I suspect there’s a direct correlation between education level and urges to be pedantic. When schooling hammered vocabulary into your head and punished you for misusing it, vocabulary being misused becomes tougher to enjoy.

Toxic though? You’re not insulting or harassing someone, unless they’re really thin-skinned.

Fair point. But I do think it is important to protect Lemmy’s reputation. It’s less about salesmanship, and more about standing up to bad takes and random, misc bullshit.

Agreed. Even in those threads though, in my experience. Even if the op is asking, op is not the only one in the thread. More often than not, people will jump in specifically to badmouth us.

I always see a lot of pushback against any alternatives proposed on reddit itself. There’s a pretty strong, probably multi-faceted resistance any time anything new is mentioned. So, it’s good to keep in mind you will face that, and be prepared with some patience and counter-arguments.

One of the big disadvantages we have is that we’re still somewhat under-developed, due to being newish still, alongside not having corporate-levels of resources to pour into development.

This leaves us open to things like the recent spam flood. These things will get ironed out over time, but until they do, they’ll inevitably harm the platform’s growth.

In just the past 6 months though, apps have rolled out and steadily improved, some security issues have been addressed, and larger communities have built-out their admin capacity. So, we’re approaching being primed for growth, but that recent spam flood took me aback for a second.

You want to make a strong first impression, since it carries a lot of influence and you only get one shot. So, before we really do heavy campaigning to try to draw people, we want to make sure they’ll have a good experience while they’re here. I think we’re close, but not quite there yet.

Progress has been steady and overall positive though. One thing I think that gets underestimated is the importance of the size of our body of old content, and how much it helps to grow that. The meme communities having pages and pages of memes to scroll, the news communities having articles on everything in triplicate, the tech communities having thousands of interesting old convos to look at, the art communities being crammed full of art, etc etc.

That body of old stuff ends up being a kind of bedrock that future users will be more interested in building off of. Then the niche communities will start to pop more imo.

Sounds like a fantastic option for folks that don’t like any mandatorily enforced censorship.

They should all go there.

Comments and votes are content too.

Somebody has to fill this place with content…

…I really like the sound of that idea.

I’m also likely to switch to kbin at some point. Personally I take a fairly long-term view of this project, so I’m waiting to see which projects keep going, which fail, and which new ones haven’t even popped up yet. I’m aware that devs can pivot and change their minds about things.

I picked lemmy initially more or less at random, and I do like it here, but I’m ultimately going to move to the most functional product. That broader idea of the Fediverse is why I’m here.

Anyone can join the Fediverse and make stuff for it. That includes google, if they feel like it.

I do not recommend that you crusade to attempt to control who does and does not belong in the Fediverse. That probably won’t accomplish anything except increasing your own blood pressure and making a lot of people block you.

I just want to point out that our fairly optimistic views and plans for Lemmy has very likely specifically attracted trolling attention. We have a target on our backs, because some people just like attacking nice things. Most of the internet is not very nice, so does not need to be attacked. We are trying to do something different though, and that will attract some negative attention whether we like it or not.

Since they want to have a chilling effect on the community, hopefully demotivating some of its userbase, it is necessary to embody a willful refusal to be chilled.

For each of us.

A thorough, consumer-facing breakdown by a major tech news site? I think we’re moving up in the world…

Though I wish they would’ve added a couple more paragraphs going into the data privacy/security concerns that some people have. I guess the average consumer isn’t particularly bothered these days, kinda gotten used to it. Would’ve been nice though.

From a brief perusal, yes, it looks okay. It’s a wiki though, so proceed with the standard caution.

Can try clearing your cache, see if that helps.

We’ve been having some technical issues on World this weekend though. Your best bet is to go for a smaller Instance and set up there as your main. Then you’ll be able to access the content from world and kbin from there, without having to deal with any of the bigger Instance problems.

If you don’t like meme culture, your problem is much bigger I’m afraid…

I agree. If we want to stand against the giants, we will have to be able to do business here, and accept those that do.

There’s a difference between working with a smaller business and helping it grow vs working with a tech giant.

God damn I love charcuterie.

Only thing you have wrong is that it is inadvertent. Normies are the mentally healthy and socially well adjusted, and the gatekeeping against them is not accidental in the slightest.

And tbf, an outsized amount of the internets truly amazing content does not come from them. It comes from the more ostracized, those that have to spend time here because they’re not well enough to actually be around real people.

It’s not a healthy habit to gatekeep, and they usually already know that. But, when normies invade a space it can change the tone incredibly quickly, so, the inner conflict will always probably remain a little bit.

It’s complicated. Just try to remember if you have things like friends, loving family and a life, some people can just tell and they utterly hate you for it. Even if they try not to be too mean about it. It’s not personal.

We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development–open source. All of our content–available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.

However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.

He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.

Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That’s the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.