The problem is that Lemmy is being mentioned in hackernews reddit and elsewhere as a potential alternative. Not as an alternative with all those caveats in framing but just so.

Communicating what it is even more boldly might be useful (I know it's been done quite a lot in long self posts but that I'm not sure how much of that goes through)

No. I didn't have such a problematic relationship that I didn't control my usage.

I do feel sad about such a great app RiF dying and the deterioration of communities I found great. Also the pattern of googling plus Reddit giving you insights. It was a convenient default which I think will die/deteriorate for a while.

I am excited to see what opportunities arise from this. Very much so.

Exactly. I probably don't agree on everything with 100% of developers of the tool out there. I don't want creators of technological tools (or anyone for that matter) to be subject to purity of ideology and opinion tests. I didn't want Brendan Eich gone from Mozilla nor anyone else gone from the tools they develop.

This is also pretty common. People tend to think like that about everything they had in their formative years.

It's nostalgia plus a realization of how entrenched tech bureocratic processes have penetrated their lives, oftentimes making them worse, not better (many of the improvements are taken for granted).

But my point is you can take this "old times were better" in most of every case when doing these surveys. About music, TV and everything.

What people really want are the benefits without some of the cons that they've very willingly accepted out of laziness and/or ignorance.

They've lost a ton of privacy and rights and ability to discourse and act by being so heavily surveilled and "panopticon'd" into superficial uniformity of opinion.

Many of the things they complain about they can still do "non tech/non online" but it requires more effort than pretending that there should be just one way so they don't have to choose.

The solution is the same as with the current shitty clickbait of today, ignore it.

If they automate shovelling useless crap (which they've already done quite a bit without the likes of chatgpt) then it's on the user to say "I'm not just gonna consume your crap, I'll go elsewhere with my views, which are your success metric, in aggregate"

What would you legislate here? The publication clearly doesn't care about quality and paying some people to fill shitty, already pre programmed templates and using something like chatGPT seems like the same style of crap.

They were definitely not a safe source of labor.

Also, I'd caution against reactive takes of "legislation" when the politicians who can legislate usually don't understand the technologies and are simply trying to bundle stuff in for their lobbyist (who funds them) benefit. The same types who "want to ban encryption" or other myopic takes.

Stronger rights and guarantees around imbalances of power (not specifically related to tech either) would work much better than just reacting to an AI scare.

Just read your post and I get its points. I don't see how combating one misrepresentation with a misrepresentation of your own improves the situation but at least I get what you're aiming to respond to now.

Even if you don't think it as ideological, there's some functionality/existencial aspects that make a discussion interesting. Instability and arbitrariness, if there's a lot of change without consistency and transparency, can lead to only people who value the authority's opinion.

In a way I'm trying to decide if in practice instance federation works like "this is my ball, and we'll do what I say when I say, and you accepted that because it's federation" or if there's a more open promise for stability. How much deep the fragmentation will go because of disagreements and how much friction does that cause on the end users when this happens (this is something you talk about when you mention the Identities across instances)

Maybe it's less prone to change and can provide more stability but an event like reddits current situation definitely brought about some chaos.

The mod post about talking with the other instance admins seems like it's not about animosity but amicably spoken ideological differences but that goes back to my point.

When something is so exclusive maybe it'll have to invest extra to not be misunderstood when it's shared often with a different pitch, using more centralized patterns that are known to "mainstream" social network/forum users.

My point is that I don't know what's specifically "fascist" about it if virtually everyone uses it.

This is definitely a great post. The only thing that I think would help also would be discoverability and user choice, but it's obviously easy to say without working on it.

Reddit had relatively consistent discoverability, but the whole "federation" aspect (which is the whole point) makes a very different landscape to wade through.

Definitely, this is a milestone for a new wave of "early adopters". It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

You hold viewpoint A and claim that those that hold viewpoint B do it because they are mad because they don't get their way instead listening to the actual stated reason, such as OPs.

I think federation is absolutely interesting but this is definitely a consideration and pretending everyone that raises is "umad" or bad is not compelling. Communities online already have problems of "circlejerk" and extreme uniformity. This could easily foster that even more to a point where there's really no communities of significance. Just similar things to 20-100 people using a chat medium to share stuff.

Meh. "Fascism"? That tactic is used in politics all the time against most prominent leaders and groups, no matter where they come from. They're both inept and totally powerful and Machiavellian.

It's the whole thing about "will bear them with humor and ridicule" but also "look at their evil actions".