polygon

Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.

Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.

Holy shit, that article was profound. Thank you for sharing.

no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example

Well I think that's part of the point of the Fediverse: No single server has to scale that much. Sure, the big ones are going to get big and stay big, but no one Lemmy server is ever going to have as many people using it as Reddit does. That means the cost of each instance is going to be tiny in comparison to what Reddit spends to keep one big monolithic site running (which is easily in the millions). Fediverse will distribute users across many instances/platforms which also distributes the cost. Not only do users have many Lemmy instances, they've also got kbin, and mastodon, plus any other platform that joins ActivityPub.

Reddit/Facebook style monolithic sites are not viable. You see time and time again these platforms desperately trying to monetize because it's so expensive to run. Fediverse can have millions and millions of users, but no single entity will have to foot that bill.

Right, lots of people have felt depressed too. That doesn't mean they've got clinical depression. It is clinical when it is so extreme that it impacts every facet of your life.

Think of it this way: lots of people can't see well, but not seeing well doesn't mean blind. If you don't see well you can improve your life by wearing glasses. If you're blind glasses aren't going to help. The whole way life functions revolves around dealing with being blind. There are all sorts of things you'll need to do to cope with blindness that people who aren't blind, or simply don't see well, don't have to do or think about. So it isn't quite right to equate not seeing well to blindness, even if people who don't see well can imagine what not seeing at all might be like since they can partially experience not being able to see.

Not sure what I make of that. He quoted a guy, rather than giving his own opinion. We can make a lot of assumptions about why he quoted the guy, but without stating an opinion it can only ever be speculation. In a massive list of essays, which I admittedly haven't read all of, one quote seems to be the big uproar about fascists running Lemmy?

And then being like "Hey maybe don't delete posts just because they're about China? That doesn't break any rules," suddenly makes them in love with the CCP? I don't have any context to judge the quote and posts regarding China literally do not break any rule. "Orientalism" is a ridiculous reason to delete a post.

This all seems completely blown out of proportion like typical Twitter drama.

Bleh, presearch is tied to crypto nonsense. I think something like YaCy is a more viable project. I can't say if one is better than the other functionally, but I feel like anyone trying to get away from Google is doing it because of the excessive monetization messing with their searches, to then switch to something built to prop up a token/coin seems a bit strange imo.

If I read it correctly, YaCy is like using a torrent except the information being shared between peers is search information. When you do a search you're essentially asking everyone else in the swarm for access to their YaCy search cache. The bigger the swarm the more data is available. It seems you can also initiate your own webcrawling to increase the size of the cache you share. So the searches are completely decentralized and unmodified by any profit-motivated algorithms and come directly from other users searches/crawling. It also seems impossible to be tracked this way. You could see that your IP was connected to the swarm, but it doesn't seem possible to know what it's doing on the swarm because there is no central server to log it, just a bunch of direct connections between computers in the swarm.

It harms the banks, which harms rich people, which harms politicians because rich people threaten.. er, lobby them concerning campaign donations, SCOTUS has shown repeatedly in the last 2 years that they're firmly in the pocket of a certain political party with rulings which enable them so they wine and dine Clarence Thomas and the rest (Google "Clarence Thomas corruption")

If you think any of this has to do with how your life might improve you've not been paying attention.

You're making it complicated. For us oldies who lived on IRC back in the day it all seems pretty simple.

Bunch of different servers connected together where everyone can talk to each other no matter which server they're connected to. In Lemmy's case, the channels are hosted on various servers, but anyone on the network can talk in those channels regardless of where they're physically located. With IRC you'd just connect to the server that was the fastest based on your location. With Lemmy/kbin, you connect to the one that is the most stable for you, or you like the name, or UI, or whatever (I prefer kbin). But once you're on one there is no functional difference to the content because they're all on the same network (ActivityPub).

You don't need to explain the details of Federation to get people to understand what it is and how it works. Where any specific community is physically hosted has no real meaning when anyone can access it from any instance. Just like IRC, being in the US and speaking with someone in Australia, we're obviously on different servers but that has no meaning when the content (chat) is the same through both.

This is the best solution I've heard so far. Any server could have their own Technology group. Using Federation, anyone from anywhere could subscribe to each of them. Or, instead of subbing to each of them you just sub to the !tech tag, and you automatically get content from all of them. When you start a community you apply any tag you want to be included in.

To me, the instance should be mostly invisible/seamless. Subbing to tags instead of instance communities puts the focus on the content rather than where the content came from. Tags would make one large meta community that simulates how that other site feels, but with the option to still subscribe to a specific community if you ended up liking it more.

Say for instance one of the !tech groups ends up with really good content and discussions and the other smaller ones end up with a lot of duplicates and low quality comments. You'd easily be able to see which one you'd want to sub to directly. In this way tags would make community discovery much easier. Instead of having to seek out 10 different groups on 10 different instances, you sub to a general interest tag and either that works well enough or you discover the one you like the most and sub to that one directly.

Also Beehaw bills itself as a "safe and inclusive space" which is huge bait to a certain type of internet scumbag. It makes Beehaw a large target for trolling and abuse. Without tools to deal with this I can see the logic in just defederating until moderation can get better. They've also been in contact with the instances they've defederated from and are discussing ways to move forward because everyone realizes this isn't an ideal situation.

I can sympathize with why they felt this was their only option, but on the plus side, this situation might just spur development of real moderation tools that are desperately needed for anyone running a Lemmy instance. Some people want to hate on Beehaw for their decision but honestly we might all be benefiting from it in the long run.

Yeah, I hear you. I've tried a few different Lemmy instances and they've all varied in terms of bugs, posts getting stuck on the main page for days, not being able to load a post I made myself even though I keep getting comments on it. I get it, this is all new. But switching over to kbin made a huge difference. kbin.social is still getting killed from the amount of new users, but imo it looks and works way better than Lemmy while still being able to communicate with people on Lemmy. I'm not sure which system is newer, Lemmy or kbin, but kbin feels way more polished and responsive.