comfy

comfy, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

comfy, 7 months ago

Their argument is that the Voice isn’t even something good. It doesn’t give Indigenous people any powers they didn’t already have, and the Voice can be ignored just as easily as the advice of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody recently was. Interview with the Black Peoples Union describes in better detail.

But even if that weren’t the case and they did think it wasn’t worthless symbolism, successful collective bargaining doesn’t just settle for every first offer. So I don’t know why you’re claiming it’s a bad strategy, it’s how unions have won important gains for workers. It’s a strategy that has been historically shown to work when applied correctly.

comfy, 7 months ago

pls no more punchlines in the title!

comfy, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??

Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it’s especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won’t sell out and extort the userbase.

comfy, 9 months ago

If this was a specific-purpose non-politics instance like many are, I’d say power to you. But for an general-purpose instance that advertises itself as being:

A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.

Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.

…then there’s a need for some serious self-examination. Preemptively blocking thousands of users, and talking about blocking another long-lasting substantial community because some other community made comments about them? This is disappointing, this does not sound properly thought-out.

You’re right, defederation should only be considered as a last resort. Not as a broad-spectrum discriminatory first action.

comfy, 11 months ago

Reposting the classic:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/119b669a-84fc-41b0-bf91-d4229adc1318.png

comfy, 11 months ago

Basically any opinion of the modern Internet I give.

I'm a certified computer expert, but I sound like a Luddite when it comes to anything mainstream.

comfy, 11 months ago

Yes. This is a different platform, I'd rather we don't just transplant all the reddit problems here.

Lemmy is inherently political. It was and is a revolt against reddit's staff, their business model and the influence of US politics, media and corporations on their platform due to their advertising model. This place wouldn't exist if there wasn't political differences.

We're not here to impress people who were banned for spreading Nazism. Go to all the reddit-clones that started in the early 2010s when reddit got called out for hosting toxic racist-or-fascist hate communities and communities sexualizing minors (e.g. /r/jailbait).

comfy, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.

There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn't staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don't read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn't a general unthemed instance for everyone. It's broad, but not 'reddit' broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source

Edit: I realize this may come off as "why aren't other people doing more things!". I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I'm not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we're seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming 'reddit but here'.

comfy, 11 months ago

@nutomic might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.

comfy, 11 months ago

The replies already here have touched on the most important factors and why they matter (it's open source under AGPL and it's decentralised, the core devs are ideologically anti-capitalist so they won't go public or sell out to advertisers, the users are the primary stakeholders)

But they haven't mentioned an issue with this question: we are a community. What could WE do to about becoming the next Reddit after a decade?

Most important? Get involved. Acknowledge that volunteering and donations are powerful! The best thing you can do is to help the devs, whether it be coding, translation, documentation, web design, or the many other things that help this place thrive. I see all these posts saying "Lemmy should make onboarding easier!" as if approximately two people are there to do all the work.

I'd say it's a mindset of coming from sites where you don't have the power and the only path for things to happen is complaining to the higher-ups. Being open source and community-driven are things new users need to understand. We may well be their first experience on a non-for-profit social media platform, where we don't have a designated full-time tech-support team, or a professional dev team of dozens.