I don't see irony there. I think calling this FOSS community 'filled with Linux-crazed people' is a stretch, but even then, it's very different to:
spoiler'd for long image
or even just hating a niche product whatsoever. It's not like Linux is EEE'ing or being invasive, so it's hard to equivocate being a passionate fan to being a passionate hater.
Haha they thought it was too easy and were proven wrong!
Honestly, if a place is obscure enough, even smaller barriers of entry help, like forums that don't let you post on important boards until you build a reputation. There's only so much effort an adversary is willing to put in, and if there isn't a financial incentive or huge political incentive, that barrier could be low.
One of the first few instances I heard of was botsin.space, which has been around since at least 2017. Bots aren't new. (Not sure where you're pulling "AI" from, this is old* tech, and I don't mean that negatively)
(edit: I accidentally a word and didn't realize you wrote 'auto-report instead of deleting them'. Read the following with a grain of salt)
I've played (briefly) with automated moderation bots on forums, and the main thing stopping me from going much past known-bad profiles (e.g. visited the site from a literal spamlist) is not just false positives but malicious abuse. I wanted to add a feature which would censor an image immediately with a warning if it was reported for (say) porn, shock imagery or other extreme content, but if a user noticed this, they could falsely report content to censor it until a staff member dismisses the report.
Could an external brigade of trolls get legitimate users banned or their posts hidden just by gaming your bot? That's a serious issue which could make real users have their work deleted, and in my experience, users can take that very personally.
Not sure why this was upvoted, the blog says it's theirs.
Moving Forward
With the new name, a few changes will be made in the engine and community. Obviously, all the repositories and community hubs will adopt the Luanti name in some form. You’ll be able to find the website at luanti.org and [snip]
On this note, another thing I appreciate is what they said about "Free" and "Libre": those names are great for saying "This is a free/libre/open clone of [x]", and that's what I'll think when I see it. Software like LibreOffice aims to support Microsoft Office documents, OpenRTC2 and OpenTTD are for people who want to see those games pretty-faithfully cloned, even if extended. Luanti is not OpenMinecraft.
IMO, the worst thing about "Minetest" is that it sounded like it was just a test creation, a prototype or experiment. It's certainly well beyond that now. The announcement introduction mentions people associate it with being a Minecraft clone or alpha release, but even further, to me the name initially gave me the impression it was [still] someone's small hobby project. 'Luanti' is much better.
No contradiction. Law is a dumb basis for deciding what you like and don't like.
Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.
There's plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn't come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.
(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).
It's possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn't really care about those ideals (perhaps they're only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn't do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.
For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn't require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn't have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.
lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn't able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.
Almost all of my creations which I share (mostly code and visual art) are entirely volunteer work. Community culture doesn't cost money. Entertainment does not need to be a job, even if it must take time and work.
Of course industrial large feature films cost full-time money. But I don't come to online communities for that.
It turns out, mods are gods.