PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Do you think a warrant canary would help? Basically post something ASAP that says “I haven’t been served any IP subpoenas as of today.” Then, update the statement every so often unless you get served.

Can we rename Neptune to “Smaller Uranus”? I couldn’t tell the difference if they weren’t shown together.

I like this, but I think that upvotes correspond to things people enjoy, which may or may not be of high quality. I.e., shitposting subs would probably be rated “high quality” when, like… it’s literally the point to post shitty content.

Also, as stated, that means we have to sum over the entire time history of the community. We would probably want to limit the time history of what is summed over, subject to a maximum for subs with high post counts (like the shitposting subs.

IMO it’s a great suggestion, but I think it needs to be part of a weighted combination of factors.

I absolutely think we can approximate it, and MAU furnishes a flawed example of such an approximation.

Okay but how do we quantitatively and unambiguously devise a metric for quality? More importantly, how do we come up with a satisfactory approximation to that metric? I’m open to ideas.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Threads, like Mastodon and the social media website formerly known as Twitter, are microblogging sites. While Mastodon users do show up here once in a while, I don’t get their posts unless they actively post in a Lemmy community.

So if your instance decides not to defederate from Threads, and you choose not to block Threads using Lemmy’s upcoming individual instance blocks, you might see their users occasionally comment on stuff. If I recall correctly, it’s pretty difficult for Mastodon users to post on Lemmy for technical reasons that will also apply to Threads.

I do think that quality of life in the wider Fediverse could dip once Threads users are allowed to participate and Threads content is allowed to spread. However, I think that the impact on Lemmy will be small. If it isn’t, we have defederation and soon individual instance blocking to help us filter out the crap.

Because the code for Fediverse sites is free and open source, I think that the Fediverse will exist for the foreseeable future. However, Meta could make it worse. If their past behavior is any indication, i.e. basically all of it, then that’s probably what they’re going to do eventually. At the end of the day, if Threads is too irritating, someone will start an instance of something that is defederated from them.

Personally, I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of Meta (or any corporation) joining the Fediverse (or any other aspect of public life), but I think we’ll be okay. I am concerned for people in marginalized groups who will have to deal with the toxic community that Threads has allowed to fester. However, there was a big stink about this a couple months ago where some big instances pre-emptively defederated from Threads. Now might be a good time to make an account on one of those instances.

Regardless of what happens, you will not be literally forced to go to Facebook or Threads. In the absolute worst case scenario, i.e. Meta takes over the Fediverse, you join or host an instance that doesn’t federate with anyone.

I’m an anxious person myself so I know this is hard to internalize: you’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.

Oh thank goodness, I could hardly think of a worse name than Calckey for a social media service.

In all seriousness, glad to see them growing. Hope to see them succeed!

Uuuuuuuugh. Rough.

I was just in the middle of trying out 3rd party clients, so I initially thought it was the clients. That being said, it only took a half-hour to rebuild my profile (mostly re-subscribing to stuff). I feel like lemmy.sdf.org is noticeably slower, although I’m still grateful for their work.

Personally it was quite annoying. It was made more annoying due to the fact that I literally wrote a long comment about this exact scenario where I advised the reader to get multiple accounts but that I basically couldn’t be arsed to do it myself.

However, at the very least, the communities I followed are all fine, and obviously the Fediverse itself won’t be impacted by vlemmy’s disappearance. (It so happened that none of the communities I followed were on Vlemmy, other than its support community.) I got wrecked for a few hours, but there’s an easy path for me to recover (make a new account on a different instance).

In my view, this event justifies why the Fediverse is more robust than a centralized system, even a hypothetical one without corporate control. It is no longer (for me) a hypothetical situation: my instance shit the bed, and I got through it. We thought Vlemmy was rock solid. It had some of the best uptime in the game. While I was briefly inconvenienced, the system went on and I was able to quickly rejoin the conversation.

Honestly, I hope Vlemmy comes back. I’m not going to bet on it (and this time I’m actually going to follow my own advice), but I miss the experience. If not, it will bring me great closure to find out why the site died.

Lastly, I think we need to be able to download our user data to a JSON like in Invidious. At a bare minimum, we need profile data and the list of subscriptions so that the new instance can regenerate the desired feed from the old instance. Furthermore, Vlemmy was one of the few instances who had no defederations or blocked instances [1]. To get a full picture of the Fediverse, it will probably be necessary to have two or more accounts under the assumption that the union of the instances’ federations will be enough to cover the desired subset of the Fediverse. It’s certainly possible, it just needs to be implemented. I guess I have an actual reason to learn Rust now!

[1] Vlemmy had just recently defederated from burggit for legal reasons. Otherwise, they were federated with everyone. I really value the existence of a small number of instances not defederating from anyone because I want to be aware of idiots and assholes on the platform that normal instances (rightly) filter out. The Meta situation has really challenged that perspective, and I reserve the right to change my mind about this. All I know is that it is really convenient to go on Vlemmy or sdf and be pretty certain that I’m seeing all the discussion. That, and that I love a good shitshow every once in a while.