This is what I love about the fediverse. On the Lemmy side we’ve seen it in action with lemmygrad. Private platforms need moderators to do that, which let’s be real, doesn’t generate enough profit to be worth their time…
Hmm, Twitter used to at least try before. Advertisers don’t like Eat Fresh! Running below a nazi tweet. There are at least some market forces keeping them at bay, which is why their social platforms keep failing.
Nothing Beats communities that are willing to oust bad elements, though
Advertisers didn’t like their ads running next to a nazi tweet until they saw how much money they could make off nazis after one of them was made potus.
It’s a reason Twitter is failing, but it’s not the reason. Even without the nazis they’d be struggling because their owner just keeps making bad financial and business decisions like not paying rent, trying to rebrand, and illegal firings
Eh. He doesn’t pay rent to cut costs, he fires to cut costs. All of this is because he wants to run twitter as a nazi platform that doesn’t have advertising backing. Advertising is the only reason a free service like Twitter can exist, and the nazis are the reason that the advertisers left.
It’s also because he overpaid for it. It’d be in bad but recoverable shape without this behavior and his desire to run it as a Nazi platform. But all of it is connected. He wouldn’t’ve made the hasty decisions to purchase if he didn’t want to run it as a Nazi platform and struggle with impulse control, but also had he found himself in the position of owning it with the massive loss in value from purchase price caused by his waiving of due diligence at the worst possible time he still could’ve hunkered down and treated it like a company he owns and wants to be profitable. From there he could cut costs at reasonable pace, listened to management as to how to minimize headcount, and done market research to maximize value to shareholders. But most notably he could’ve done reasonable cost cutting and made it a Nazi platform. It was gonna hemorrhage money either way. He just decided to be an idiot about it.
So what’s the problem with it? Elon. Not one single facet of him, though his impulse control is likely high up there, but all of him. At every point he’s making the decisions that ordinary people can see are financially unwise against all advice of experts and professionals. Decisions he should know better than to make.
He’s also the only shareholder now AFAIK, though that’s based on loans, so those lenders can do a takeover of sorts (maybe? I’ve only read some headlines claiming that)
platforms driven by user created content like the nazis, and other extreme right ideologues, because the audience for them consumes that content like religious zealots going to services, getting in their daily requirements of indoctrination. This inflates user engagement. However, the businesses advertising their services, and products, on those platforms do not like their company being associated with these people.
It’s nice when the primary goal of the owners and mods and aligns with the users.
Chasing profit is the worst mechanism in so many cases. One of those cases is when competition is by nature very limited. Social media kind of fails unless you have very few places to go. And you’re locked in if your friends are all on the same offering.
Lemmy world just removed their non-discrimination clause and one of the admins is (poorly) justifying it in a thread about it. I wouldn’t cheer quite yet.
This is only a problem because lemmy.world has become one of the centralized hubs for Lemmy, which means that jettisoning them has a larger impact. The failing of lemmy.world is a reminder that we should be intentionally spreading out to smaller instances, that way a bad admin/instance can be cut off without losing much value. Additionally, by lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc having such a grip on the core of Lemmy, they are emboldened to make bad changes without fearing consequences.
Totally. I would love to stand up an instance but it’s a little above my tech knowledge and, frankly, I don’t want to have to think about the legal aspects of what happens on it.
If I ever somehow did it, I would probably not allow photos/videos. Disable downvotes. Things like that.
The more users spread out into smaller, more easily censored instances, the more the remaining fragmented bits of the Lemmy ecosystem still talking to each other will turn into echo chambers full of groupthink. This low threshold for defederation is the Fediverse’s greatest weakness. Sure, it’s possible to work around it—but how many separate Lemmy accounts are users expected to create? Even if you have accounts on every instance of note you’d need to manually cross-post messages to each balkanized server and their comment sections wouldn’t be shared—exactly the sort of thing federation was meant to avoid.
Email, another federated system, has this same weakness. It’s why it’s increasingly difficult to run your own (outgoing) email server which other systems will accept messages from without going through a well-known third party like Google. Especially when trying to push content to a large audience (e.g. mailing lists), which happens to be Lemmy’s core function.
