Just passing through.
I agree - but I also appreciate that all instances of Mbin and PieFed combined currently have fewer monthly active users than lemmy.dbzer0.com alone, which is only the seventh biggest Lemmy instance. So for now it doesn’t make much of a dent whether we’re counted or not. :)
Fedidb observes 50k monthly active users. 65% of these are distributed between instances with more than 2000 monthly active users, making up the five biggest instances. Half (51%) are on either Lemmy.world or Lemm.ee, which are the only instances with more than 3000 monthly active users.
A fourth of us are on instances with less than 1000 monthly active users.
I don’t think that’s all that bad. But who am I to say, I’m not even part of the statistic. :)
I can’t avoid politics and shareholders completely, but it really boils down to cutting costs.
They are companies supported by venture capital, basically risk-taking investors wanting a high pay-off. The problem with receiving this money is that the investors end up owning the company, and you have to answer to them. And once they are making money, why wouldn’t the owner feel entitled to their share?
The problem being, of course, that they never really had a strategy for monetizing the platform. So how can you turn a profit? Some try to sell premium features, but for a dominant social media company it always boils down to three things:
It used to be that point 3 required certain base levels of moderation, but with the current US government, this has changed. Point 3 has become unpredictable. Censorship of political content that can be deemed extremist, such as opposition to genocide in Gaza or sympathy for Luigi Mangione, might help social media companies that are eager to comply in advance.
So basically, platforms now need to maintain the cheapest possible moderation (1) that allows advertisers to stay on the platform (2) in order to maximise profits.
These platforms are huge enough that they do not need to care about individual users - especially sites where users tend to be anonymous. So you don’t really need to introduce expensive checks and balances; just ban users at any suspicion. There are plenty of fish in the sea.
Now, how do you get to a point of suspicion as cheap as possible? Machine learning models is probably your best bet. Reddit observing people’s voting history provides them with useful data to this end. Running some LLM on the user’s comments is good as well, which is how you end up being banned for quoting the Godfather, as I saw one newly recruited Lemmy user report. The more safeguards you introduce, the more expensive moderation becomes.
Advertisers don’t care much about over-moderation. Nobody has any incentive to care about individual users in a site that is as crowded as Reddit. What matters is that there are enough users left to generate content (until AI can take over that as well), and that passive (harmless) users are there to click on ads. This dynamic is the same across all mainstream social media - Instagram just wants to provide you with a sufficiently addictive and toothless feed to have you keep looking at ads.
Last, the question is what needs to be moderated. Is sympathy for Mangione the same as encouraging violence? The regulators/political elites would certainly think so. Is it extremist to support Palestine? Where is the line drawn between legitimate political opposition to a fascist coup d’etat and inciting political violence? These are sometimes hard decisions, but following the above logic of unmonitored over-moderation, you don’t even have to think about it. Just ban at first suspicion.
And then, suddenly, the social media platform is not only seeking profit, but it is also colluding with a fascist state takeover and suppressing the opposition. Which is why people give you political answers to this question even though the answer is really very simple: Bad moderation is cheaper.
pff - the real pros can make line go down
That said, I guess people living in countries where the government is prone to censorship might do well to use smaller instances than lemmy.world, as they are more likely to fly under the radar.
Or just switch to a smaller instance if lemmy.world does get blocked, I guess.
All hat and no cattle. Empty threats and empty promises.
America has always been susceptible to bullshit artists and snake oil salesmen. Of course it had to end like this.
FediLab is the app I know of that aims to support the most fediverse services. They claim to support Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, and Pixelfed. You could try to sign in with Sharkey as well, who knows.
I use https://phanpy.social/ with Pixelfed and Mastodon, and it works quite well with the two. I believe other services are also supported, but I have not tested it myself. :)
For the curious:
It had a boxer engine in the rear, just like the Beetle. The Beetle was designed by Ferdinand Porche, the T97 by Hans Ledwinka. Ledwinka served five years in prison in Czechoslovakia after the war for collaboration with German occupation forces.
One has to imagine the colours.
Striking red banners, green leaves, probably very colourful cars. Funky traditional hats catering to the traditionalists. Colours, modernity, tradition, everything in one spectacle. And then there’s the music on top of it.
This was not some dark black & white event - it was joyful and colourful, and an ignorant observer would easily get sucked into the optimism of it all.
Today’s nazis have what, frog memes, doge, and whatever the fuck this is?
Really good write-up.
RE: Too many cooks:
And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
This is true and a genuine problem, but also a lot better than the alternative, which is the commercial platforms where nobody gives a shit about them and they are harassed on a daily basis with nothing much they can do about it.
On Twitter, community notes were hailed as a success for giving the Community an entirely toothless form of moderation. On the Fediverse, the community has been given real teeth.
RE: Guilt by association
This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
Nice reminder to spread the word about the wonders of P2P, Tor, and E2EE. Some people will always believe in the propaganda of the capitalists and the authoritarians seeking to undermine these technologies, but they are all very much alive and well, and I think most people are fine with the ideas of having their nude selfies or whatever protected under E2EE.
