I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:

… lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances …

The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.

I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.

I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.

what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances

That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.

They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.

Your source is 3 months old and doesn’t back up your claims.

what does “hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities” mean in practice.

It is an attempt to pre-populate new instances with some popular communities which is seen as a way to improve discoverability. I find the general concept of using “popularity” for that to be somewhat problematic, but the main issue I have with the actual implementation is that it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that*.

One instance? There’s at least two. But does that really matter? Reddit had r/TheDonald and r/conservative, and trying to get those people to fuck off and stop proselytizing elsewhere was like trying to play whack-a-mole against an anthill.

Here, you block the tankie instances and move on with your life.

Might be. It is definitely a thing, though.

When I used to work for a large American corporation that sold products to consumers, they took it extremely seriously and breaking it would result in disciplinary action. It probably had something to do with advertisement laws, but it also easily could have just been because it makes the company look very bad.

one place even asked people to write fake reviews on Trustpilot/job sites

That sounds unethical, to say the least. Did they verify if you actually did it, or just “suggest” you do?

Corporations drill it deep into your head that you do not positively promote your own products or negatively review competitor products without both making it clear that you (1) work for $Corp; and (2) are sharing your own, personal opinion.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to Plex, they suck at training employees about social media policies.

plus these are benches too it looks like

This part is the most surprising. For something meant to go in urban areas, where’s the hostile architecture? No railings between seats? No spikes?

Oh, interesting. I knew something was off about the place when I kept seeing anti-“woke” conservative opinion pieces posted there, but I thought it was just a bunch of MAGA morons voluntarily role-playing as “independent” “journalists”.

I actually jumped ship a while back. I agree that Plex is a business and they do deserve to get paid for development and infrastructure costs, but it’s the blatant enshitification that I have a big issue with.

They chose to lock a previously-free feature behind a paywall for everybody and asked for even more money to get it back. The less shitty alternative would have been to ask only the users who needed to use the relays to purchase a Plex Pass. Or, if they wanted to make it seem like a positive thing, they could have made the new subscription into an “enhanced quality” remote streaming experience that enabled higher bitrates over relays.

They gave their users the middle finger by picking the most transparently greedy option that they could get away with justifying.

Fair enough, although that actually has worse optics IMO. It goes from “this costs us money, so pay us” to “we need money, so we’re creating an artificial reason for you to pay us”

The self-hosted servers use UPnP and NAT-PMP to automatically forward the port used for media streaming.

Very, apparently.

They use UPnP and NAT-PMP1 to have clients directly stream the media from users’ own self-hosted servers. It costs them almost nothing in bandwidth to do that.

Software costs money how would they continue to developed it if not getting paid?

Apparently a hot take as evidenced the downvotes on my other comments here, but by adding things people want instead of taking away things people already have and charging more for it.

They don’t even have the excuse that they need to pay for the bandwidth costs of relaying video from servers to clients. Video is streamed directly from the user’s self-hosted server, using UPnP or NAT-PMP to make the server accessible from outside the local network.

And this isn’t a new feature they’re adding. Remote streaming was already implemented and generally available to users.

I don’t discount there being a cost in maintaining code over time, but it’s not as though they have to spend any significant employee time on improving it. They already support UPnP and NAT-PMP to have the clients connect directly to the self-hosted servers.

It would be nice if they added NAT hole punching on top of that, but it’s evidently good enough to work as-is in its current form. If they’re not even running relays to support more tricky networks (which the linked support article has no mention of), keeping this feature free costs them literally nothing extra.

No, it’s still wrong.

We have ways to do NAT traversal and hole punching on consumer routers. Failing that, UPnP and port forwarding exist. Or, god forbid, IPv6.

In the rare case that literally none of those are an option, they would have to use TURN to relay between an intermediary. That is a reasonable case to ask the user to pay for their bandwidth usage, but they don’t have to be greedy fuckers by making everyone pay for it.

This is enshittification and corporate greed. Nothing more, nothing less.

You need to use a different device and IP address. IP addresses are a dead giveaway for someone trying to create a second account, and even with a different address, browsers are easy to reliably fingerprint.

The reason for using an entirely different device* is to prevent advertising crap baked into your software from sending Twitter or other platforms any unique advertising ID associated with one of your old, banned IP addresses.

*With careful setup, a virtual machine with a dedicated VLAN and internet connection would work.

Mastodon doesn’t by design

There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn’t shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it’s not entirely lacking discovery features either.

Sure, but I was being literal. A non-negligible number of those comments are likely being automated.

We should really avoid antromorphizing non-humans. Call them bots, like most of them probably are.

That sounds right for the company whose CEO was appointed moderator of r/jailbait. This was before you had to accept an invitation to be moderator, but fuck Spez regardless.