OpenStars

I don't go to Facebook, X, Instagram, or Reddit. Some people that I talk to irl also don't follow social media. Why should they - what does it offer then? To those people I have been recommending Lemmy in the past, and now I don't do that anymore. I would like to though.

Agreed - as Blaze always says, save the why and how it works (under the hood) for later and for now just show them the goods.

And when a major instance defederates from Lemmy.ml I will start recommending that exact instance to people.

Or, an admin at sh.itjust.works mentioned the possibility of automatically applying a user level block to it for all new users, along with a bot message about how to remove that block. As discussed above, it would be far from perfect (e.g. someone mentions that the genocide going on in Ukraine is bad and gets hit by many downvotes with no clue where they came from bc they are not shown notifications from the people who may reply to say how it is actually good though, bc Russia is the one doing it...), but indeed it would be better than now.

I would rather, instead of dividing between have vs. lack smartyness, focus on have vs. lack kindness, consideration, empathy, etc. Remember Reddit? (A half-joke bc although you just came from there more recently, some of us haven't been for a year or more and are legit starting to forget, almost blissfully!:-)

I don't mind talking to people all along the intelligence scale, but I do mind talking with people who engage in trolling behaviors. I will hang out with the humble uneducated plebes but I refuse to with their opposites. I am not phrasing it well but somewhere in here it gets complicated bc those scales overlap, as often the least intelligent behave as if they were somehow entitled to be treated as the most - e.g. Dr. Fauci gave the entire world a vaccine, but it was people who flunked or never took biology in the first place who are trying to block access to not only it but to simple masks. One side works to earn respect, the other does not yet not only demands equal treatment but somehow more than equal, and sometimes at the point of a literal gun. One side actually reads the Constitution of the United States, while the other side does not yet attempts to overthrow it regardless, bc they apparently know "better" how the country should be run than those who founded it.

So while I think that fascists should have a place they can talk - that's just humane - I also do not want to be in that place. Their rights end where mine begin. So if (like I/we did to Reddit) that means that they win and therefore I have to leave, so be it - I will leave social media entirely if need be, before I compromise and enjoy watching people "dunk on" others. If it is X or bust, then I choose bust.

Or the less hostile but just as damaging form of this where people treat social media as a place for emotional venting rather than real conversations with real people. Those two are related bc just bc you can get away with doing something, bc you have that power/ability, does not mean that you should do it. e.g. one or maybe three comments like "^This" or "I also choose this guy's wife" or "And my bow" etc. is fine but a hundred of them!? in a row, or even like twenty, is just too much. They speak, and therefore people cannot even listen anymore bc of the crowded noise from everyone else speaking.

Who sees the last ten posts to a community being "which android phone is the best these days" (no other details provided) and decides to add an eleventh to the group? Answer: people who are lonely and need someone to talk to, but don't care about the rules of politeness, and are so self-centered that they want another post devoted entirely to themselves. Never mind the fact that there being so many of those drives people away who would have actually answered their question. They not only whisper but SHOUT into the void, and if the only way for me to have peace is to mute them, or not go to where people do that, then so be it. Their right to post such runs up against my right to not have to listen to it.

And maybe, for some anyway, their lack of etiquette is merely bc they are young? But whoever they are, their presence foretells the absence of the people that they will drive away. So you cannot simply increase tolerance infinitely in order to grow the size of the Fediverse, bc that works in opposition to people who refuse to tolerate the intolerant and inconsiderate. We cannot have it all there - one or the other is the best that could be achieved even in purely theoretical terms, much less making it happen irl.

In the past I have very much bought the content legally, by the normal means. The issue of giving to the creators directly I don't know though.

I presume that would have security issues of its own:-), and this is just a guess but it might look more like traffic that some ISPs may want to ban, if implemented like that?

I haven't done anything remotely piratey for decades but people say that there are forums that way. I'm not intending to conflate P2P with the likes of TOR that is merely one implementation of that, just saying that apparently the implementations exist.

