Well, the Spartans were pederasts…

If the other services are exposed on local ports, you can have NPM forward to those.

There’s a “sort [posts] by new comments” option.

I think at some point the various fediverse components will need to divide up by function, into generic account hosts, generic content hosts, and generic interface hosts. As long as those three functions are bound together, the possibilities for federating between platforms will be limited.

The pattern I see in MAU is periodic surges of new users, followed by a leveling-off decay that eventually amounts to about half of the new users.

How does that compare to other platforms?

This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post.

I thought that’s more or less how it’s supposed to work now: if someone on instance A subscribes to a community on instance B, the community gets cached on instance A; and users there can post to it locally (and see each other’s posts) even if it temporarily can’t re-sync with instance B.

Is that not how it works in practice?

Or maybe a general-purpose ActivityPub plugin, if you prefer to view lemmy content from your mastodon account or vice versa.

Conceptually, it’s similar to an RSS feed: you can’t give someone a link to a feed that will automatically open in their own feed reeder; they need to go to their own reader first and paste the url there. The only exception is if their browser is configured to recognize feeds and open them in their default reader—and I think that’s going to have to be the solution for fediverse content: browsers will need to be updated, or browser plugins developed.

Ongoing discussion—i.e., comments replying to other comments, not just posts—drives engagement as much as content. If the post-to-comment ratio is too high, active commenters are less likely to encounter each other in the sea of automated posts.

What does it mean for an instance to “join in”? Can users not participate unless their instance has joined?

I think it might accomplish more to wait a few days or hours for them to do something that egregiously violates community standards, then defederate en masse—and use the defederation as an event to draw media attention to their practices.

I would make a simpler and more objective rule: no instance should host more than (say) 25% of active user accounts.

Offer courses in community moderation using the university’s instance?

Finally, we can test our entire pipeline by deliberately training misaligned models, and confirming that our techniques detect the worst kinds of misalignments (adversarial testing).

Creating psycho AIs for the cop AIs to practice on—what could go wrong?

I think the Fediverse should be seen as two distinct parts: one that hosts user accounts and provides a user interface, and one that publishes content and provides discussion space.

Ideally, the first would remain independent from major companies, while the second would become universal for all web content.

I wonder if the first days of SMTP were like this—people sending emails to each other in amazement that messages could reach people on other servers.

The instance(s) on which you have accounts dictate the interfaces you use to interact with the fediverse. If you find lemmy’s interface adequate for interacting with mastodon or vice versa, then you only need one account; but if you want to use different interfaces for different types of content, get accounts on instances that offer those interfaces.

Federation is user-driven, not admin-driven: if you subscribe to content on a new instance, that instance will become federated with yours by default.

Defederation is admin-driven, but if done right it’s an added value: if you agree with the admins’ policies, they’re filtering out content you wouldn’t want to see anyway. So it should suffice to make one account on an instance whose policies you agree with—or barring that, an instance that never defederates from anyone.

And for maximum control, you can always start your own instance that just hosts your own account.