That would cause me to miss many interesting threads that were created at a time when I happened not to be looking at Lemmy.

“New comments” it is for me, that causes threads to get bumped to the top as long as other people still find them interesting.

I looked at the two complaints you linked to and at how those threads seem to be displayed on these users’ instances:

• https://sfba.social/@otters_raft@lemmy.ca/115267196743748430
• https://mas.to/@otters_raft@lemmy.ca/115283224174559468

(edit: I don’t know why they aren’t displaying as links, but changing them to have a link text doesn’t help either, so I’m keeping them like this)

That looks the same as it has always looked, to the best of my knowledge. I’ve gotten at least one similar complaint before, from a Mastodon user who didn’t understand what they were looking at when they got a Lemmy post in their timeline. So I think the answer to your question is no, nothing changed, either it is a coincidence that you got two such complaints within a few days, or what actually changed is that your posts have (for whatever reason) become more visible on Mastodon.

I’m not sure I understand your substantive question very well.

There already is a bridge from RSS feeds to ActivityPub: https://rss-parrot.net/ (there are plenty of sources I follow through that).

The clue of what ActivityPub is for is in the name: it is for publishing one’s activities. For example “I’ve written a new blog post”, “I’ve commented on someone else’s activity”, “I’ve upvoted someone else’s comment”.

RSS is really just a structured format to describe the content of a website in simpler terms. It doesn’t ever send any information to anyone, it doesn’t have any mechanism for anyone else to interact.

I used to follow news sites directly through an RSS reader. But I would need to set that up separately on each device, including after reinstalling, which I just can’t be bothered to do. I know there are things like Feedly, but not everyone likes proprietary services and software that much. I like the fact that on Mastodon nowadays, I can follow both microbloggers and RSS feeds.

I don’t know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.

also useful, thanks, the one I linked to works for any website though, not just Lemmy instances

It’s not loading for me either.

In order to not just give you a fish, but also teach you how to fish: you can check whether any website is down for everyone or just you using https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ (a short URL for this is isup.me).

“All” means all. I suggest not using “all” but subscribing to things you actually want to see.

I had some problems accessing my instance for a few minutes earlier today, but right now everything is working smoothly.

because the WWW is now so unimaginably big that something needs to show up on the first page, and except for very obscure search terms, that “something” will probably be more well-known pages that have invested more in SEO

Things you send to friends and family will not be indexed by Google, so that is somewhat useless for this purpose.

while I don’t know the answer to the question, I am very certain that

or would whole fediverse crash

is not it; if that could make the whole fediverse crash, someone could do it maliciously. At most it will cause problems delivering your messages or delivering messages to you.

yeah, I saw your instance only after posting the above comment :D

Still, some other people reading this thread might not know this; I think the way you guys are doing it is a good way to get your articles more widely spread, I think it would be good if other media organizations did the same.

Media organizations typically don’t want to post (only) to discussion groups, they want to provide a way to follow them as organizations.

That being said, @heiseonline@social.heise.de does sometimes mention threadiverse communities in its posts so they appear in those communities.

probably not, maybe you could ask a former sysadmin of lemm.ee whether they have a copy of the database and can extract this data for you, but if that doesn’t work, they’re probably gone

For a link, you’ll see it after posting if it appears in the list of places the link has been crossposted to, at which point you can delete it.

An image, that is more technically challenging because it requires detecting whether two images are the same, which is not as trivial as it sounds. But for images, I think reposts are no big deal anyway, many people will not have seen it the first time.

I don’t see a lot of the things you’re trying to avoid on my instance. But I almost always browse “subscribed” and mostly have no idea what’s going on in communities I’m not subscribed to.

I’m currently unable to find a minimum age requirement on my instance, so she could try that. I’ve never given this topic much thought because Lemmy didn’t exist when I was a minor…

The fediverse is somewhat inherently a low-trust environment. Centralized social media (including traditional web forums) has only one database of users, so its administrators are able to keep track of similarities (in geolocation, email addresses, style even of deleted posts, etc.). Here every instance has its own database of users; if you register on another instance, it will be very difficult for anyone to figure out you’re the same person.

The fediverse is also still obscure enough that mostly it’s still a relatively high-quality place and this has mostly not been a real problem. You should join an instance, and communities, that moderate to give you an enjoyable experience. What that means varies according to person; I don’t mind the things you list very much, but am very glad I have not gotten any messages from fediverse chick Nicole in a while by now.

I may have found one (coincidentally a few minutes after seeing this thread): https://discuss.tchncs.de/modlog?userId=20528183

no, I agree with the above user that it would be better to federate images too, for at least the following reasons:

• redundancy: see the OP
• privacy reasons: images loaded from other instances inform the other instance that one is viewing those images, do you trust all of them?
• censorship reasons: some lemmy instances are blocked in my workplace and I can never look at images from them when browsing at work; others may be blocked in entire countries

If I’m not mistaken, Mastodon already does federate images to other instances, so it isn’t unheard of.