Also it trends towards a more intellectual crowd, even if primarily in the technical sense. Simply having to pick an instance probably keeps away a lot of the people who could otherwise flood every single community with inane questions - i.e. ask other people to do their work for them rather than do a 10 second internet search on their own.

Oh that sucks. Tbf the entire concept of the Fediverse is an enormous security nightmare regardless: someone was telling me how a person could spin up an instance and share a picture also served up from their machine, then maliciously correlate the incoming IP addresses from the latter of people who viewed it vs. make interactions (voting or comments) in the former to identify you irl. But at least that takes some technical effort, and there seems no reason not to put additional obstacles up to make it harder.

Unfortunately the Lemmy developers seem to have little incentive to add features that are primarily for Westerners who e.g. don't agree that an authoritian admin and/or mod is always correct regardless of the facts. And Westerners don't seem in that much of a hurry to make alternatives - although K/MBin exists already and Sublinks is coming as well. If we want better, we would need to put in the work to make it happen.

It's still a thousand times better than Reddit:-). Except I no longer recommend Lemmy to people that I meet irl - I can't keep doing that in good conscience anymore, until there is an instance that defederates Lemmy.ml. Yes the new person could block many people and even whole instances, but it seems a little similar to recommending that someone use Arch Linux - like, really!? Hopefully the concept of the Fediverse will improve someday soon and I can do that once more, bc I really do want to.

People forced to by work:-P.

He tried to capitalize on the Rexodus, but iirc could not pick just one lane b/t "freedom" and intolerance of the intolerant - you can never have both. Interestingly the Fediverse is currently deciding the same thing, with some neat new tricks coming in v0.19.4 that should help.

First, practically speaking, do you run that site or have some ability to modify it? You mention it a lot, but it was a different account that introduced it to the Fediverse (that I could find with my search), so I was not sure if you were merely promoting it or something deeper. Otherwise we are merely discussing theoretical possibilities here but it is up to whoever owns or maintains that site to do whatever they want with it... and they likewise should have a record of having been explicitly asked to remove that instance, if such a request existed. So even if you were to do a feature request or full-on git code contribution to fix it, having some contact with the actual owner/maintainer sounds necessary, to avoid potentially doing something non-consensual on behalf of lemmy.ml, which they have (may have) explicitly asked to be the opposite?

Second, is it the "best place for FOSS content"? I just blocked that entire instance, so I will miss out on all future posts, regardless of whether the community was politically affiliated or not. Ironically it might have been you that convinced me to take that course of action (though I could be misremembering the username, sorry if that is the case, or perhaps you were merely part of a 4/5-way, which does strike a note), with something said months ago about how most of the toxic interactions came from there, after blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml. I was advocating essentially (paraphrase here) that "at least positive conversations can be had on the Fediverse, whereas on Reddit I had to give up on that entirely outside of niche subs, and so far I have not had sufficiently negative encounters with people on lemmy.ml to want to block that instance fully (like those other two), but indeed >90% of the time when I get the most batshit insane replies it is from them; though not always b/c that is something to be expected from any large instance?" Since then, the line got crossed in my mind and I just blocked it and have not looked back. I will miss some interactions, yet I do not care: those that remain will be sufficient, and contain far less hassle. It is like filtering water: yes it will contain less taste, but it will also contain less fecal matter too:-P, and I have gotten to the point where that is what I am looking for, in every community that I visit now, not just the "non-political" ones.

