They don’t need to do that when the fedi is a thousandth of the size of their social networks lol. It’s hilarious that you think they need our user base.
Meta does not give a shit to absorb the fedi. We are like a thousandth of their size, just a blip on their radar. I have no idea where people get this idea of self importance that Meta cares about their 10 user server.
If they didn’t why would they develop tools to federate? It’s obvious that the threads project was sped up significantly following musk’s obliteration of Twitter, so they wouldn’t go out of their way to implement such a feature if they didn’t have a very specific reason for it.
A company’s goal is maximization of profit, so don’t assume they intend anything else. The activitypub userbase is too small to be a significant addition to their userbase but in this way they can destroy it before it escapes their control. They don’t take risks. Mastodon could seriously compete with threads and it’s gaining popularity. If one more big boom happens it might be too late to stop the fediverse from competing with meta in the most cost efficient way possible. Do not be lured in by the false sense of security, meta wants us to help maximize their profit. We aren’t doing that right now so Meta wants to stop us (or limit us, whatever they deem more profitable)
Nothing good will come of federating with meta, the fediverse should simply stay out of their reach and realize whatever potential it may have.
I think there might be another way to hurt it though that this article doesn’t seem to mention. Funnily enough, it’s also a theme of an asterix and obelix comic book, which the introduction referenced. This way would be monetization. Threads might try to “help” the fediverse by feeding the bigger instances money, therefore the hosts of the instances would be more open to negotiations with meta and accepting of their policies.
I will compare this to YouTube which started paying all it’s big creators until they became dependent on the platform for a living and then started slowly implementing more and more rules that limit their freedom of expression. Remember how much PewDiePie used to swear in his getting over it videos? In another “pew news” or whatever it was called video I happened to watch he directly mentioned that he censors himself because he isn’t going to put his job on the line just to say “fuck”. Profit invites creators to comply with YouTube’s regulations even if they aren’t enforced violently always.
The same pattern was used in the asterix comic I mention above. Ceasar decides to open a building complex almost next to the problematic for him village and so the residents flood the markets and are shocked at the low prices compared to Rome. As a result, the villagers start increasing prices and advertising their goods and services, neglecting their previous morals and ethos. In the end, however, the Romans lose again after (panoramix, I think?) makes them realize how much separation this has caused them, living only for their business. As a result they kick the Romans out of their village, once again united, and Caesar’s plans fail.
I think both these stories could serve as a potential warning to anyone who might consider selling themselves out if meta adopts such a policy.
Kbin just released Collections, its feature to allow users to create groups of magazines. The microblogging side of the fediverse has lists. It sounds like this is basically what you're asking for.
It looks like you're on kbin, which doesn't have lists. The equivalent feature is Collections but its fairly new. Collections are essentially arbitrary groupings of magazines, similar to reddits multireddits.
Lists on microblogging platforms allow you to manage multiple groupings of accounts instead of following them all. So your home timeline could be people you know IRL and you could have a list for different interests and you can view each one independently.
People complaining about a loss of users are the same people that will complain about performance issues next time there is a huge influx of users that stresses the infrastructure for popular instances.
Hard (high hanging fruit): allow users to look and behave like communities so that we can follow each other (and masto users too ) as we would normal communities, where each user has their own (or multiple!) “community” they can populate and moderate as they see fit.
Huh, seems like you’re right or at least I couldn’t find anything like that. I feel like theoretically ot should be able to do that, so I’m gonna snoop around a bit more and maybe file an issue. Doesn’t help that kbin’s UI is still pretty atrocious at the moment, but the project is still fairly young and developing at a good pace at least.
Oh no knock on kbin here from me. Seems the design is still community/magazine focused is all.
The suggestion in my previous post (which others have made BTW) is not just about having both microblogging and reddit-like platforms in one place, but, IMO, creating a blogosphere type of platform fused with a Reddit-like platform, and which, if you want, can function like microblogging and have microblogging platforms easily mapped onto it (for federation purposes).
I wouldn’t stop using Lemmy because of “user profiles”, but this was one of the worst things implemented by Reddit. Basically started the slide into Facebook-tier
None, it’s all 1 big network. Each instance is a different flavor of the same thing.
Tangent: I don’t understand why existing in an instance somehow makes a user any different than anyone else. Yet, I hear people saying things like “typical lemm.ml user” or crap about Hexbear users. It’s like people are taking the ideologies of the instance owners and labeling anyone in it to have the same ideologies. Where did this come from?
Well those instances are very specific and you can assume a lot about the users who signed up there. Other instances seem to have normal spread of people.
Strong ideologically driven instances may be more invested in spreading the gospel, so depending on the frequency of posts that populate /c/all and topics that garner a lot of attention it can lead to certain instances standing out compared to more generic ones. It’s kind of becomes like someone sporting a sports jersey versus others that might just be more generic clothing as an example.
