wasn’t it revealed that that Trump’s garbage dump was running defedded Masto?
Gab is also a Mastodon fork, which was originally defederated before being blocked from most instances and bullied by the remaining freeze peach instances, so they mechanically removed the federation code.
I’ve also heard some special interest communities on Mastodon intentionally defederate from the broader network for privacy reasons.
I personally don’t value the microblogging format and never really gave it a shot. It’s just personal preference. In my opinion, the site format mechanically encourages low-effort junk, and there’s enough of that on sites like this. I only use microblogs as an inconvenient feed for specific niche news updates I can’t get elsewhere, like I would an RSS-type feed.
With that said, I support people posting on fediverse microblogging sites rather than on xitter or bluesky. I have to jump through a lot of moving hoops to even view xitter feeds without an account.
Joining an existing community is usually easier than starting a new one.
There’s also the problem of management. Lots of Lemmy comms are abandoned and, while there are some I would like to exist, I just do not visit regularly enough to be responsible for moderating more and more and more communities across the fedi. So I don’t create new comms.
Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.
In a way, it is. It’s also much further uphill if you consider it a solo task. These are absolutely valid things to vent about, even if they are solvable.
(I felt a lot more like this before the reddit API exodus)
The easiest way would be to quickly look up the ones you don’t know yet. Many have Wikipedia pages and the others usually have good home pages explaining what they do. But as you can see, there’s a wide range for hosting different kinds of media and discussions.
What does that have to do with Cory’s concerns? They don’t want to build an audience on Bluesky because that promotes Bluesky, a dangerous place to build up, in the view given by the article. It would be neglectful to let it gain enough power to become a Twitter 2.0, we have an opportunity to prevent us repeating history.
That’s serious stuff if true. I would often the upload date to avoid reuploads and regurgitated (and lower visual quality) content. It’s also extremely useful to know how outdated some advice or guide is.
I assume you also have to trust the servers which the accounts you’re messaging are stored on. (Although there are real situations where all users will be on the same server, where this is obviously a great benefit.)
Haha they thought it was too easy and were proven wrong!
Honestly, if a place is obscure enough, even smaller barriers of entry help, like forums that don’t let you post on important boards until you build a reputation. There’s only so much effort an adversary is willing to put in, and if there isn’t a financial incentive or huge political incentive, that barrier could be low.
One of the first few instances I heard of was botsin.space, which has been around since at least 2017. Bots aren’t new. (Not sure where you’re pulling “AI” from, this is old* tech, and I don’t mean that negatively)
(edit: I accidentally a word and didn’t realize you wrote ‘auto-report instead of deleting them’. Read the following with a grain of salt)
I’ve played (briefly) with automated moderation bots on forums, and the main thing stopping me from going much past known-bad profiles (e.g. visited the site from a literal spamlist) is not just false positives but malicious abuse. I wanted to add a feature which would censor an image immediately with a warning if it was reported for (say) porn, shock imagery or other extreme content, but if a user noticed this, they could falsely report content to censor it until a staff member dismisses the report.
Could an external brigade of trolls get legitimate users banned or their posts hidden just by gaming your bot? That’s a serious issue which could make real users have their work deleted, and in my experience, users can take that very personally.
How was it default? I’ve been here for years and in all that time, it was never default. It was one of the most popular, and the most widely shared, but that’s not the same at all.