What do they currently know about the Internet? Are they currently using a microblogging or discussion platform? Difficult to answer this without knowing that.

It would probably be easiest to do that with an automod bot… but I don’t think there are many benefits to it. After all don’t we want there to be a lot of content and engagement so that this place can become a good place to find information, interaction and entertainment?

I often post more than 2 posts per day to the same community simply because more than one interesting and relevant thing about the community’s topic happened on the same day. When I post the first one, I can’t yet predict how many more there will be on the same day, so can’t yet prioritize in order to not exceed the limit.

Data scraping, there’s not really anything or not much that can or should be done about it. ActivityPub is, as the name implies, intended to be mostly public. If something is public, it’s public.

Bots, that is a more interesting question that may become more relevant in the future.

Nope, not mocking you.

I see the word time a lot of times here too.

You’re talking about two different "OP"s.

The OP of this post isn’t banned on lemmy.ml, but the OP of the post that this thread is about (i.e. that can’t be seen there) is: https://lemmy.ml/u/breadsmasher@lemmy.world

Yup. I remember in the 2000s and early 2010s it was very widely agreed that websites that allow user generated content are a good thing and politics should advance their existence, not try to pass laws making it harder.

Nothing about the facts has changed since then. Politicians’ attitudes meanwhile…

It’s a problem for any kind of social media, not just federated.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/04/eus-top-court-just-made-it-literally-impossible-to-run-a-user-generated-content-platform-legally/

I was already posting on web forums (also wikis) before Facebook or Twitter became popular, when the Internet was not yet very established and posting things on it oneself was something only few people thought of doing.

I was outright excited when I saw “social media” becoming more mainstream. I thought at the time, at least more people are using the Internet, even if it’s “just” Facebook or Twitter (which I didn’t and still don’t see much value in), at least it’s the Internet, that’s a good thing because the Internet is a great and exciting thing for society and a wonderful source of entertainment!

Now we live in a world where the general public mostly only knows how to operate social media apps, otherwise has no tech proficiency at all, doesn’t even know what else is out there on the Internet, and doesn’t know or care how the social media apps they’re using are designed to manipulate them. And politicians are busy working to make it harder for good idealistic people to solve those problems. :(

From some things maybe. Plenty of recent “online safety” style laws around the world have no exceptions based on platform size.

This is precisely the point of literally all the recent new laws regulating online platforms, including this.

To kill smaller ones that can’t comply with those laws, so that only large ones remain (if at all) and it is easier to censor and surveil the users there.

I just hope that at some point, people will figure out how wrong politicians of the 2020s were to do all of this, and a new free and open Internet will rise from the ashes as long as any remain.

I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.

agreed

Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

I don’t agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.

At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T

agreed

and so they should be given a longer leash

Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.

Governments also do not have the resources to chase down

and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?

algorithms are

Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you’re following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.

I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet’s original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach…

But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.

u wot m8

The article simultaneously takes the positions:

• that it’s a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on “social media addiction” was well decided. (in the section “How Governments Are Regulating Social Media”)
• that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section “How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned”)

Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it’s possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn’t have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.

more national instances would probably solve that, i think, so you can just go to your local one.

That’s roughly how I chose my instance… I thought I’d choose an instance geographically close to me for latency reasons and such. I didn’t know anything about different Lemmy instances at the time and didn’t (for example) know that my instance actually hosts very few popular communities, so I’d be participating mostly in remote ones. :D

https://xkcd.com/810/ was oddly prophetic

Is the source code already available?

not really, every Lemmy instance has an owner…

What federation is is that every Lemmy instance gets some of its data not just from its users, but also from other Lemmy instances. You can think of each Lemmy instance as one mini-reddit, in principle there is no difference between reddit and one single Lemmy instance. Federation means that Lemmy instances copy their data from/to each other so that you can talk to users who use other ones too.

It’s harder to delete things here than on non-federated services because everything you do here gets copied to lots of other servers, which are supposed to delete things when you do, but it’s impossible to guarantee that they always will (on purpose or by mistake).

I once deleted a comment here almost immediately after saving it, but then still got multiple upvotes for it. I found out that this was because one big instance hadn’t deleted it for whatever reason and its users had no idea that I’d meant to delete it.

Yes, it’s working.