Bluesky is using content addressing to deal with this, although currently it is only built around feeds and not forums. Your profile is truly portable and posts can optionally be retrieved from “mirrors” (one of the CDN-like servers called BGS) so you don’t need to rely on your current hosting server (the account hosts called PDS) to federate with everybody.
You raise a point very similar to something I’ve considered a lot. If Mastodon is going to reach critical mass, it will happen on the backs of a few mega-instances.
The average internet user simply doesn’t understand the Fediverse. And why should they? All they know is that they want to sign up for a service and receive said services. They don’t want to figure out which instance to join any more than they want to figure out which email provider to use. The default choice (ex: the account that comes with their ISP or their phone like iCloud or GMail) is usually good enough. Remember the days of vanity email domains and tons of smaller email providers? You just don’t see that very much any more.
Mastodon will be the same. People are learning the name Mastodon, but they don’t know the difference between Mastodon the app and Mastodon.social the instance. They don’t see Twitter as being similar to email where they can pick their own server, so they won’t apply that thinking to Mastodon. They’re going to naturally coalesce around defaults - either servers that specifically say Mastodon in the name that look “official” or the instance that their friends use.
This is one of the reasons that I’m against federating with mega corporations should they choose to implement Activity Pub. It will eventually become very challenging to defederate from a service of that size without cutting off 90% of your content, and what many users might come to expect.
I would argue that it’s easier and less disruptive for Lemmy instances to defederate since the focus is on communities. I wouldn’t care much if my server defederate from another because I’ve joined similar communities on 3 other instances. But with Mastodon, following individuals is a key focus. There’s no replacement or alternative for an individual. People will notice when their friends disappear.
I’m not the All-Keeper of Receipts on this matter and I don’t have a Lemmy.World account, this is just what I’ve gleaned from various posts coming across my timeline. My comment you’re replying to was also meant more to emphasize the strength of decentralization against this kind of behavior, both reactive and proactive, instead of being a shot at Lemmy.World directly.
That said, from my understanding, there’s a few things they’ve done recently that users are questioning. They’ve changed their TOS/Code of Conduct, dropping some explicit protections for the usual protected classes i.e. gender identity/ethnicity/disability/etc and generally making the rules more unclear than before. The thread here is a brief look into that, and I especially appreciate the post by fiat_lux within it. Note the admin Xilly has responded within and said they would look into adding these things back, but obviously the conspicuous removal of them caused a lot of eyebrow-raising. A couple extra threads about this are here and here
A user was also recently banned for questioning the TOS, which they report here, and provide an archive.org link to their comments here, since the L.W team wiped their account out when banning them. Their comment seems like a very fair criticism, which the L.W admins supposedly invoked users to provide. This clearly seems like a power-tripping admin taking personal offense and deliberately permabanning and wiping out their account in direct response to the user’s concerns of this exact thing happening, giving the impression of immaturity and laissez-faire enforcement of the rules. Additionally, wiping out a user’s content while banning them is a good way to cover your tracks on the actual ban reason. It’s a good thing archive.org was available to catch this one.
Speaking of archive.org, L.W has also recently started banning archive.org links and any posts that question that decision, which is discussed here.
I’m really not invested into this saga so if someone else has more receipts or insight on these situations feel free to add on.
Agreed. In order to keep a upvote/downvote based platform from becoming toxic, a lot of good moderation is required. Lemmy.world is definitely not doing that.
Bluesky has federation running in a sandbox network and is built to support 3rd party moderation tools both server side, client side, and in the custom feeds. Currently all users are on the main server which isn’t yet federating, though.
BTW one neat thing about those 3rd party mod tools is that you won’t need to wait for the server owner to act
This is what I love about the fediverse. On the Lemmy side we’ve seen it in action with lemmygrad. Private platforms need moderators to do that, which let’s be real, doesn’t generate enough profit to be worth their time…
Hmm, Twitter used to at least try before. Advertisers don’t like Eat Fresh! Running below a nazi tweet. There are at least some market forces keeping them at bay, which is why their social platforms keep failing.
