loobkoob

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn’t help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

“Landed gentry” was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn’t have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.

How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I’m not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:

And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn’t vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he’s profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.

“That means that you won.”

It’ll potentially just end up like emails (which are also federated, after all), where Gucci employees get an @gucci.com email address and an @gucci.com ActivityPub handle.

Ideally, OP’s crawlers will just come from their own instance that other instance owners can defederate from if they want to opt out.

It’s like if Dali spent too long looking at Saturn Devouring His Son

I occasionally see something tagged as “18+”, although it’s never been porn. I have wondered if it’s bugged, too, but I don’t really mind either way - there are other websites that are far, far better for porn if that’s what I’m looking for. Maybe there’s some great non-porn, non-gore content that I’ve been missing out on, but I think the chances are fairly slim.

If it helps, I use kbin.social (and its PWA for mobile browsing) and haven’t seen any porn at all in my feed. I assume it’s filtered out by default, but I haven’t checked. I don’t get any of the extreme political stuff in my feed either.

I agree with the OP, but I do somewhat agree with you, too. A lot of the news articles we get now feel like “micro-updates” to the same story: Elon Musk does bad thing that is bad for Twitter, Russia says shitty thing and attacks Ukraine some more, the American right-wing tries to do something else to take away abortion rights, etc. They can sometimes be interesting developments, and I don’t want to minimise the importance of any of them because they are important (well, not most of the Musk spam, but the others, certainly), but most of the commentary on topics like those has been played out over the last 12+ months and there’s not necessarily much new content to analyse or discuss.

However, OP is right that comment sections here are often disappointing. I find myself commenting here a lot less often than I did on Reddit simply because there are fewer interesting comments to reply to, and because my own comments get fewer interesting replies. Part of that is just the nature of having a smaller userbase, but it doesn’t stop it being a little demotivating when it feels like you’re commenting into the void, or when no-one really wants to engage in an in-depth discussion.

It’s nice to see a (cautiously) optimistic voice on this subject for a change, although I think I feel less optimistic than you. But I do think there’s the potential for it to be mutually beneficial so long as Meta remains non-malevolent.

I think there a few key differences that mean the Google XMPP situation can be used as a direct parallel, too. Google didn’t really see much benefit from staying federated, because all federation did with live messaging was mean that non-Google users were benefitting from Google’s users without being monetised by Google. When Google’s users lost access to their non-Google contacts, the vast majority of them just carried on as usual, meaning Google continued monetising them as usual and it was only beneficial for Google as a company.

I don’t think that’s the case with Threads. Meta will continue to benefit from federating with well-moderated content in the future because, for Meta, it’s content that’s being created for free by another platform that they can still monetise. And if it’s well-moderated content, that’s effectively free moderation, too - something Meta would normally have to employ people for.

More interest in Activity Pub from other big players would definitely be a good thing, if only to make sure no one company has a monopoly. It would potentially have disadvantages, of course, but I think if tech giants are going to get involved, I’d rather multiple get involved to keep things somewhat competitive and (hopefully) drive consumer-friendly ideas.