copygirl

The real question is not what the algorithm pushes to you, but whether their moderation actually bans bigots and removes their posts. Any other instance would lose their “right” to federate with a queer-friendly instance if they didn’t do that, so why would Threads get an exception?

Isn’t “queer friendly” and “federates with Threads” an oxymoron?

Both banned by your instance: https://lemmy.world/instances

I don’t think that’s how it works and it would likely not be legal. By explicitly blocking Threads, you make a big statement about not wanting your instance’s posts to show up there. Also from a technical standpoint, I don’t think a “middle-man” instance will push posts from another instance to a third one. You’d have to explicitly scrape data that’s not available via the API. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Could you please provide some sources for that? I’d like to know more.

First of all though, there is no such thing as a “hostile fork”. Being able to fork a project, for any reason, is the entire point of open source. And to be fair, not wanting to continue working for a for-profit company for free is a very good reason.

And yeah, when you suddenly turn a FOSS project that’s been developed with the help of a bunch of contributors, into a for-profit company, without making a big fuss about it beforehand and allow the contributors and community to weigh in, then yeah, that’s a hostile takeover of sorts, at least in my opinion. Developers gotta make money, but they could’ve done that by creating a new brand instead of taking over that of a previously completely FOSS project. Forgejo is preventing that exact thing from happening by joining Codeberg (a non-profit).

There’s been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it’s now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven’t familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.

I did decide to delete all my comments and posts on Reddit. Sure, maybe I’ve posted some helpful comments, but why support Reddit with their continued existence? Remove content, and people might move to other sites to get their information.

I also decided to keep my account. Turns out some content stayed around, because I could not see and therefore delete it in locked subreddits. So when they came back, the comments came back too, and I was able to delete them, still.

I don’t know how many years it’s been, but I also have been driving Arch for a while. I might not recommend it to absolute beginners, because you do need some patience and experience (such as how to effectively google), but honestly besides some mostly self-inflicted issues, I felt like I had it all around easier than users of other distros (and Windows, of course).

1. There is the --download-sections option. Looking at it, you might want to use --download-sections "*0:00-1:00".
2. I briefly checked with --list-thumbnails and it doesn’t look like YouTube offers any square ones, so I would look into using ImageMagick to edit the image with a command. I doubt yt-dlp allows you to do any sort of image manipulation out of the box.

I use uBlock Origin + vaft from TwitchAdSolutions, which is currently working pretty well for me. I’ve had some issues before, and every now and then the stream can freeze up when an ad is played. But it’s so much better than having to endure even a second of those mind-rotting ads.

At the moment, upvotes and downvotes, while not used that way by many people, is more about what others will see, rather than what content you like. It’s more like a community moderating and rating effort. Upvotes make posts more visible, by pushing them further up in what’s currently popular. Downvotes do the opposite, and in my personal opinion, should be reserved for posts that don’t fit the community they were posted in, spam, or things that break rules – typically the same reason why you would (and should) report a post. They are not “agree” and “disagree” buttons. Topics you disagree with can still spark interesting conversations.

Using the same mechanic, voting, to tell an algorithm whether similar posts should have higher visibility on your own feed, would be incompatible with this existing system. Posts that get a quick reaction or emotion out of you are even further encouraged, while things you simply don’t want to see (but aren’t necessarily “bad”) get punished heavily.

This system works through subscribing to communities you are interested in and actively participating in improving the health of those communities, rather than passively consuming content. That takes some effort, yes.

All in all I think this proposed system is not compatible with Lemmy, and maybe not even a good idea.

It could just have something to do with the fact that many people think ads are not only annoying but also highly manipulative, creating artificial needs in people, a tool to make already successful and rich companies even richer, … and the surrounding technology to power them is unethical, hoarding tons of information, building profiles of people, tracking which websites they visit, what search terms they use, …

When people talk about blocking ads, being frustrated about them showing up, it’s just kind of disrespectful to be like “well you could just pay for the service, you know?”. Besides, who knows how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets.