Nothing Beats communities that are willing to oust bad elements, though
Advertisers didn’t like their ads running next to a nazi tweet until they saw how much money they could make off nazis after one of them was made potus.
Nope, they still don’t. Except pillow guy. Hence why the nazi networks keep falling and why x is failing.
Pillow guy declared bankruptcy recently.
Good. I hope he gets fucked up on the streets and ends up getting some empathy for the marginalized.
Don’t you love capitalism? And big fat lawsuits taking out bad actors?
Without it they wouldn’t be in power in the first place
Yup. Instead you get corrupt officials, and good luck dislodging them with a lawsuit like this.
It’s a reason Twitter is failing, but it’s not the reason. Even without the nazis they’d be struggling because their owner just keeps making bad financial and business decisions like not paying rent, trying to rebrand, and illegal firings
Eh. He doesn’t pay rent to cut costs, he fires to cut costs. All of this is because he wants to run twitter as a nazi platform that doesn’t have advertising backing. Advertising is the only reason a free service like Twitter can exist, and the nazis are the reason that the advertisers left.
It’s also because he overpaid for it. It’d be in bad but recoverable shape without this behavior and his desire to run it as a Nazi platform. But all of it is connected. He wouldn’t’ve made the hasty decisions to purchase if he didn’t want to run it as a Nazi platform and struggle with impulse control, but also had he found himself in the position of owning it with the massive loss in value from purchase price caused by his waiving of due diligence at the worst possible time he still could’ve hunkered down and treated it like a company he owns and wants to be profitable. From there he could cut costs at reasonable pace, listened to management as to how to minimize headcount, and done market research to maximize value to shareholders. But most notably he could’ve done reasonable cost cutting and made it a Nazi platform. It was gonna hemorrhage money either way. He just decided to be an idiot about it.
So what’s the problem with it? Elon. Not one single facet of him, though his impulse control is likely high up there, but all of him. At every point he’s making the decisions that ordinary people can see are financially unwise against all advice of experts and professionals. Decisions he should know better than to make.
He didn’t even want to buy it, he was trying to pump and dump, the court made him go through with the purchase.
He’s also the only shareholder now AFAIK, though that’s based on loans, so those lenders can do a takeover of sorts (maybe? I’ve only read some headlines claiming that)
platforms driven by user created content like the nazis, and other extreme right ideologues, because the audience for them consumes that content like religious zealots going to services, getting in their daily requirements of indoctrination. This inflates user engagement. However, the businesses advertising their services, and products, on those platforms do not like their company being associated with these people.
It’s nice when the primary goal of the owners and mods and aligns with the users.
Chasing profit is the worst mechanism in so many cases. One of those cases is when competition is by nature very limited. Social media kind of fails unless you have very few places to go. And you’re locked in if your friends are all on the same offering.
“Zombie Nazis: Eat Flesh!”
Lemmy world just removed their non-discrimination clause and one of the admins is (poorly) justifying it in a thread about it. I wouldn’t cheer quite yet.
This is only a problem because lemmy.world has become one of the centralized hubs for Lemmy, which means that jettisoning them has a larger impact. The failing of lemmy.world is a reminder that we should be intentionally spreading out to smaller instances, that way a bad admin/instance can be cut off without losing much value. Additionally, by lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc having such a grip on the core of Lemmy, they are emboldened to make bad changes without fearing consequences.
Totally. I would love to stand up an instance but it’s a little above my tech knowledge and, frankly, I don’t want to have to think about the legal aspects of what happens on it.
If I ever somehow did it, I would probably not allow photos/videos. Disable downvotes. Things like that.
The more users spread out into smaller, more easily censored instances, the more the remaining fragmented bits of the Lemmy ecosystem still talking to each other will turn into echo chambers full of groupthink. This low threshold for defederation is the Fediverse’s greatest weakness. Sure, it’s possible to work around it—but how many separate Lemmy accounts are users expected to create? Even if you have accounts on every instance of note you’d need to manually cross-post messages to each balkanized server and their comment sections wouldn’t be shared—exactly the sort of thing federation was meant to avoid.
