- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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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There are no bots making empty arguments or basing the news.
We want, we post, we dont, we dont.
Simpleverse.
We donut
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.
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?
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.
Personally, I think you just proved their point. Anything they know from talking to people who know things is immediately dismissed with “oh, it’s anecdotal at best”.
Source? ;)
Lmao, you think THIS is a good place to get news? Half the time it’s just reposted reddit ahahahaha
Add Twitter as well
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
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.
deleted by creator
The Australian Subreddits got overrun by extremist right wing people who tend to be 20x louder than anyone else, and exaggerate everything.
I don;'t think this is just Australian issue
Probably not. There used to be shitty subs like the Donald and fat people hate too.
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 😂
Yeah and if you’re IP banned your fucked
If you’re not shadow banned
I suspect they shadow banned me first for a few days, and probably pissed off a few racists who kept watching my account.
I had an account for 10+ years before deleting it and creating a new one. My old account never even got banned from a subreddit once in all that time. And I had other accounts Before that, so I suspect I was targeted on the last account I bothered with
Waves
Lol
the only problem is the lack of niche from like in some reddit subs, not main subs, and people there are unlikely to migrate here. plus the bots therer drum all the engagement to get people interested. when an instance vanishes it takes the content with them and i dint see the last one recover from it.
That’s where I’m at too. I never spent much time on the bigger subs on Reddit. Mostly spent my time in the special interest/hobby subs. There were some pretty awesome communities in there. Unfortunately, I wandered out of my lane, and I decided to tell some MAGA assclown that he wasn’t just licking boots, he was deep throating them. According to Reddit, this was harassment, even though this prick was going around saying Alex Pretti deserved to die. As a result, I was permabanned. Oh well.
I was just talking about this on discord (unironically). Something I genuinely miss about reddit (among other things) is being able to go to a TV show subreddit and engage on topics by strictly quoting lines from the show back at each other. But to have that meant all the other shit, where you can’t quote Wayne’s World 2 without automod thinking you’re advocating violence. The world I want and the world we have cannot seem to co-exist. And I am not sure it should. I’m just not sure it shouldn’t either. And my side is always losing.
It takes very little effort to open and run a community here, be the change you want to see. :)
I disagree. It’s easy if you want to use a community as your personal blog without any interaction from others. It’s hard to get an actual community running.
People are more likely to participate if you are. :) But if the space exists, natural discovery can happen too. You do not have to do much more than open the conversation.
I generally agree with activite communities being a self reinforcing feedback loop. That said, one of the challenges federation creates is fragmentation for “the same” community across multiple instances. As a result, each community appears relatively inactive as they’re all vying for engagement with each other.
That’s ok though, this place is a slow burn.
@IMALlama @fediverse Is this bad? Seems like this lets the “best” community rise to the top, for whatever definition of “best” the community chooses. Otherwise you start interfering with freedoms and setting a judge to decide what communities “should” be
i love lemmy for what it is now. it sadly doesn’t have some communities as active here as reddit may, like stuff for soccer in particular for me, but it’s solid for everything else
To me it feels like Reddit mini
The whole “look” of lemmy seems to be an homage to reddit but the hate levels are really dialed down here and there seems to be more reasonable people.
I’m having a blast here.
Not only because it gives you the content that you choose. And there’s no shorts, no ads, …no superfluous bs (god I hate fb, I fucking loathe it).
But also, everything is within reach. The options are within the options. Done.
@ekZepp funny, I thought this is what Google search is nowadays:
“Threads was worthless because it’s the most boring social media website ever imagined. It’s a social media network designed by brands for brands, like if someone made a cable channel that was just advertisements and meta commentary about the advertisements you just saw. Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail.” @matdevdugLOL Oh dear! LOL
@ekZepp @matdevdug “So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. 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.”
@ekZepp @matdevdug “Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn’t a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night.”
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.”
One of my policies to make this place less insufferable, is to block people who behave in ways that I object to.
For example if somebody shows up in a Windows thread, and just types in “Linux!” I’m blocking that person. Add something germane or novel or fuck right the fuck off, that’s my attitude.
It’s full of leftist purity testing, that’s for sure. And, you can’t say certain things even if they are actually true.
Purity testing is a good thing, it keeps shit out of your milk and feds out of your org
i block tankie instances, and tankie posts.
Yeah fuck that. I’d rather everyone just be themselves.
And the eight and final rule of fediverse, if this is your first time discussing linux distros, you have to fight.
Felt.
Amen!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Also, there is no central power that has to make the line go up. I remember reddit like before 2014 and that was much like here in many ways (in an older kind of way, more racism and smut), but they just had to shoehorn in moar users more and more and more, and forbid any troublesome subs (while leaving other troublesome ones ofc.).
So IMO there is a real difference, we cannot grow too big or we’d just split off into new entities.
