It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.
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Wow. I had to stop reading this one. Long on words, poor on writing and spelling and neither circling a theme so much as just edgelording on everything social, I’m not sure whether it was ever getting somewhere.
But life’s too short for 6000 words on The Things That Suck With Stuff I Don’t Use.
So here is a stupid question
What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it? I’ve hear much about fediverse and Lemmy, but is Lemmy part of it or not? Are other systems like Blue sky a part of it or not? Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?
I learnt something new today, cheers
I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact.
I kind of want to know the context of this
Also, do seals taste more like fish or more like mammal? Or like whale?
Idk, it looks disgusting and is overall described as fishy and oily.
There is someone on Reddit saying its like a mix of Ahi Tuna and Moose lmao. Unfortunately I have never had straight Moose steak, so I can’t really imagine it.
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
One even reported me for being racist (successfully) despite the fact that the entire time I was fighting back against the racism
Even worse, you now need to log in to even see it at all in a mobile browser. So f that
Those same fuckers are on a roll now, winning one MP seat.
Yeah. And they were apparently “never going to win in SA either”. Everyone was happy with that result. SA is happy they lost, and ON supporters were somehow happy with being absolute failures too 😂
Stuff like this is why I banned Reddit first.
I was perma banned for calling someone “A fucking piece of human garbage” as they openly and brazenly advocated for the death of trans people.
I got banned, the person calling for Trans people to be killed did not.
That’s unfortunately pretty standard.
Whereas, on Facebook, nobody gets banned. I’ve literally reported people inciting violence towards others. However, it seems permitted by community standards these days
I am having a great time exploring the Fediverse and of course having a blast here in Lemmy. That said I have found a lot of limitations as well that makes the Fediverse work “for real” when you want to go in deep into the federation part of it. For example I was really trying to move away from instagram and I wanted to create my own instance of Pixel fed. The expectation is that I have my own instance in the fediverse I can own and I can connect to the rest of the network. The reality is that from your little bubble you can’t see old posts from accounts on other servers. Only new ones. Which does not really make it work for real. There are plenty of other use cases that work better, but assuming that’s the “only way” and it’s perfect is not being fully honest. A lot of people like to shit on ATproto, but it’s a protocol that feels less extreme on federation and more friendly on the “normal person” usability part of it. Every person have their own needs in the end.
I can’t speak to how Pixelfed works, but PieFed pulls in old posts. e.g. when lemm.ee (a Lemmy instance) shut down, several communities were migrated, including its old content.
Perhaps one day Pixelfed will implement that as well.
I really hope so! That was a big let down moment.
Tbf all of these tools - and Pixelfed more than most - are so very new, and being developed on a shoestring budget using volunteer efforts that are not seeking capitalistic remuneration. And being able to pull in old posts is a very niche feature that affects an instance pretty much only once, upon its initial creation and then never again, so it might not be a top priority for its dev team to implement. Though a lot of teams for Fediverse tools (like PieFed) tend to be quite responsive, and pinging them may help them realize that it needs to be done sooner, i.e. communication of that may be helpful rather than annoying?
Whereas ATproto’s main downsides lay in it lacking “robustness” for the future - what happens when like pretty much every Internet company that ever existed (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.), they decide to switch from attempts to attract a wider user base to trying to monetizate its content? Suddenly all those ATproto connections become a liability where someone can access the content held hostage therein without having to watch advertisements that benefit the main branch, thereby switching the collaborative model to a competitive one.
ATproto is strictly better in the short term, and will cause much pain later on, as opposed to the Fediverse that has some onboarding and ongoing pains now but to some people offer better hopes for the future of a more unfettered/unconstrained method of interaction between people, where control is placed more democratically into the hands of the end users rather than centralized authorities.
Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.
If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell “Source?!” and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.
However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn’t line up with their narrative, it’s hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being “fake news”.
The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it’s a meaningless victory.
Not sure I understand your point. Your self reported experiences, as a random internet stranger in a sea of bots and malevalent actors, IS only amecdotal at best.
Welcome to the post-modern era of truth. Where objective reality doesn’t matter, only personal truth and reality. If what you’re saying doesn’t fit my personal truth, you’re using fake news or making it up. Even scientific research is fake news if it doesn’t fit my narrative. Just look at who funded the research.
