Solar Bear

Use lemmy.ml how you want to use it, and if you want to participate in other political leanings, go to a different instance. No one is really stopping you, and that’s the whole idea of the fediverse. And there really isn’t any value lost, because this isn’t a “choose one and only one” situation. You’ve got all of the fediverse at your fingertips.

Until you make the mistake of replying with the wrong kind of comment to the wrong sub, and get banned from the entire instance and lose the ability to post on many of the largest subs on this side of the fediverse. Or maybe they just see you out and about and decide to ban you on sight because they don’t like what you said. There’s nothing stopping that.

Admin overreach and abuse is a major issue for the fediverse because it affects more than just the user in question. Admins of large instances get to decide who has access to the users and communities on their instances, and very often the users of the instance aren’t even aware of the actions taken on their behalf. Mastodon recently implemented a notification for when blocks and defederation remove your follows or followers, and this is a great first step. Users deserve to know when they are impacted by decisions such as these.

I love the fediverse and want to see it thrive, so we need to stop putting our heads in the sand on this issue. It’s always discussed as if it’s an issue with a few problematic instances rather than the systemic issue in need of a solution that is is. Admins need the tools to protect their instances from real abuse, but we need to balance that with the right of the users to know what’s going on and not be unfairly deprived of the social aspect of this social media experiment, especially without knowing.

“Because I feel like it.”

So in other words, because she wants to? As in, “because it’s her body and she can do whatever she wants with it”?

The only difference between Tumblr and Facebook is size. Facebook isn’t uniquely evil; it does exactly what any corporation would do at that scale. The systems that molded Facebook into what it is would also mold Tumblr or anything else into the same abomination.

I would respect principled opposition to megacorps even if I think it’s still misguided in this instance, because at least that’s overall based. But all of the discourse focuses on the specific wrongdoings of Facebook as if any other corporation wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in their position. It feels very kneejerk.

I want to federate and use it to destroy their platform. The biggest problem with the periodic social media “migrations” that always fail is that it creates a fragmented diaspora. Take Twitter as an example. When the big migration off Twitter was supposed to happen, some went to the Fediverse, some went to Threads, some went to BlueSky.

You know what happened? After a few weeks, most of them went back to Twitter, because that was the only common place between them, where they knew they could all meet and communicate. If Twitter was forced to federate with all other platforms, it would have been snuffed out by now. But if that was even proposed, everybody would have a kneejerk reaction, because Twitter bad. Nobody is thinking of the big picture.

I find it kind of strange that people seem so hesitant about it

I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we’re going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.

Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that’s a bad outcome for all involved.

THIS IS A RED CUBE HOUSEHOLD