Hey fellow inhabitants of the Fediverse, particularly those lurking on Lemmy,
I've been thinking a lot lately about the nature of information, discourse, and where genuine human connection can still thrive online. It leads me back to platforms like this one.
We often talk about censorship in terms of direct bans or content removal, which is obviously a critical concern. But what about the more insidious forms of control? I'm talking about the subtle fiddling of algorithms, the deliberate hiding of certain content without outright deletion, the 'shadowbanning' that makes you feel like you're shouting into a void. How resistant is the decentralized nature of Lemmy, and the wider fediverse, to those kinds of pressures? It feels like the very architecture here might offer a unique defense, but I'm curious about the community's thoughts.
I know we're not exactly bursting at the seams with users, and frankly, if you're not already clued into how something like Lemmy works, you're probably never finding it through a casual search – SEO seems like a foreign concept here, battling potential duplicate content issues across instances. Is this quiet corner its strength, or its eventual downfall if the 'outside' world becomes too noisy?
Speaking of noise, it feels like nearly 90% of the content generated on the broader internet these days is starting to feel like it's churned out by LLMs. Autogenerated articles, comments, even entire 'conversations' that ring hollow. Is the Fediverse, specifically, a safe haven from that rising tide of artificial content? Does the human-centric, community-driven nature of these instances inherently push back against such automation?
I've looked into ActivityPub and other federation tools in the past, and my observation has often been that they've been adopted primarily by marginalized groups in society, seeking refuge from mainstream platforms. While that's incredibly valuable and a testament to their utility, what could truly happen to extend this concept, to genuinely get more people involved without compromising the very principles that make it appealing – decentralization, human curation, and resilience against algorithmic manipulation?
Just throwing it out there. Would appreciate any insights or theories.
The most code I know is turtle LOL (and to be clear I'm talking about the one for like, kindergartners where you draw geometric shapes by lifting and putting down the pen with the commands)
also if I did know something else the first thing I would do would be something like powerdeletesuite for reddit. I know it doesn't get rid of stuff posted to other instances but it would likely auto-delete a lot of them unless the instance specifically wanted to block me from doing so, and a big part of why I do it regularly is that it keeps me fairly obscure. Every time I comment on this people are like "what you put on the internet is forever" and like, yeah, but I don't have to make it easy to find.
Yes/no. Google removed the archive feature on websites due to running out of space. Way back machine got massive dados so stopped indexing for a while.
Bit rot and link rot is real..much content from early days is gone. Sure. an llm training farm may have your blog post from 2024 but not from 2010 if the website is down
Or depends how much money a company can make from your data