Honestly, idk what we’re going to do. It feels like with all the age verification laws being pushed, the mass surveillance, and the quelling of dissenting opinions, the world admins are looking at 1984 as a guidebook. Are we going to get a Ministry of Truth established soon to “verify” what is accurate and what is not?
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
While that’s true, I don’t believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven’t ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven’t seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it’s small and hasn’t been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
We take it for granted that as the fediverse grows in numbers and nodes that it will continue to stay mostly contiguous.
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don’t have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not “filters”, just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone’s reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that… but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
This is the sort of advertisement we actually want
I think even if shills, bots and influencers gain traction in the fediverse, it’s still better than reddit or Instagram because of federation. There won’t be one corporation algorithmically feeding you ads. You can curate your experience more than you can on another platform.
There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don’t really matter.
Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it’s worth 0.2% of that budget.
And that’s just Israel.
I think that’s trying to solve the wrong problem.
If I had awesome moderating tools, identifying and deleting comments that violate the policy would be effortless. I would not need to ban a person, which as you aptly point out, can reappear forever. But, I can ban all of his violating comments, which are, after all, the true target and violation, not the commenter.
I actually like the slower pace. There’s no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don’t just see what I’m subscribed to. I’ll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that’s really hot elsewhere, or I’ll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It’s slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement.
Maybe I would have thought this at one point? I remember when you could get to the bottom of the All feed in one session.
Lemmy is probably the fastest paced social I go on now. I’ve got my people I follow on masto and a handful of forums. So coming to lemmy from those feels downright metropolitan.
And it has not enough users. If the fediverse ever became popular enough to hold significant marketshare, we’d see similar issues. The upside to the fediverse is that you can defederate from misinformation peddlers.
Fediverse doesn’t (as of yet) have a monetization path because of it’s “self hosted” structure - I put it in quotes because most people use large instances, but anyone can spin up their own and federate.
The big risk with this is that if it reaches a critical mass where advertisers see potential for profit, the mechanism that would be most convenient, especially with LLMs, is bots.
Say Toyota wants to promote their new car. They contract an advertising agency, who spins up a few dozen LLM agents trained on Lemmy data and instructions to talk up the latest new car. It might make posts, or just comments, but in all cases it will eventually promote that product.
All that for the cost of a few tokens, and the only giveaway would be the “AI phrasing”, if anyone catches it.
That’s already happening. Bots are posting from open instances, and malicious instances are manipulating votes.
The best solution I see is allowlisting servers you want to federate with.
Weird I thought the fediverse was mostly delusional leftists talking about how great life is in North Korea, China and Russia and how bad the imperial west is.
This is weird ass article. It’s like the author has never used an Internet forum before and didn’t understand how the Internet works.
Don’t stop at the Fediverse. Keep going. You’ve only just begun.
I really would like to somehow convince more people to adopt the idea that, like, Facebook and friends are run by bad people and you can choose not to use their products. Just stop. Find another way. Be uncomfortable for a little while.
But people aren’t up to the challenge.
Honestly people are more likely to just quit those websites rather than join new places. I support that though. And I am seeing a lot of people around me are going away from these platforms recently.
It’s also one of the most nitpicky whiny places you can visit. A new open source software/update just got released and it does something cool! “Well it’s not {x} compliant so it’s trash.” Or “If a solo developer or a team decides to use ‘AI’ then their entire project is AI slop.”
There are so many moments where I’m like “just shut the fuck up and enjoy the software/news/updates these strangers are providing for free.”
Amen!
It’s full of leftist purity testing, that’s for sure. And, you can’t say certain things even if they are actually true.
People are far less aggressive with their opinions compared to reddit. 90-95% of people here are decent people though with strong opinions. And as long as I can have a civil discussion with someone I think it’s a decent enough place to be, no matter what bias.
Even better.
Most instances have human moderation, gating for bots, and yes, and you actually have to take 5-10 minutes to figure out how it all works, so the stupid people are automatically excluded by sheer complexity.
I fucking love Mastodon.
Stupid people can just use AI, so nothing is truly barred, not like it requires more than a 3rd grade reading level either. Your post being upvoted this much shows how easy it is for the average NPC to make an account.
People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years.
Hopefully, unlike betamax and laserdisc, the fediverse will trudge on despite the megacorporate protocols
you don’t need special equipment to use the fediverse, so imo it’s unlikely it will “fail”
Yeah and I’d like to see it become increasingly scrappy and decentralised using lightweight fedi software like snac.
