Just a thought, communities dedicated to one particular gender are often not inclusive by design, especially if you actively try to funnel people of a certain gender to certain communities. And therefore they, historically, have tended to devolve into echo chambers, and then subsequently into toxic spaces, with little room for nuanced discussion nor hosting a broad range of opinions. That’s not to say all communities are like this and most don’t start out like that either. There is value to have these communities if they themselves promote inclusion. But putting people of a particular gender into a gender-specific community is not at all the solution to “Too few women on Lemmy”.

I’d rather see the focus on making the general communities be welcoming to everyone equally.

I only agree with two rules: be awesome to each other (if in kind) and downvote is not a disagree button, it’s a troll button.

Dictating other rules, like the use of the edit keyword or how to measure scale of something… Is not awesome.

So far, the majority of content that approaches spam I’ve come across on Lemmy has been posts on [email protected] which highlight an issue attributed to the fediverse, but which ultimately have a corollary issue on centralised platforms.

Obviously there are challenges to address running any user-content hosting website, and since Lemmy is a comminity-driven project, it behooves the community to be aware of these challenges and actively resolve them.

But a lot of posts, intentionally or not, verge on the implication that the fediverse uniquely has the problem, which just feeds into the astroturfing of large, centralized media.

My first concern is that if the platform is open source someone can host a malicious version of it, where certain requests may be ignored (such as deletion).

Just so you know, this is not a fefiverse specific issue. Third party websites have cropped up to scrape sites like Reddit and post archived versions of undeleted posts for decades. I’m not sure your concern relates to the fefiverse at all.

Bloonface.com has been posting anti-fediverse propaganda for a while now. It’s time to stop listening to what they have to say.

Thanks bot, but in this case, posting the full link is pretty damn important to the point.

https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] is up to date, my dude.

Lemmy.world users can upvote and reply to /c/[email protected] and this will be broadcast to other instances (like I can see those upvotes and replies on lemmy.ml) but beehaw.org users won’t see them.

Defederation blocks specific fediverse content from appearing in the server doing the blocking only. It’s NOT a censorship or privacy tool. It doesn’t stop blocked servers from pulling content (a pointless endeavour anyway since all information is public by default and could in theory be pulled from unblocked third parties). Defederation is specifically a tool to control what instances are available to view from the instance doing the defederation, and perhaps most importantly, to keep content legal for one server to host entirely off a server where that content is not permitted (like Nazi stuff in Germany, or porn in many other places)

The search engines are increasingly becoming enshitified anyway. I no longer think being found on Google is going to be the hallmark of success long term it was purported to be. We need a new search paradigm. And I don’t just mean reinventing search engines. I mean new ways of organizing content and answering search queries. Or better funding models for indexed search.

The threat right now is from Meta, that is eyeing the fediverse, not Google.

For anyone paying attention, I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but it bears repeating: business models that treat the user as the product–to be sold, not catered to–is a cancer on the internet.

This ought to be a wakeup call in 2023. If you aren’t the paying customer/supporter, you are less than dirt on the underside of the boot of the big tech firms. You are cattle, in a factory farm, to be treated like shit, only to be slaughtered for profit at the next opportunity.

Attitude’s like “I don’t care about ads” and “my data is worthless to me, so why not trade it in” all mask the more fundamental problem that is that you are being held in a cage full of shit, when in reality you could be roaming free in a pasture.

The upvotes could come from more than just those two places. If lemmy.world and dataterm.digital don’t have identical global instance blocklists, one may still be blocking more upvotes counts han the other. Hence why my example had more than two instances.

Federation can get messy when you start to compare instances between each other.

• For one some instances disable down votes, so may count differently.
• Then you might see delays in synchronisation for whatever reason.
• Finally, federation & defederation. suppose you have instance A, B, C, and D but instance A has blocked C. Users on C comment in and upvote content on D. Instances A&B will download a copy of the stuff posted by D users, but only B will have upvotes contributed by C. Therefore, different upvotes counts.

And that’s just what I am aware of.

Welcome to the fediverse!

Reddit won’t. You hold out hope that Reddit will improve your experience. But you are not the customer though, so why would you expect them to?

Reddit’s valuation has grown tremendously over the years. From a few million, to 15 billion. It is now beholden to many stakeholders (and soon many more with the IPO) expecting a return on investment. Reddit is a factory farm, and you are a chicken in a shitty cage happy to lay eggs for no pay.

