It isn’t trump’s people pushing the buttons. The people running around before Biden dropped out yelling “Genocide Joe” almost definitely weren’t under trump’s control, and were possibly paid foreign actors. The same was true 8 years ago.

“Controversial” is what that would be called. Do we need a third vote instead of double-vote?

I’d rather keep the status quo. While I realize that the vote visibility can play into the hands of mod/admin/instance owners with nefarious or petty vengeful purposes, we also can see who bad actors are in the vote system - iow a bot or person perpetually downvoting subjects they disagree with yet not participating.

But people need to be aware that the votes are not private.

We could split the difference and users could get auto-notified if their vote was viewed and by whom. That way it’s a two-way street. The mod/admin can see your votes, the users know that their vote was accessed by that mod.

Second choice would be that all users are anonymized by a hash so that bad vote actors can be removed via their hash being associated with malicious or other bad acting, but to discover who individuals are the admin would have to do the legwork of follonf multiple posts/ comments to associate the hash.

No perfect solution.

Don’t know how that would be implemented, but someone needs to watch the watchers.

Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.

I agree in principle that .world containing most of the fediverse’s activity kinda isn’t great for the idea of the democratic nature of the fediverse. However, the point of the ‘verse is that anyone can spool up an instance if they dislike it, or start more communities on existing instances. If .world were to disappear it would suck, but that’s part of the problem with any instance in an informal community. Any of them can disappear.

I imagine this is controversial, but I appreciate that there’s less entertainment here. I’ve already had more decent discussions here in the last 6 months, even if I disagreed strongly with the other person, than I have on Reddit since the 3rd party app debacle.

The constant churn of what some people consider entertaining, or the never-ending effort in attempts to be the entertaining and flippant comment that gets upvotes even on serious subjects really just gets old. I don’t mean to say people shouldn’t have a sense of humor, but when everything starts to revolve around cheap quips and retreads of the same old comments, that’s stagnation. Any serious sub big enough to damp that behavior also tends to be more exclusive of outside opinion.

So I guess I’m happy with news, politics, tech, and porn - though I have to admit I blocked out a crapton of the porn when Lemmy was new because it was overwhelming so I don’t see much of that in /all anymore.

That’s unfortunate. I switched to kbin from Reddit and really liked the community feel. That’s what sold me on the fediverse. But seeing as there wasn’t SSO across from kbin to lemmy, I had a second account for the latter as there was a lot more activity on lemmy and I used kbin less and less as the site spent more time broken.

I agree there should be some more formal way of letting community operators know their instance is going away. However, the fediverse not having any way of enforcing any such rule, means we’re still looking at individual whim determining whether or not an instance will simply disappear overnight or give users time to move.

If anyone cares to check my comment history they’ll find a crapton of rebuttals to anti-biden comments that were NOT deleted by anyone.

I don’t disagree that it’s an issue, the only thing I can offer is that Linux shouldn’t be a community full of controversy needing block/bans of participants - the issue being is views the .ml mods do espouse being placed deliberately or left as propaganda.

I’ve commented there on a /news community with sourced points to make my argument and was basically told to shut the F up and had my comments deleted.

So I blocked the community.

I’m not sure how to deal with extremist mods any other way. Their instance, their community, and other than defederating and putting a lot of effort into restarting and growing any valuable communities on another instance while keeping the undesirable .ml gang out, I’m not sure there is any other solution.

I would like to see a participation per capita breakdown. IOW who posts the most per person relative to the number of participants. Edit: by country and community.

Seconded. There’s no need to have them here. The toxicity of FB, “fake news”, and the trolling that goes with it can stay the hell away from the fediverse. There’s enough to deal with here with issues from places like hexbear, CSAM, and whatever else, we don’t need knuckledraggers posting “only ‘60s kids will get this” BS along with “each upvote is a prayer for trump” or some shit.

My argument was that monetary compensation of some form would drive participation, and that participation could take the form of simple things like ads all the way to developers coding lemmy instances to accept ads and other preferred features desired by corporations like user tracking, algorithms to place preferred posts, communities and/or users at the top of views, etc… Make the software free and give instance operators a cut of any revenue, and bam, EEE wins. Way too easy, the burden of running the instances falls on the operator and with some nice EULA wording, probably the liability as well.

Of course, that hypothetical scenario hinges on corporations finding the lemmyverse worthwhile to exploit, which hopefully won’t happen.

If you want corporate control go back to Facebook and Reddit. Seriously. There are places that do what you want already, no need to corrupt this one too.

Did you read what I wrote? Are you just being stubborn about human nature? Don’t insult me by implying I don’t understand this stuff at least at the surface level. All I’m painting is a potential future, and that future is depended on corporations finding the fediverse worth the effort. If they don’t, NBD. If they do, I can assure you they will grind away at what the fediverse is until it’s shaped like what they want, federation be damned. Like I said, maybe you can carve out a corpo-free area, but that depends on the instance operators wanting to put out the effort and money while corps are potentially waving cash in their direction. Humans are shortsighted and greedy.

I’m pretty cynical. I’m a huge sci-fi fan, and enjoy everything from Star Trek, to The Expanse, to William Gibson’s novels. P K Dick, too.

You want to know which futuristic reality they projected is the one in the lead? I can tell you it’s not the gleaming white space stations with hundreds of thousands of humans peacefully engaged in furthering knowledge and exploration.

Nope.

It’s the despotic corporatocracy with the token ineffective government winning. The corporations rule all. Ever read Jennifer Government? Yeah, we’re headed for Gibson’s Sprawl and disparity in a hurry…well, if Climate Change doesn’t get us all first.

If corporations get their hooks into the fediverse it will be like putting out fires. Plenty of people out there willing to sacrifice what the fediverse is for a few bucks. I don’t want Threads/Meta to even get a toehold, that shit’s poison.

Stupid?

Cynical, sure…Pragmatic even, but not stupid. I don’t have rose tinted glasses that so many fediverse adherents seem to have about this platform. I see the corporate world taking what it wants. They may not snatch it up quickly, but they sure as hell can engage in the EEE slow grind and get what they want eventually.

Sure, fight. We might be able to carve out a piece that remains free. But if they want to commercialize it, they will, and there will be plenty of instance owners that will jump on the bandwagon to make $ or just defray costs.

You forgot profit.

If Meta/threads sees a way to cram ads into their instance(s), they will. If they offer money to others to put ads on their instances, they will. If they make rules or other demands of those making money - like no defederating from Meta/Threads, or requiring federating with other corporate instances, they will. On top of that, you’re going to get people drawn into the fediverse, like influencers, political spammers, more bots, and anyone else that follows that type of social media. Coders will start writing corporate-friendly instance code that will allow individuals (like influencers) to spin up profitable instances quickly that tie right into the corporateverse.

EEE will happen. We can argue about defederating from these corporate instances, but it’s going to be a running retreat.

Maybe hyperbolic. Maybe not. If, of course, if meta/threads finds the fediverse profitable.

Do you have the money to enforce those rules? Because meta certainly has the money to get people to profit off what they want.

You will lose. EEE/enshittification will happen. To think otherwise is naive.

They won’t waste time on lemmy over this. They’ll send cease and desist letters if they care enough. Ignoring those would lead to a suit, but assuming people are immediately going to be dragged into court over the actions being discussed here is on the farfetched side. Even those lawyers and paralegals on retainer have a cost per man hour, so dealing with finding out who a Lemmy instance operator is and drafting the legalese is going to have to be a worthwhile effort for them over some article links.