This is how I see it. If fedi proper becomes mainstream then us old heads will just recreate the old fedi and guard who we federate with very closely.
Most people aren’t here for commerce, so I think it makes sense to keep some areas aggressively social only.
Malls versus parks or libraries kind of thing.
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.
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.
israel is pretty new on the scene, only after '23 they significantly increased thier propaganda funding, russia still beats them with billions per year on propaganda, of course its not limited to just social media.
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.
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.
I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement.
I do. And that’s also why if you consciously choose Lemmy as your first line of internet discussion, I encourage you to help build a critical mass to sustain your particular niche or topic.
I encourage you to help build a critical mass to sustain your particular niche or topic.
I’m going to keep posting my insect and spider pictures then! :)
i see people going back to reddit, assuming they dint get shadowbanned, if content disappears.
unless you enter .ml environment…
Or hexbear, Lemmygrad.ml, hilariouschaos, and [edit: false stuff removed] maga.place.
Lemmy definitely has its dark corners.
lemmytoday isnt conservative, i havnt even noticed one, most of the actual conservatives have largely been defederate long time ago. also they wouldnt survive on a small platform anyways, because of how little interactions they get.
Thank you for correcting me. I edited my comment to indicate that it was maga.place.
I really do not understand all the .ml hate. If you have it so much why are you using their technology (Lemmy)? So much bullshit being reposted as fact. Basically echo chamber brigading. I left Reddit to escape this shit…
Edit: although judging by your post history you lack conviction and joke about everything, so maybe I missed the mark
From one socialist (me) to another (you, presumably), the lemmy.ml hate comes from:
- Conservatives who dislike socialism
- Liberals who dislike socialism
- Socialists who think Stalin and Mao were anti-democratic fuckheads, and don’t enjoy being around “socialists” who like them.
I like Lemmy, but can at the same time dislike people who like things I consider to be authoritarian, even if those people created the platform in the first place.
Viewing lemmy.ml content on ‘All-Top’ is a rather happy medium for me, still get to see some of the best memes
I’m definitely not a socialist. .ml is where I landed when I joined due to not knowing any better and joining the largest (at the time) instance, and honestly the outside hate is keeping me there.
Of you hate it so much, why are you using their technology?
Oh boy, this isn’t a question you want being asked of people (yourself included).
Really reeks of “if you hate capitalism why do you participate in it?”
I am ver intelligen
That’s why I’m advocating for people to switch to piefed and stop donating to the lemmy project which funds .ml.
Unfortunately the “attitude” system makes Piefed unusable.
Whats the “attitude” system?
PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes you give, displays that on your profile and if you downvote too much it takes away your downvote button. That happened to me after a weekend of use. This is Lemmy. There’s a lot here that needs downvoting.
Here is the full explanation :)
Are you downvoting to disagree or are you downvoting because it’s not contributing to the conversation?
Agree, this seems completely toxic and ripe for abuse.
That’s why
Which is? I’m still missing something here.
I really do not understand all the .ml hate. If you have it so much why are you using their technology (Lemmy)?
Piefed is a derivative of Lemmy. So you’re not getting away from it.
And Lemmy is a derivative of Reddit so by your logic you haven’t escaped from it.
Yeah, there’s definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it’s not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.
There’s just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you’re funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there’s none though.
As soon as there is “unlimited” content, the vast majority of said content is shit
Lemmy as far as I can tell is mostly dup posts and blind links, especially links to youtube. The absence of Spez is of course priceless, but otherwise Lemmy is duller than plenty of single-issue blogs or forums, or even the still-decaying corpse of Usenet. That article is about Mastodon, which has a different crowd than Lemmy does. I’m not big on the “follower” model though, so I’m not there very much.
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
FOSS dominates by sheer persistence growing slowly as everything else burns bright and extinguishes until it’s the best remaining option.
It’s the slow way, but it’s the right way.
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.
See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.
Spot on.
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.
I wouldn’t say it’s “not up to the challenge” insomuch that like when you want to convince someone to not use Chrome, you’re running into the problem that you have to create a framework under which the amount of problem Chrome can be can actually be measured/registered.
People always assume “Yeah but the average user doesn’t care”, but never truly read that line and realize what it implies.
It’s not that my mum opens Chrome, sees that it’s 74/100 on the problematic-software-you-shouldn’t-use-scale, and then decided to use it anyways.
She opens it. That’s it. It ends there.There is no “This is a 74/100 problem”.
There is no problematic-software-you-shouldn’t-use-scale.
There is no scale.
There isn’t even the conceptual idea for it, and hence no reason or impetus to ever internally have such a scale.And now comes an important question: Why? Or rather, why not?
And the answer is both easier and also impossibly harder than most of us trying to convince others would want to accept: Because it doesn’t matter.
