palordrolap

One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.

There’s at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That “at least one” is me, which is how I know. I’m not here all the time and wouldn’t be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.

Stage one complete: Embrace.

The lack of answer to the question “Why are Meta suddenly so open and willing to integrate with the Fediverse when they’ve basically been doing the opposite with their own products?” is a huge concern.

My guess is that they don’t have an exact game plan yet, and are letting their naive, enthusiastic staff - those with no idea of the answer to the above question - do the initial scout and integration work with a view to see how it can be perverted for Meta’s profit/benefit in future.

Meta probably wouldn’t use the word “perverted”, but from an outside perspective that’s what it’d be.

My thinking here is exactly the same as in comments I posted about Microsoft’s embrace of Linux a short while back: 1 2

Unrelated username commentary: Your leet/hex username had me wondering if it resolved as an IP address too. Turns out you belong to the US Department of Defense. Unsure if you knew that already.

For obvious reasons, I decided not to try to actually visit that IP.

The true secret of X and its predecessor was to not use the main timeline. It was to put everyone you follow into a List and then only look at that.

Downside? You don’t see what your follows liked. It was that way before the new manglement too.

The other downside: If you’ve not been adding follows to a List on a regular basis as you followed them, making such a List from hundreds of follows is going to be a bit of a chore because the Lists feature has never made it all that easy.

Considerable upside: No ads. Literally none.

Of course, now that I’ve put this out there, the boss man might get wind of it and shut down or enshittify the Lists feature, but it’s had a good run.

Over on Mastodon, I mostly follow hashtags instead.

But the model of a protracted invite-only period worked so well for Google Plus, tho.

Hadn’t hear of this. Looked into it a bit.

The fact it requires a specific piece of software, even on desktop, puts it one step from (old) Twitter to me.

Even things like Discord - while very much not the same in other ways - has a web version that runs in a browser. Ditto the early 00’s instant messaging apps.

Also, the decentralisation seems to all be under the control of the one company(?). They say “no single entity controlling it” but there’s not much further detail. I might be mistaken, but it doesn’t seem like the Fediverse’s version of decentralisation, at least at first glance.

Moving further(?) into tinfoil hat territory: The founder’s name is very similar to that of a late Reddit founder, which is worth a double-take. Funny coincidence? Fake name? Either way might be playing on the coincidence? etc. etc. Hard to tell. Dude’s probably legit, right?

b) A few of the web links for it were in Chinese, but that’s probably a red herring. Translation suggests people in China are using it to get around certain internet issues.

Maybe I’m just suspicious of new things.