Maybe better example might be like how people assume things by the bumper stickers people have on their cars, or signs and flags they choose to display in front of their houses compared to the general neighborhood. There’s some passion that may be assumed.
Having 6 accounts on 6 instances Id just like to point out that whatever instance Im currently on is the best instance on lemmy. I am poly-situationally-tribalistic.
There’s a little insight into human psychology provided by this whole decentralisation thing. People tend to get pretty tribal about which instance they’re on pretty quickly. It’s obviously pretty silly most of the time, but that’s human nature. In the end I think it counts toward a flaw of decentralisation, though not a fatal one … a lot of people don’t align strongly with any particular instance or their admins and moderation choices and the tribal baggage that comes along with it all, they’re more interested in the whole network … and yet we’re all forced to pick an instance because that’s the architecture.
Instances have specific signup rules, moderation strategies, and accepted speech/posts.
It’s ok to not understand things, but be informed that instances literally materially differentiates users. The impacts are internal and external facing.
It’s like people are taking the ideologies of the instance owners and labeling anyone in it to have the same ideologies. Where did this come from?
I generally agree, but hexbear exists mostly as a place where r/chapoTrapHouse users went after it got banned from reddit, so it tends to have a specific type of user.
Is there any point since there will be instances and websites that allow people to look you up? Not to mention there will be people who will archive everything on Lemmy. (Just like on Reddit)
I do like that Mastodon reminds you to add Alt text before posting an image. People think alt text is just for the blind or near blind but sometimes I have a hard time figuring out why a picture was posted and the alt text clears that up. All that to say, it’s reminders help create the habit of adding text descriptors.
This is a really good idea. Multi-instance communities would not just provide content redundancy, but also some load balancing. Each multi-instance community would become it’s own little CDN. Duplicating the data across instances does pose a problem of bloat, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks.
Bloat can be slightly resolved by just archiving/delete the data after a certain period or let the poster set the deletion date based on reputation. Just thinking out loud.
No, and the difference between Beehw and Lemmy.world is why. Different people have different views about moderation and what is acceptable content.
There are two solutions to the real problem of duplicate content:
Multireddit - like functionality for grouping similar content.
Making crossposting a reference to the original post, not a copy. Mods would need to be able to block crossposts from specific communities, and remove crossposts to their sub.
If community mods on different servers saw they have similar moderation guidelines, they could agree to federate. If they diverge in the future or disagree, they could defederate. Just like instances can defederate from previously federated servers today. It would be no more or less disruptive than defederation is today.
Heck, if done thoughtfully, it could even allow cross moderation, multiplying the number of mods for like-minded communities. The only mods who wouldn’t appreciate that are the egotistical, power hungry, Redditish mods.
If the mods can agree on policy, there is absolutely no reason to have two communities. Shut one down and use the other.
Edit: can someone explain to me what the difference between synchronizing two communities and subscribing to a federated community is? I mean, that’s exactly the point of federation.
That system makes the instance a single-point-of-failure for the whole community, which has been a big problem lately. If communities could easily be multi-instance they would have redundancy. That seems like a good reason to me.
While I agree there should be functionality to propagate changes to a community between instances when the host is offline, there is no practical way to share administrative control of a community. Any decision by an administrator to sanction a community or defederate an instance will just result in exactly the fragmentation you fear.
The real solution is for small groups of communities with similar interests to gather on separate instances with few or no users. Meanwhile, other instances gather users with few or no local communities. This maximizes the benefits of cacheing community content while minimizing the impact of defederation. If a community host can no longer be maintained by its owner, that ownership can be easily transferred without transferring the burden of hosting hundreds of communities or supporting user logins.
I started out looking for an exact replacement for Reddit (where I mostly lurk). Initially I thought the lack of content and traffic on Lemmy was a bad thing, but I now see it as early days of a community and lack of content means I have a chance to make a post or comment that is valued and gets engagement from other users. Reddit was so mature that anything I wanted to post was either already there, not welcome or buried under an ocean of other content/comments. If you use both you could even find good content on Reddit to crosspost on Lemmy.
It’s quite nice being part of a small community now. Even just an up/down vote from you will be worth more here. It’s great.
Just a joke. I used to just read the comments in reddit threads and be satisfied with the conversations already being had. The subreddits I usually visited were busy enough that I had plenty to read. Rarely did I ever feel like logging in to add something. (I’m also unoriginal, so if I thought of a joke I’d go find it in the reddit thread and upvote it, ha).
Lemmy has less comments, less to read. But I also don’t pointlessly scroll forever, so I guess that’s probably good.
Thanks for pointing that out! High quality content takes time to craft. It’s being skilled and/or knowledgable, being able to convey that across on a digital platform (where basically everyone’s anonymous and of unknown backgrounds), and being engaging while you’re at it. It definitely can be demanding for some.
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