Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it's inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.
That's why I suggested Revanced with "disable recommendations" patches. It's still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.
I think it's sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.
The algorithm doesn't actually care that it's promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people's eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using "not interested" and "block this channel" buttons doesn't make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you're teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!
The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP's mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). "Youtube with no ads!" is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.
Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit
Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don't like "magazine" for a community)
Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin
"Suddenly"? This has been happening for a long time. If you click on outbound links from built-in Windows apps, they used to always open in Edge unless you used a tool named EdgeDeflector to redirect them to your preferred browser. In 2021, they killed EdgeDeflector by making it impossible to redirect links with the microsoft-edge:// protocol baked in, even if you go deep into the registry settings to change this. They will eventually do this to Outlook and Teams too and get away with it, just like they got away with restricting EdgeDeflector.
Reddit has been that way for a long time, after it lost the reputation of "niche forum for tech-obsessed weirdos" and became the internet's general hub for discussion. The default subreddits are severely astroturfed by marketing and political campaigning groups, and Reddit turns a blind eye to it as long as it's a paid partnership. There was one obvious case where bots in /r/politics accidentally targeted an AutoModerator thread instead of a candidate's promotion thread and filled it with praise for that candidate.
They used to display a bar in the top right of the screen that was "percentage of daily server costs that are covered by Reddit Gold purchases today" and I remember them always hitting the goal. What other costs (besides staff) were they losing so much money on?
Yes, the point of the Fediverse is that everyone is free to associate with groups they choose. There is nothing wrong with creating instances that are very isolated. What Beehaw wants with the "improving moderation tooling", however, is a safe space where the network is restricted from them, but they still have full access to the rest of the network. That suggestion is what I was calling selfish, because this way their users would be parasiting off the content and moderation of other instances while giving nothing back.
Their reasons are much more selfish than that. They insist on only having 4 moderators while never scaling up, and they don't like how federation allows users from other instances to post on their instance because it disrupts their rigid ideal community vibe. According to their suggestions on "improving moderation tooling", the ideal federation setup is that their users can post on other instances, but other instances' users can't post on theirs, so they can save time on moderation work. The moderation work of other instance admins for their users doesn't matter, clearly.
Read the article, the problem isn't their online activities but the wifi attracting them to cluster outside the library building. The residents don't want the homeless hanging around outside the library and turning off the wifi would reduce their incentive to be there.
Ironic that three people downvoted this. But I agree, a "no downvotes" rule is designed to avoid disagreement and conflict, which is impossible on a public forum without extremely restricted expression. If the point is to be always be nice, why not disable open commenting and make users select their replies from a list of canned positive comments. 100% safety and positivity.
Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?