

/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021
Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website
Healthy for Lemmy, totally catastrophic for Pixelfed.
I know this comment is satire (well done… I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.
I’m clearly not paying enough for a therapist.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.
For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.
As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.
Urban dictionary says it’s a term that refers to when an undercover government agent fails to blend in with whoever they’re trying to blend in with.
Absolutely, if you’re seeing propaganda, it’s because it’s allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.
Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.
There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".
Chocolatey and Windhawk
“Stuff in my feed I don’t want to see in my feed” is kind of the exact problem the Fediverse set out to solve. Nothing gets “injected” to a feed here so if you are seeing it, it’s a choice to continue to do so.
I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.
Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!
“Lemmy” is actually not a platform like Reddit, it’s software and the network of instances running that software is decentralized (Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol) meaning each instance is operated by a different person (or group). There are also other similar softwares like Piefed and mBin that work pretty well with Lemmy. That is all to say that if an Admin or Mod is “getting fascisty” you can block that instance, join another, or even create your own. That’s the beauty of ActivityPub!
The only thing I’m aware of that they do even remotely better than anyone else is privacy.
Where did you hear this? Its my understanding that they are one of the worst when it comes to privacy.
“Many small instances that can survive with a couple of donations” seems much more sustainable than a handful of large ad-selling business “powered by Mastodon”.
Well said! My instance doesn’t need ads because the servers don’t care about profits.
I’ve never seen an ad-based tier on a Mastodon instance and the network does just fine 🤷♂️
Without executives leeching money from going to the actual cost of servers things seem to work better! Go figure!
I was just thinking the same thing. It’s rare that the bullshit from tech companies is so quickly identified packaged and labeled like that (even if we are still calling it “AI”).
I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in the intelligence of a woman who would marry a Lemmy user.
The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.
Actually about a third of all users have an adblocker installed. Adblocking has been mainstream for a while, no doubt why Google finally stopped pretending they were OK with it.
What you’ve expressed is not pessimism it’s cynicism.