Likewise, for sure Elon Musk will try to tell people the fediverse is full of pedos. Coming from him, that puts us in the same club as that diver who saved a bunch of children in a cave in Thailand. So in that sense I guess the point about commercial capture is more relevant: I’m more worried when people like Musk pretend to be our friends. But in all honesty, I’m not very worried about that either. I still rock an entirely independent e-mail provider, even after everything Microsoft and Google has done to undermine that technology.
We have all these ideas about universal human rights, and we are trying to wish them into existence. So we teach them to children as if they are something they should believe already exists, not as it’s an ideal we are working towards.
I think the idea is that it will make people more protective of human rights, but the flip side is that people seem very reluctant to see the cracks in the fiction they have been sold. And then when/if they realize the state of the world they often become jaded, acting as if the realization that it’s all a fake construct is somehow the greatest insight on earth.
And then, if they’re good people, they start working to make the fiction just a little bit more real.
If we want to talk about why European countries have blood on their hand we could keep going all day.
I’d push back a little against the notion that nobody cares. You don’t have many (any?) political allies who are willing to stand up against dictatorships and let go of their cheap oil supplies, but you do have people and organizations who care.
The International Criminal Court did, among other things, issue an arrest warrant on Netanyahu. I think we have managed to establish international law, but not yet international justice. As a result it’s easy to give up and consider it all to be false promises and lies, and to a degree that’s not entirely wrong. But I nevertheless believe that current-day international law is the greatest achievement we have made since the second world war, and establishing international law is the fundamental first step towards international justice.
I have a lot of friends working for various international organizations, and while it’s one hell of an uphill battle, I can assure you that there are people out there working tirelessly to try to make a change. And despite everything, most European countries are still supportive of the ICC and in favour of establishing an international legal order.
If we want to be hopeful about Europe, it has to be judged by it’s commitment to that promise, and not by the corrupt, narcissistic, or plain moronic leaders who are way too frequently put in charge.
Ah, well, fuck. Then I don’t really have a positive spin on it.
Maybe the US crashing and burning will at least limit US influence on the Arab world, opening at least a slight hope for improvements in the region in the long run. It’s a weird world - yesterday it was Europe and the US against the rest, today Europe stands alone and Russia is paralysed in Syria. Maybe tomorrow we’ll see genuine alliances between Europe and countries in the Arab world that are not entirely built around exploitation and sucking up to dictators.
Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.
I hate myself for being pedantic, but: You haven’t emigrated yet. Immigration is coming, emigration is leaving.
I’m guessing you’re from Iran? The only good thing I can really say is that they’re as afraid of you as you are of them. But they are fucking terrifying, and as you well know you’re right to be careful. I can’t believe the stuff we seemingly choose to turn a blind eye to coming from foreign authoritarian regimes on European soil.
This looks pretty ideal in my opinion.
I think it’s fine as long as:
A lot of people, myself included, are hesitant to take the time to look at content if nobody took the time to manually share it. But for a use-case like you mentioned, for a local community that is too small to be established naturally any time soon, I think it could make sense. Especially for local news — YouTube videos should maybe still go through a human screening before being shared.
That’s my five cents, anyway. :)
Leaving Jeff Bezos in charge of 007 is basically the same as leaving the franchise in the hand of a Bond villain. Very obviously a bad idea.
At this point it will be an American movie produced by Kremlin assets who will bend themselves backwards not to insult China or any other authoritarian regime that might produce revenue. Who plays Bond matters little at that point.
If you want to look at things from a different angle, you could also consider signing up for Mbin (fedia.io, kbin.earth) or PieFed (piefed.social, feddit.online).
I guess it might make sense for some people, not for others. It does allow you to see things from a little bit of a different angle, especially in the all feed.
I’m not American thank god, but it matches the experiences of American women I have talked to about it. And it matches experiences of European women I’ve talked to. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it held true other places as well.
The amount and nature of porn being consumed obviously affects people’s expectations everywhere it is happening. I’m sure this argument does not apply to secluded tribes in the Amazon or whatever, but that’s just not what I’m talking about here.
Where do you see your life going?
Accountability is a bet on a stable routine. You’ll go to work, earn money, go home, spend money. A lot of people are happy with this.
Languages could take you many directions, with endless opportunities to climb into various international organizations and take on a broad range of tasks. If you’re willing to work hard, learn other skills, and move around, you could have a very interesting life. If you want to stay where you are, options are likely to be more limited.
Physiotherapy offers maybe a middle ground. You won’t climb as much, but there’s work, and you can move around if you want to, even though work will not require it. You can have a routine in life, but one that is maybe easier to break free from if you want to.
As you like the idea of a stable monotonous office job,maybe accounting is perfect for you. Personally I need something that pushes me around a bit - I’m terrified of staying in one place far too long.