If you are okay with that, then by all means. 👍

But I’ve come to realize that free run chicken eggs taste a hole lot better, even if there are fewer of them.

There’s no way there are 120,000 active subreddits, unless ‘active’ means a least one post per month. The same 200 subreddits rotate in r/popular and r/all.

Since you are asking, here’s my primary 2 complaints about the UI so far that so far seem unaddressed:

• not having placeholders for community icons and user avatars is jarring. This pushes the text around which makes each card slightly missaligned with the last depending on if there are icons/avatars. This gets tiring to read. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It could be a black box, or even just padding.
• in the same vein, it’s hard to see what post/comment link is in what instance. This is especially important because different moderation rules apply to different instances. Also, celebrate the diversity of federation!

Reddit’s business model was not founded on selling LLM data. Reddit got greedy and decided to change their business model to cash in on an unexpected revenue stream. What was also unexpected (to Reddit) is that you cannot cater to reddit-style social media communities and monetize their data for LLM training effectively at the same time. And now Reddit will have neither, and will die just like all other businesses that adopt Enshitification as a core operating procedure.

Let this be a lesson to them and all that follow: do not let your greed make you blind to the consequences of your actions.

“Servers? Instances? Is this a place to connect with my friends or a goddamn server room?”

That’s not a property of of federation (see email and websites) it’s just because early adopters are a little wired. In any new social phenomenon, it takes a second wave of adopters (first wave of followers) to bridge the wierdos from the masses.

Cue this classic study in leadership: https://youtu.be/hO8MwBZl-Vc be the first one to follow the wierdos and show the masses it’s cool.

It’s implied in the analogy that this is the first time Person A and Person B are talking about being attacked by a bear.

This is a very simplistic example, but A and B might have talked a lot about

• being attacked by mosquitos
• bears in the general sense, like in a saying “you don’t need to outrun the bear, just the slowest person” or in reference to the stock market

So the octopuss develops a “dial” for being attacked (swat the aggressor) and another “dial” for bears (they are undesirable). Maybe there’s also a third dial for mosquitos being undesirable: “too many mosquitos”

So the octopus is now all to happy to advise A to swat the bear, which is obviously a terrible idea if you lived in the real world and were standing face to face with a bear, experiencing first-hand what that might be like, creating experience and perhaps more importantly context grounded in reality.

ChatGPT might get it right some of the time, but a broken clock is also right twice a day, that doesn’t make it useful.

Also, the fact that ChatGPT just went along with your “wayfarble”, instead of questioning you is also dead giveaway of bullshitting (unless you primed it? I have no idea what your prompt was). NVM the details of the advice.

I tried Mastadon too, it didn’t gel with me. Turns out I don’t care to follow people. I follow topics.

Is this so hard for big tech to understand?

Wikipedia’s (modern) definition for sophist:

A sophist is a person who reasons with clever but fallacious and deceptive arguments.

Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of bullshitter:

a person who tries to persuade someone or to get their admiration by saying things that are not true

I would argue that bullshitter captures one very subtle difference, that is vitally important to how we understand the technology behind LLM:

A sophist’s goal is to decieve. A bullshitter’s goal is to convince. I.e. the bullshitter’s success is exclusively measured by how convincing they themselves appear. A sophist on the other hand is successful when the argument itself is convincing.

This is also reflected in LLMs themselves. LLMs are trained to convince the listener that the output sounds right, not that the content be factual or that it stands up to scrutiny and argument.

LLMs (like the octopuss in the analogy) are successful at things such as writing stories, because stories have a predictable structure and there is enough data out there to capture all variations of what we expect out of a story. What LLMs are not is adaptable. So LLMs cannot respond creatively to entirely original types of problems (“untrained dials” in Neural Network speak). To be adaptive, you first have be experiencing the world that requires adaptation. Otherwise the data set is just too limited and artificial.

I think comparing LLM’s to bullshitters–that is, focused on the rhetoric, not the substance–is apt and insightful.

Perhaps the best way to put into words a feeling about LLM I have been coming to understand.

To be fair I feel like a lot of debates online are trapped in rhetoric. I also feel like call centers and support lines (the crap onrles anyway) are too.

Maybe the real question we need to be asking is: how do we incentivise listening, instead of parroting rhetoric?