Well I’m not wikipedia here, just going on things I’ve read in past. You can either believe it or not believe it, suit yourself.

In the pre-internet days it was a well known fact that major media outlets in the USA had federal officials on staff to put the kibosh on issues of national security. That criteria has since broadened. For anyone that still watches news media on TV they can see for themselves the stories that never get past the editorial desk.

I’ve read claims of the same federal scrutiny happening for large social media outlets. These are USA companies operating in the USA so they fall under jurisdiction. They’re certainly not going to advertise that’s the case. I don’t doubt this is happening for a second and in their own best interest they keep it on the downlow.

I’m not sure I understand the comment. You meant 99% of those complaining are posting hostile shit? If so, it’s the 1% that post intelligent and legitimate counter arguments we need to allow a voice. It’s not uncommon for legislation to push through under the guise of some public benefit that further erodes our civil liberty. As US citizens we need to be vigilant about that kind of thing or we’re just throwing our freedom away.

I could have made that a lot longer, but I just wanted make a few points without creating a wall of text.

Of course there’s garbage you don’t want to see in a community. But the difference is there’s an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If I don’t like how a community is moderated, I can go to another community. Mods make these calls for the sake of quality and topicality of their particular community, not because of some ulterior motive.

This is in comparison to an institution of some kind using keyword algorithms to mindlessly remove intelligent discussion only because it may be against some kind of predetermined policy. The US government does this. They have official agents placed within the staff of major social media outlets for this purpose.

The only thing I said about Musk is that it’s a positive he tried to reduce censorship. I never implied that he removed censorship altogether. Twitter is still guilty of curating content same as the others. However Threads has flat out stated a full tilt censorship agenda.

Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like “a friendly space” and “convenient” to sell it to users. So you’re actually losing something by jumping ship from Twitter. The one positive for Musk era Twitter was an attempt to reduce censorship, but the crazy things the company did otherwise far outweigh it.

One of the shitty things profit driven social media sites do is curate content to create a more advertiser friendly space. It even extends to special interests and government interests. I mean what do you call that when public information is curated by the government. I sure as hell don’t want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.

In the USA there’s a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and don’t necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect they’re doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.

Yeah it’s semantics, but to me an algorithm includes some kind of code to do something I’m not aware of or have control over, like a section of code that does a job in the background. In this case I think of something that pre-selects which content to put on my front page based on some logic I have no control over.

It’s not really an algorithm, you see posts based on the type and sort order you select. Sorting by “hot” counts votes, sorting by “active” counts posts. My default is Subscribed and New. When I get through all the new stuff I check Active and Hot.

In any case, yeah there’s stuff I hope not to see here. So far so good and hopefully it will stay that way for a while.

Haha man, as the wise philosopher Pauly Shore once said, “dude, you’re harshing my mellow.” So yeah we don’t want those guys doing that to us.

This is what could happen. Learn from XMPP and don’t let corpos into the Fediverse.

ActivityPup is an open and public protocol. Anyone can use it however they want, but as a community we do have some control over who we federate with, so excersize that control.

Yeah ChatGPT could fill out an application as well. In fact AI is getting to the point now where it would be hard to tell even by voice. Though it’s also a matter of effort on the part of the exploiter. They don’t have to make it zero occurrence, just enough to keep it at bay.

frankly I don’t see the point other than as an ideological protest

I don’t think it’s something to take that lightly. Problem is the EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) that corporations are so good at realizing. The ActivityPub protocol the Fediverse is built on is public so anyone can use it. There’s nothing to stop corporations from using it however they want. They can exert influence on ActivityPub much has they have on public standards in the past. That doesn’t mean we should happily allow their profiteering to infiltrate our communities. It will destroy them.

Hopefully everyone will defederate Meta instances.

Sheesh I hope so. Hopefully there will be some kind of instance vetting system in place that can blacklist them entirely. We absolutely don’t want corporations getting involved in our community. That’s why we’re here to begin with.

The admins and mods are keeping them at bay, but it could easily get out of control. At this point it’s transparent which it normally is when mods and admins are holding the line, but the soldiers are at the gates.

Yeah I was a bit weirded out by that, it’s like what, am I joining a cult? Anyway I actually signed up on a number of instances in search of one I like and only a couple were using an application. The rest were just captcha plus email.

I think they should come up with a better mechanism than an application. I understand the need to verify a signer is actually a human being, but an application is pretty off-putting. Problem is there’s bots that can get around captcha and email authentication, AI keeps getting smarter.

I think people are finally getting fed up with what corporations have done to social media. It was always community driven by community until that point. We’re just going back to our roots.

Yeah Mastadon feels like a monolithic mess to me, but probably I just don’t understand how the tags work. Never used Twitter for that reason. In any case, Lemmy is a lot more in tune to my needs. Kbin might be good for me too and I looked at it a bit, but Lemmy seems to work better for me.

I don’t know that much about the architecture of the Lemmy or Kbin software, but I would imagine it does some kind of sync operation that’s not time sensitive. So I would expect you could bring a server up and down at some cycle and still do all the pushes and pulls as required.

Though in practice I think I’d just set up a server that’s always on. I mean you could probably do it easily enough with an R-Pi and DynDNS. I don’t believe the software is all that demanding until there’s a big user load.