Shonk.

From what I know, F-Droid compiles apps from source so you can be sure that the code you’re running is actually made from the source code that it claims to be built from. On most other platforms, the developers could be uploading malicious programs that actually have the code changed from what’s shared online as its source code. Then add the fact that other developers can and do look at the code, and what changes are made from version to version.

There used to be this service called Flattr, and it’s still around, but I’m honestly not sure how it works anymore. The way it used to work is you set a monthly amount you’re willing to contribute, you get to specify which projects to support, either one time, or recurring, and then your contribution is split up between the projects you chose to support.

I don’t know if this is an ideal system, because some creators might end up staying unsupported even though people are using their creations, others end up reminding their audience constantly to use the service and support them, so they end up with more than a similar creator not reminding their audience.

In the end, I think the best thing for all creators would would be universal basic income. Everyone is taken care of such they can survive and pay for necessities, and then they can just create stuff for others to enjoy, for free. (Oh, the humanity!) No trying to convince people to share part of their hard-earned money just for basic survival.

On Mastodon, when you follow another user on another instance, your instance will send a request to the other, to be notified of new posts made by that user, as well as posts they’ve boosted. When such a new post arrives, a copy will be created on your instance so it can be displayed without nagging the original instance again for the post’s content and such.

Lemmy is similar of course, since it uses the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub). Think of communities as “special users”. Whenever someone creates a post or reply, the community will boost it, so it ends up on every instance where a user has subscribed to that community.

This part I’m not entirely sure on but I believe it’s how things work: The other way to send messages around other than subscription is obviously to send messages directly. In ActivityPub there’s a field that specifies the recipients of a message. When such a message is created, it is pushed to the instances of the recipients. On Lemmy, the recipient is the community you’re posting to. On Mastodon, the recipients are filled with all the users that you @-mention in the contents of the message. So for a Mastodon user to post to Lemmy, they have to mention the community, which is why you see some posts that contain the community’s handle.

Because you can’t follow / subscribe to users on Lemmy, the posts of Mastodon users that don’t involve Lemmy never end up being “federated”, meaning Lemmy instances don’t get notified of these posts, so they don’t end up being “copied”. This is the same on Mastodon by the way. Unless your instance sends out a request to fetch posts from an unknown user, it doesn’t know about their posts, since nobody so far has cared about them.

This makes sense because if you were to try and store all the content from the fediverse you would need a LOT of storage for little gain. Similarly it would be bad to never store the content and always fetch it, because that would generate a bunch of additional traffic, which especially small instances would suffer from.

To summarize: Lemmy doesn’t display Mastodon posts because it doesn’t have a mechanism to subscribe to those users.

How long have you been part of the fediverse? (A term which tends to not be capitalized, by the way. *nerd snort*) It’s not about you getting to interact with every instance using just one account. It’s about putting the power into the hands of ordinary people. Including the power to associate or disassociate with certain people, communities, and content. That includes an admin’s ability to go “I see you’re not sufficiently moderating your instance. We will defederate until you’ve taken steps to ensure your instance sufficiently moderates with common-sense rules.”. Whether that is due to some content policies or to block an instance from which a ton of spam originates.

Just how with email a provider can choose to block or automatically mark-as-spam any email coming from a server they don’t trust, for example because it’s a known source of spam. It’s actually how a lot of the internet works. And it works as long as well-intentioned people are in positions to make such decisions. And if a server or service goes rogue, they get the equivalent of defederated.

Incorrect. I’m fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don’t want to see.

However, I’m allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn’t allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don’t need to all block the content they don’t like manually. It’s my instance admin’s choice, and my choice to go with their instance.

If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don’t have to sign up to one that does something you don’t like.

Besides, you don’t seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn’t for the ability to defederate, we’d have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn’t matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.

Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?

Say you have an instance with a “no-NSFW” rule, for people who don’t want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn’t have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in “All”.