Sure, but this is Mastodon, not murders. Much lower stakes.

Fandom was exactly what I was thinking of. Just maybe without having more ads than content. That I’m not a fan of, especially for volunteer supplied content.

Extra thought on search: add a weighting option so individual servers can be searched, but don’t come up as high in the rankings. So keeping with the superhero theme, have the Flash comic wiki with a 1 weighting and the more general DC comic and Arrowverse wikis with 0.8 weightings.

I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics, but I don’t really see it as much of a direct competitor to Wikipedia. Interwiki links have been a thing for a long time, but they’re not really used that much. They also are used by specialized shortcut syntax instead of using a more intuitive domain name syntax. So let’s say you have a wiki for the Flash TV show and you want to link to an article in the Flash comic wiki. This would be great for that. Maybe have “search related wikis” as an option to search some hand picked wikis?

But for going head-to-head with Wikipedia, I don’t really see it so much. Part of the success of Wikipedia is that it forces editors to work in a single namespace, debate the contents, use a common set of policies, and so on. There is also a lot of policy, process, human knowledge, and institution built up over the years geared solely towards writing an encyclopedia. If you go to Wikipedia, it may not be perfect, but it will have gone through that process. Trying to wade through hundreds of wikis to find a decent article does not sound like a treat, especially if effort gets spread across multiple wikis.

Like with Lemmy, I am excited to see where this goes. And nutomic, congratulations with your daughter!

If Lemmy does become more of an organization, it would be nice to have a level of public assurance over any control exerted by the organization. A lot of people see that the lead developers of Lemmy are communist and shy away from it based merely on that. I have one of the oldest accounts on Lemmy, I’ve seen plenty of them, and my impression is that they have conducted themselves with only the utmost ethics. However, it can still help newcomers who don’t want to feel like someone might be breathing down their neck.

Lemmy devs may have controversial political views, but their software is written with a good intention. KiwiFarms on the other hand use it to target instances.

Not just that, in all interactions with them, I’ve never found the devs to be anything but respectful.

I wonder if there’s a machine learning technique that can be used to detect bot-laden instances.

I’ve never bought this argument. It really doesn’t take much brain power to figure out that if you are dealing with strings, the left side is going to be on the left and the right side will be on the right. That’s incredibly intuitive logic.

I would offer up a different reason that neither should be used. Format strings do the trick nicely and allow you to start including literals, convert other types to strings, etc. as needed.

In my privileged position of never liking twitter, I would call it beautiful.

I’m not feeling any pain from Twitter falling apart either, but there are communities that have been built around Twitter that will suffer. Journalism is one, but that may be for the better given that Twitter warps quality journalism. I’m more concerned with other communities like Black Twitter that could suffer even if they are able to make a migration to Mastodon.

I would hope that people can get beyond the feeling of vigilantism being seen as a vital feature. Not that I’m opposed to them taking on bigots, but if creating Twitter drama is a deal breaker then it feels like they might have their priorities in the wrong order.

Okay, thanks! Assuming it gets added, I hope it sends a message that Fediverse developers are listening to the wishes of people in the Black Twitter diaspora, even if it goes against the traditional stance of the Fediverse developers.

Was this the feature that some people were like “Black Twitter can’t migrate to the fediverse without this”?

I hope archive.org posts another copy on-line so that if I want to refer to this later, after lemmy and the whole cargo-cult-deadend activitypub architecture has gone the way of the dodo, I will still be able to.

To go further with this, I’m glad that I live in one of the most archive-happy time periods in history, at least when it comes to public data. Much of human history is simply lost to us. The wealthy might have distorted histories of themselves written and some records persist, but historical records are often incomplete or straight up propaganda. Only recently have we gotten to the point where just about anyone has the capability to keep a written record of their life (universal literacy).

But actually storing those for millennia is hard. Most medium degrade quite quickly, maybe even within decades. Certain texts were only preserved via regularly copying, hardly scalable. It takes something like the Internet Archive to preserve a lasting legacy that can extend past the most influential people into the experiences of commoners.

I think it’s important to take arguments like these seriously, especially when they are coming from minority groups whose needs I may not be familiar with. Far too often, I see concepts like privilege, structural racism, and racist infrastructure being dismissed as ridiculous by the conservatives outright when they’re well grounded in reality.

Plus it’s so fun to make a play on “Twitter”.

Did you read the article? That’s literally the opposite of his conclusion.

That’s a really good simple version of identity verification, but it would be beneficial to have something like academia’s ORCID system. ORCID provides a single ID with a wide range of meta data, education history, employment history, credentials, etc. It also stays valid across name changes, whereas it looks like presscheck.org is partially tied to their real name.

Depends on what metric you evaluate people’s content by, if you want to be seen as Lord Journo the teller of Truf I don’t care if you work at Washington Post or not. I don’t want it.

You might not care about that, but many people do. I want to know if someone has fact checkers looking over their shoulder or whether they’re free to pull claims out their ass till the cows come home. That’s not a matter of prestige, but rather one mechanism for establishing a basis for trust.

Is the situation you describe because of the state of Lemmy, or that the Lemmy admins are uniquely targeted for impersonation?

It’s because Lemmy allows setting a display name that shows up almost identically to a local name. If it continues to be a problem, my guess is that will be changed.

They’re trying to create the infrastructure to lord over regular users.

It’s not so much that. It’s that journalists are, by their nature, very tied to their reputation for accuracy. Having a system for verification is helpful for the general public to know that the person is at least who they say they are.

Contrast that with a situation that Lemmy has had where a person keeps creating accounts with the display name of one of the admins and posting disgusting porn. I think they finally got bored and went away, but what if that was a larger campaign waged over years? Identity verification provides at least some baseline for trust.

It’s still Google, but it’s a good sign.

Seems like this is just kind of a common thread with social media, no?