Email, another federated system, has this same weakness. It’s why it’s increasingly difficult to run your own (outgoing) email server which other systems will accept messages from without going through a well-known third party like Google. Especially when trying to push content to a large audience (e.g. mailing lists), which happens to be Lemmy’s core function.
Bluesky is using content addressing to deal with this, although currently it is only built around feeds and not forums. Your profile is truly portable and posts can optionally be retrieved from “mirrors” (one of the CDN-like servers called BGS) so you don’t need to rely on your current hosting server (the account hosts called PDS) to federate with everybody.
You raise a point very similar to something I’ve considered a lot. If Mastodon is going to reach critical mass, it will happen on the backs of a few mega-instances.
The average internet user simply doesn’t understand the Fediverse. And why should they? All they know is that they want to sign up for a service and receive said services. They don’t want to figure out which instance to join any more than they want to figure out which email provider to use. The default choice (ex: the account that comes with their ISP or their phone like iCloud or GMail) is usually good enough. Remember the days of vanity email domains and tons of smaller email providers? You just don’t see that very much any more.
Mastodon will be the same. People are learning the name Mastodon, but they don’t know the difference between Mastodon the app and Mastodon.social the instance. They don’t see Twitter as being similar to email where they can pick their own server, so they won’t apply that thinking to Mastodon. They’re going to naturally coalesce around defaults - either servers that specifically say Mastodon in the name that look “official” or the instance that their friends use.
This is one of the reasons that I’m against federating with mega corporations should they choose to implement Activity Pub. It will eventually become very challenging to defederate from a service of that size without cutting off 90% of your content, and what many users might come to expect.
I would argue that it’s easier and less disruptive for Lemmy instances to defederate since the focus is on communities. I wouldn’t care much if my server defederate from another because I’ve joined similar communities on 3 other instances. But with Mastodon, following individuals is a key focus. There’s no replacement or alternative for an individual. People will notice when their friends disappear.
deleted by creator
I’m not the All-Keeper of Receipts on this matter and I don’t have a Lemmy.World account, this is just what I’ve gleaned from various posts coming across my timeline. My comment you’re replying to was also meant more to emphasize the strength of decentralization against this kind of behavior, both reactive and proactive, instead of being a shot at Lemmy.World directly.
That said, from my understanding, there’s a few things they’ve done recently that users are questioning. They’ve changed their TOS/Code of Conduct, dropping some explicit protections for the usual protected classes i.e. gender identity/ethnicity/disability/etc and generally making the rules more unclear than before. The thread here is a brief look into that, and I especially appreciate the post by fiat_lux within it. Note the admin Xilly has responded within and said they would look into adding these things back, but obviously the conspicuous removal of them caused a lot of eyebrow-raising. A couple extra threads about this are here and here
A user was also recently banned for questioning the TOS, which they report here, and provide an archive.org link to their comments here, since the L.W team wiped their account out when banning them. Their comment seems like a very fair criticism, which the L.W admins supposedly invoked users to provide. This clearly seems like a power-tripping admin taking personal offense and deliberately permabanning and wiping out their account in direct response to the user’s concerns of this exact thing happening, giving the impression of immaturity and laissez-faire enforcement of the rules. Additionally, wiping out a user’s content while banning them is a good way to cover your tracks on the actual ban reason. It’s a good thing archive.org was available to catch this one.
Speaking of archive.org, L.W has also recently started banning archive.org links and any posts that question that decision, which is discussed here.
I’m really not invested into this saga so if someone else has more receipts or insight on these situations feel free to add on.
Banning the Internet Archive??? What on earth is happening over there???
Agreed. In order to keep a upvote/downvote based platform from becoming toxic, a lot of good moderation is required. Lemmy.world is definitely not doing that.
Bluesky has federation running in a sandbox network and is built to support 3rd party moderation tools both server side, client side, and in the custom feeds. Currently all users are on the main server which isn’t yet federating, though.
BTW one neat thing about those 3rd party mod tools is that you won’t need to wait for the server owner to act