To my mum, she couldn’t give a flying fuck what others think about Chrome, she wants to open a web page. She has actual problems in her actual life, she doesn’t care a rat’s arse what the tiny computer she looks up the weather and contacts her kids on does to allow her to do that internally. She’s worried about her health, about her colon surgery healing or about her mum (my grandma is 93) having fallen down.Well, yes, “why don’t you care about things?” is a timeless problem. People don’t like to see beyond the immediate. Probably because in pre-history, the creatures that focused on right now did better than the ones who went “but if we keep cutting down the trees, eventually it’s going to cause problems.”
Well, now we have many problems, and our brains have not advanced.
People are fucking addicted to instagram and I’m the annoying “get rid of that shit” preacher to everyone I can. My gf has reduced her usage, but still checks it from time to time.
I always ask “Do you really need to use it?” - and almost always, their answer is “not really, but it’s the only place I can find X”. Some of my gf’s friends use it to find new places to go. Some of my boardgaming friends still use it, mostly to “know what events are coming up” or what new games are being released.
Instagram is essentially this age’s yellow pages of a telephone list, small businesses are super dependent on it and they’re forced to post fucking stories everyday or get erased by the algorithm
It’s one of those self fueling problems. Businesses post on Instagram because people go there, and people go there in part because that’s where they found out about businesses doing stuff.
Better options are possible, but the big money is backing this hell. Less money to be made from RSS feeds , web rings, and email newsletters.
I don’t use any social media other than this. I find out about bands I like playing from their email lists or bandsintown. I’m on a couple “things happening in the city” email newsletters. It doesn’t demand my attention.
I also wish they would, but ive realized a lot of people have no self control or discipline. I guess I do because of some challanges during my life. But for most people, its difficult to even stop eating unhealthy food, and thats not even difficult. :)
But for most people, its difficult to even stop eating unhealthy food, and thats not even difficult.
It is if you are poor. Healthy food costs more than junk, in the short-term.
Ah yes, didnt think about that. I dont blame any poor people for doing what they need to survive. I would steal food and do what is required if I needed to.
That’s not even difficult? Get out more, man.
I dont think its difficult. Nobody has a gun to my head forcing me to do it.
Difficult things in life are things like being permanently sick, disabled, being poor, being ugly, being bullied, being with a toxic partner, having a toxic boss etc.
But not eating unhealthy food, thats not difficult. Unless you are poor, like someone said above. Then its difficult because you cant choose something else.
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.
That’s not the problem. The problem is how fucking slow it is. It has such few users, I see the same post in the early am as the late pm. IRL I’m an introvert, but online I’m a social fucking butterfly, and I need to give and receive attention. Also, you are highly overestimating yourself if you think dumb people can figure this out, because I’m dumb af
Plenty of stupid people in the fediverse so I dont think we will win any prices for that, guys. And plenty of people who think they are smarter than average, and zero people who think they are dumber than average. The usual stuff.
I know you probably didn’t mean this, but I don’t think accessibility barriers are good. Diversity of thought is strength and bad comments naturally sink to the bottom.
After seeing how many terrorist ideologies have been allowed to thrive by claiming First Amendment protection since 2016.
No.
“Diversity of thought” my ass. I’m sure your wonderfully-diverse thoughts are just what all of us need to hear, but if they can’t pass muster under human moderation, they’re not worth platforming.
Pretending these comments only come from “stupid” people is abelist and provably false.
I am defending those with barriers, not fascists.
Turning to authorities to suppress fascism doesn’t seem practical. We need to cultivate good democratic systems and education systems that create citizens capable of thinking critically and turning down bad ideologies on their own. Citizens should be empowered, not coddled.
LOL
Referring to self-hosting, human moderators as “authorities” is hilarious.
I remember when, here in Missouri, the people wanted to regulate predatory payday lenders. Those opposed called their fucking organizations “Such and Such for Equal Credit Access”. Sounds nice right? Almost like the term “Diversity of Thought”.
What you refer to as “empowerment”, I refer to as a cancer. It needs to be cut out, like they did back in the day on Cable Street.
If you feel so disempowered, go have a conversation with Grok. He’ll make you feel super special.
Apologies, I think we are talking past each other. I think I misunderstood your initial comment. It read like a suggestion that lemmy’s more extreme communities were terroristic and a criticism of the first amendment, which suggested that you believe the government should be allowed to dictate what kind of speech is or isn’t acceptable – in particular on these little platforms. My comment was in response to that notion.
Re-reading it with your second comment, I think you’re saying that “terrorist ideologies” have been allowed to develop on conventional social-media by claiming first amendment protections in order to not moderate communities, and 2016 was not in reference to early lemmy but to the MAGA movement. That makes more sense, and I generally agree that conventional social-media follows irresponsible stewardship practices.
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.
