Mastodon not being Twitter has been part of my ongoing description of it when asked. If you liked Twitter because you might rub elbows with important people, watch the drama in real time, or go algorithmically viral for a sick burn (or alternately something cool), you’re not going to get any of that on Mastodon. If you want microblogging to subscribers, it’s got that. If old school “people actively shared me” virality is enough, it’s got that. But it’s not going to replace Twitter, because Twitter was a culture and an algorithm as much as it was a microblogging site.

If Lemmy had more people it could be almost a 1-for-1 Reddit replacement (still a little confusing with multiple communities of the same name/topic). Mastodon can’t do that for Twitter.

I can’t tell if the Bluesky team is bad at business or planning some sort of eventual rug pull. They’re certainly a for-profit corporation without any evident way to generate profit, and their words and theoretical design all sound like they’re not easily compatible with profit, but multiple profit-focused entities have given them a lot of money for something that, if implemented as envisioned, will not make them any richer.

My only guess is some form of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish where the core server is better than the rest of the network, but the network exists to assuage fears about another social network implosion or protect from potential antitrust issues while not being a real threat, but it feels like a complicated way to make Twitter 2.0 and get rich.

As long as there’s a profit motive involved, enshittification seems like the expected conclusion. We could just be at step one. From Doctorow’s description of the enshittification cycle:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I saw zero spam and multiple posts talking about spam.

Mastodon allows some artistic nudity

This is akin to saying “the Internet allows some artistic nudity”. Like, what do they think Mastodon is? Who is allowing it? “Mastodon” also allows hardcore porn. Or it doesn’t. Or moderation is spotty. Or it’s collapsed behind a warning.

Journalists, do like the barest minimum of research before simply relaying statements from company spokespeople.

And users don’t even necessarily need to set up their own instance. There will be defed-heavy and defed-light instances users can just choose from based on personal preference. The instance mostly just matters for who federates and internal moderation policy (which is aligned), so it’s not like anyone will be forced one way or another.

deleted by creator

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators.

Are deleted and resolved posts still visible to moderators? This seems like a tool for abusive accounts to dodge moderation by deleting their posts before they’re up long enough to get moderated. Reddit had a similar issue with bad actors being able to delete/edit their previously removed posts to hide the content from moderators reviewing the account to see if their activity patterns were worthy of a full ban.

Sure, if they clone Reddit then I definitely could see it, though I think Lemmy communities are a much bigger risk for them to open up to since they’re so moderation dependent. At least with Mastodon what you see is all based on your follows. Reddit loves to abdicate on responsibility by just leaving it all to the mods, but I don’t think Meta can get away with that, and especially when they don’t directly control the mods.

All your stuff is already public on the internet without any special access being granted. If they want the convenience of receiving ActivityPub packets and metadata, they can just stand up a honeypot instance and some fake accounts. The Fediverse isn’t built for privacy.

Threads isn’t going to federate with Lemmy. It’s not the same sort of communication and the crossovers are ugly and confusing. Mastodon is where the real federation/defederation decisions will take place.

Everyone who’s subscribed to the same communities will see all of each others’ comments. The ones that won’t be seen are those in communities a user intentionally doesn’t subscribe to, which is a good thing.

And putting the choice of where conversation takes place in the hands of the OP isn’t good. There’s already issues with the first poster in a “no duplicate submissions on the same topic” community getting to set the tone for conversation through title and text. This just makes it worse. Downvoting a bad link still means the conversation is being denied in the community of users’ choice and the solution to that is allowing duplicates, which is just the status quo plus extra spam.

This kind of defeats the purpose of having multiple federated communities. Politics on lemmy.world and politics on Beehaw are different communities with different rules and different people who can even see them. Some people are subscribed to individual communities because they like that community, not because they want to join in a free for all with the entire fediverse. They don’t want to go to lemmy.world because the first poster liked lemmy.world traffic or moderation better, they chose the community they subscribed to because they liked it better.

I think the better solution is a front-end collecting comments for a particular link in from all the communities you subscribe to. If you subscribe to three different politics subs and they all post the same link, then all the comments could be displayed at once, either interspersed (with some method of considering traffic when comparing vote totals) or in collapsible sections (effectively like a top level comment for each community).

In the US, antifa vs. fascists is the actual conflict bubbling up in real life. Only online do people care about tankies. They’re a test for moderation and decentralization so people can keep them from being disruptive, not a real concern for freedom of expression. Critical support for Russia’s invasion (or disruption of support for Ukraine) is way more likely to come from the alt-right fascists than pseudo-left online tankies.

“Don’t worry, if you correctly call this a genocide, hexbear will ban you for genocide denial without a hint of irony.”

If you were already on thin ice, this shouldn’t have really been a surprise. Like most internet dwellers who get banned somewhere you’re dressing up your offending comment to make it seem like persecution, but while it’s not a heinous comment on its own, but if you have history I can absolutely see a mod not wanting to deal with you trolling the hexbears. And it certainly wasn’t just “using the word genocide”.

Your removed post does talk about genocide, but it also talks shit about Hexbear users. Which I get, I won’t join instances that federate with them, but it’s not exactly comporting with their Rule 2 of “Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.”

Like to some extent yeah, tankies kind of provoke it because apologia for oppressive regimes actively invading their neighbors is itself offensive, but you’re conveniently spinning this to be about genocide rather than the aspect of the comment that would run risks of removal in most communities trying to not foster flame wars. And since you’ve been banned before, it’s hard to believe this isn’t your first time doing it.

So what’s the problem? It’s a ban-happy three-person mod team shaping a community. There are other communities with the same explicit subject. When a community’s mods move it in a direction you don’t like, you join or make a different one, and the nature of Lemmy means they haven’t even camped an important community name.

It’s not even a particularly tankie sub, there’re posts calling Russia warmongers still up and at +82. Seems like most of the removals were posts trying to pick fights. And while tankie bashing is often fun and warranted, it’s not really extreme censorship to say that’s breaking a rule saying “everyone should feel welcome here”.

Users don’t even need to leave lemmy.ml, they can just use their lemmy.ml account and post elsewhere.

There are multiple world politics communities and multiple other news/politics communities that also discuss world politics. One community going ban happy is irrelevant.

That’s for healthcare workers, for the general public it’s only 5 days, as long as you subjectively feel you’re improving and don’t have a fever. It’s stupidly fast, especially since around 20% of people are still PCR+ after 5 days.

While there are good reasons healthcare workers should be more cautious, they’re certainly not the only ones who should be, so that discrepancy between what is recommended to the general public (and by extension becomes company policy) and what they recommend to healthcare workers seems pretty bad.

Same with a lot of other health problems. We’ve had so many people who have gotten it, many of whom probably didn’t think much of it at the time or didn’t even know they’d been infected. That’s pretty likely to have population-level impacts.

We know it can affect cognition and increase risks for a variety of health concerns, but somehow the idea that those individually-recognized issues might start showing up in population-wide trends doesn’t seem to cross people’s minds. Instead we get stories wondering about why everyone’s gotten angrier, or worse at driving, or why younger people are having heart attacks. Certainly those things could have entirely unrelated causes, but the idea that it’s actually mass infection with COVID isn’t even brought up and then rejected, it’s simply ignored.