Have all of the Lemmy instances (and kbin ones, too) now added email requirements, captcha, and maybe the little paragraph asking why you should have an account that Beehaw does?
Also, how do you identify bot accounts? Can you bulk ban accounts or.do they all have to be examined and dealt with individually?
ETA: I wasn't suggesting the paragraph. Just wondering what the instances are putting in to prevent bots. I actually tried to sign up for Beehaw, wrote my little paragraph, and then got the pinwheel of death, lol. I was never able to sign up, but lucked out with a kbin.social account. I have to add that it's pretty disappointing to be downvoted for simply asking a question. Feels like what I left at Reddit.
I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.
I may be wrong, I don't know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.
What is something someone can gain by swarming an instance or forums like yours with bots? I cant wrap my head around it. Also if someone has an instance and swarms it with bot accounts, it may seem like you got a popular instance but where is the revenue if there are noone who is able to click an ad? Do they do it just for the lols?
Federation can get messy when you start to compare instances between each other.
For one some instances disable down votes, so may count differently.
Then you might see delays in synchronisation for whatever reason.
Finally, federation & defederation. suppose you have instance A, B, C, and D but instance A has blocked C. Users on C comment in and upvote content on D. Instances A&B will download a copy of the stuff posted by D users, but only B will have upvotes contributed by C. Therefore, different upvotes counts.
Honestly, the people focus is what always put me off both Twitter and Mastodon. I want a focus on topics, not people. Everyone who can contribute something in a decent tone is welcome to the discussion but who is discussing things doesn’t really matter.
For that reason I don’t really like the term Peopleverse or even using Fediverse when you just mean the threaded conversation parts of it.
I want as little to do with the people focussed social media models like Facebooks, Instragram, Twitter,…
My grief with articles like this is that their “X is not there yet” statement rarely comes off as “It has rough edges but its improving”, but always as “This product is flawed. Dont even bother”.
And itd be fine if it’s just someone’s opinion, but here it’s someone’s opinion in a news article. The effect is that someone unaware of the fediverse will read that, assume that opinion is fact and never try the platform. Not only that, they’ll also start stating the same opinion to others as if they experienced it first-hand…
Articles should bridge the gap of knowledge! Stop dissuading people from trying new stuff and encourage them to give it a go!
Sure, promoting lemmy as a drop-in replacement of reddit is downright dishonest. But it never hurts to create an account and see what the fuss is about. The article should work as a heads up to avoid headaches, not the website altogether.
Who knows, maybe it will be a perfect replacement for you, despite everything. I know it was for me.
I’m making an active effort to approach Lemmy differently than Reddit. If I’m being negative, I won’t comment. If it’s a pointless debate on politics, I won’t join. Positive comments only.
With that in mind, and some breathing techniques, I’ll just say: the day Lemmy becomes in anyway related to cryptocurrencies is the day I’m immediately gone. Thanks for your input.
I think the most confusing bit is that there are multiple versions of the same “subreddit”, so communities with the same name on different instances. Right now its especially annoying, because we don’t know yet which of them will become the most popular. We need some way to combine those communities into one, preferably on the instance level so users mostly only see one entry per topic.
I think what makes it hard to understand as well it that sometimes stuff just doesn't work currently. Because of the influx of new users, for example.
And new users confuse something not working on the servers side as a mistake they made and get increasingly confused. When it all settled a bit and everything works as expected, I think at least a part of the confusion will be lifted and new users will have an easier time.
I agree that it sounds like your friend doesn’t want to put in the effort. But he’s right on a couple points. Lemmy is easy to learn and use, but that fact that you have to learn at all will scare most people away. People are used to immediate gratification. Sign up, maybe fill out a 2 sec questionnaire for your interests, enjoy. Lemmy isn’t streamlined to that level yet.
The lose of signal won’t matter. It happens to me all the time as I move from wifi to wifi.
For your third question, it depends on if you a have a key backup with a key security code. That’s something you should set up asap after your initial client login. If you do, then you can recover. You might want to look at github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/16202 for more explanation. The question comes up a lot.
Regardless, I’d make sure you’re always logged in twice if you can. Do you have Element Web running alongside Matrix? If you do, keep logged in on a desktop, or laptop. Just in case you lose the phone.
Definitely have backup passphrase/passkey. But is it true that (again assuming just one device) if I log out…then later log back in with the Passkey…that messages received while signed out won’t decrypt? That will be hard to explain to family.
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