James R Kirk

I did not realize you were OP (or even had a Lemmy account) 😂

Mastodon has more of a flat structure and is designed to be more conversational which is why I think it hasn’t caught on amongst celebrities and the pundit class. It’s great for conversation but only so-so at self promotion.

@rysiek@mstdn.social’s blog is one of my favorites. He really understand the social aspect to a lot of modern technology.

People get so weird about Dansup.

If Mastodon/Fedi was at the scale those platforms are we would see more harassment, absolutely. It remains to be proven but I think federation enables a lot more eyes on content which implies harassing material can be removed more quickly.

Federation/decentralization solves a lot of problems over centralized social media, but ultimatley you can’t engineer human nature.

I had a response typed out but have a question, is this feature pulling in comment feeds from every community the instance is federated with? Or only from communities the individual user is subscribed to?

Don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Piefed overall. I think you misunderstood my second point a little, I don’t want to be “exposed to new things” in my social media per-se, I want to read my chosen subscriptions (with my chosen social groups) and move on.

I see the “issue” of “divided” communities coming up a lot. But to me, the variety of perspectives and moderation styles on the same topic is a major benefit of the Fediverse (to the point I might describe it as its greatest strength) especially when it come to non-technical or social topics like politics. For example Lemmy.ca users are going to have very different perspectives about US politics than Lemmy.us (hypothetically). I’m not sure that it benefits those users to centralize the discussion (not saying that’s what’s happening exactly but it is something I see come up a lot).

Two reasons:

1. There are many steps between “I never wish to see any unmoderated content ever again” and “I wish to see unmoderated content in my feed every day”. I don’t want to block Lemmy.world communities but I also will go insane if I read those comments every day.

2. I can’t know what those communities are in advance of their being inserted. I don’t want the default option for content in my main feed to be “opt out”.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I kind of hate this? I think most communities are lazily moderated and I don’t want to have every goon’s unmoderated takes on whatever the topic is forced in front of my eyeballs.

Yeah I have to imagine much of it is bots/artificial views already, this line from the article stood out:

That means this short reel has been viewed more times than every single article 404 Media has ever published, combined and multiplied tens of times.

It doesn’t shock me a single reel has significantly more views than all of 404 media, but “multiplied tens of times”? A recent comment me chuckle:

“Investor fraud is basically the entire business model of well basically everything anymore.”

(implying the ad views are faked to increase the stock price).

I think it’s interesting how “maximizing for engagement” inevitably leads to slop taking over everything. I wonder if real people (with real money) will continue to engage with the slop? Some people surely, but enough to sustain these mega-corps?

I haven’t seen anyone mention lemmy-explorer yet, it’s a good way to find communities too:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Exactly, not being beholden to one set of rule-deciders is not so much an “issue” as a distinct feature of the Fediverse.

Well said. I personally don’t get the opposition to Threads using ActivityPub. I like being able to follow Threads profiles without exposing myself to Meta.

Yeah personally I like being able to follow Threads users without needing a Threads account or exposing my information to Meta and I honestly don’t understand the vocal opposition to that.

Size has not much to do with it. If a hypothetical instance allowed a “troll farm” to set up shop there, sane admins on other instances would de-federate from the one that allows trolls pretty quickly.

Threads users cannot subscribe or post to Lemmy communities or follow Mastodon users (yet). Threads has a sort of halfway federation situation. Mastodon users can follow Threads users without having a Threads.net account but that’s it.

Also, the ability to allow Mastodon users to follow Threads accounts is opt-in, and only a small portion of users have chosen to do so.

You won’t see it on Lemmy because there is no way to follow individual users on Lemmy. Here’s an example of viewing a Threads user from my instance. There is no content because Kara cannot interact with Lemmy and Lemmy users can’t follow her.

On Mastodon, Threads accounts (or any account) won’t federate to your instance until you (or someone on your instance) specifically requests to follow. It’s a common misunderstanding when people think that federating with Threads.net will “overwhelm” a small instance.

Also, not every Threads account has opted into federation. So there’s really very little available content out there.

Threads accounts (or any account) won’t federate to your instance unless you (or someone on your instance) specifically requests to follow. It’s a common misunderstanding when people think that federating with Threads.net will “overwhelm” a small instance.

Threads is twitter style (like Mastodon) so it’s not going to have much to do with Lemmy. Threads allows users to opt-into a sort of half-Federation where Mastodon users can follow their content. It’s a unique case and not how Federation normally works.

With Mastodon, content from users on other instances is not “downloaded” unless someone on that instance specifically chooses to follow it. So it’s not like every small Mastodon instance that federates with threads is going to be overwhelmed by all the millions of user feeds on Threads.

Tbh there is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding Threads federation, but in short- there is no technical way for them to “extinguish the fediverse” even if they really, really, wanted to.