I recognize that my individual user instance block would be irrelevant to this conversation if it were unique or even rare, however it is not. Many others are talking about already having done that as well, and potentially many more will do so in the future, especially as new users arrive and are told (some of them by me:-D, but again I am far from the only one who does this). I feel that I have done my due diligence in that particular respect - I have warned innocent users of lemmy.ml that they will increasingly be locked out of good conversations, as in worse than not seeing them, they will reply to people and never get a response no matter how long they wait, b/c we will not even receive their notifications. And then I waited for days for people's replies to continue... and then I simply moved on. If they remain there, that is their choice, but I will not remain personally federated with that instance by choice. Furthermore, if a major instance were to defederate with all 3 of the axis powers instances, I would join it and not even be able to view their responses in the first place. Over time I predict that it will become more and more of an echo chamber, where they shout into the void, and ofc have conversations amongst themselves, but in isolation from what is going on in the rest of the world. At least as it pertains to my account, and again I am far from the only one (though I do not know the stats - possibly some instance admin could anonymously count how many instance-blocks to it its users do? lets say the ones who have done some activity on that account in the past week, although you and I both maintain alts and yet I don't always keep any of mine except my main fully updated in such matters, so even that would be an over-counting as all my older ones, even if I posted something from it, would still not have user-blocked it). Or someone will do a poll at some point.

I hope you continue your efforts to help migrate those communities elsewhere. But the reason I say that is for their sake - whereas for my own sake, I've already settled the matter (until I can move to an instance that has a full instance block and do so still more firmly). I am satisfied, and if they want to gate that content to solely users federated with that instance, then that is their choice, but I have made mine. And I see others individually stating that choice for themselves as well. This is happening - the admins & so MANY of the users on that instance have earned a reputation: they FA and so they will, to some degree, by some people, FO. I am so glad that someone (you) will continue warning them, but I am also glad that it is not me:-).

So perhaps that is what the warnings could say? Assuming we had any ability to add such in the first place? Something like "Warning: many users have chosen to block this instance, so an account on this instance will have more restricted interactions with the rest of the Fediverse" - repeated for each of the 3. Possibly as a tooltip, an additional column, a footnote, or separating them into a distinct table altogether, below the main one if someone really wanted to push the issue hard:-P - but the latter seems unnecessarily punitive imho, and I think a footnote+tooltip would do just as well. Surely this list will expand in the future as well - e.g. if a federated Truth Social equivalent instance were to be made, or some other warning needed to be delivered even temporarily (like "Warning, this instance has <70% uptime over the last 3 months, you may in the short-term want to avoid it until it stabilizes"). And no need for any detailed reasons why - different people have different values, and ideas about what is acceptable or not, but just simply stating the consequences of choosing to make an account on it is all that needs to be said to ensure that the recipient has all of the requisite information to make an informed choice? That seems to me to provide maximum freedom - that way both the admins there and users all across the Fediverse including the most vulnerable newest ones can then do however they please. It is a solution that should fully please nobody, least of all those on the most extreme ends, but as a middle-ground compromise seems the least worst that could be done?

Fwiw, it has been 7 days since I told you that it was missing from that list. But yeah, it could have been the changes prior to the official roll-out of that version.

Although, v0.19.4 is one possibility yes, but it is also possible that the instance was missing prior to that as well, if they had asked for it to be due to the incoming flood from the Rexodus? i.e. this is not enough to reject the null hypothesis that both things might be true at the same time.

I do not say this b/c of my bias against them - if hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are there, then lemmy.ml should likewise not be non-consensually removed either, the issue is whether they asked for it to be removed, or not.

Speaking of, it would be good to place a warning about all 3 of them - people should be free to do as they please, but part of that freedom entails having the knowledge to make a choice. Silence in the face of oppression is not "freedom", as e.g. Ukranians realize better than any of us today, sadly:-(. Like porn, it is fine for someone to walk in with full knowledge of what lies ahead, it is when it surprises a naive unaware person that it causes problems.

Right, I was raising awareness of that specter and suggesting that it would need follow-up research into the history. It looks like that website was announced a year ago but I found nothing (except this OP) about "explorer" & "lemmy.ml" by a quick search in this community or in other communities too. At a guess it would have been discussed offline, i.e. Matrix rather than Lemmy.