It is actually illegal in some jurisdictions, including mine.

The sort of sneering at newbies is exactly the sort of shit that in no small part gave Mastodon a reputation of being hostile to outsiders.

If we want this shit to take off as something other than a nerd curio, it needs to be accessible, not delivered with a side helping of judgment for not being 100% on board with the endeavour from the beginning.

For real, I've been trying to learn Japanese on and off, love the country, like lot of its media (albeit not much anime) and I'm absolutely desperate to avoid being associated with those guys.

Most people who aren't nonces recognise fairly instinctively that a sexual image of someone who appears to be a ten year old girl is a pretty noncey thing to both produce and look at, and that finding some level of sexual attraction to someone who looks like a ten year old is pretty noncey. But you know, weebs gonna weeb.

Absolutely. In my experience, there's a really strong tendency from people who are already all-in on fedi to treat "this thing doesn't have feature X that my previous site Y did" as simple whining and respond to it with hostility rather than constructive criticism, you can see that with the thin-skinned reaction to some criticisms of Mastodon back in November about e.g. lack of quote posts or poor discovery features.

They don't treat it as constructive criticism or actual feedback from users but instead as an assault on something they identify with personally, which is a recipe for disaster

The more pressing matter is that simply viewing such images is a crime in some jurisdictions, let alone distributing them. It exposes both the site itself, any federating instances and users of any federating instances to potential legal issues.

More philosophically, I don't care if people that want to look at underage anime girls fuck off. They can go and be creepy weebs somewhere else.

Once Meta gets their foot in the door, I guarantee they will try to bully the fediverse into doing things their way. Hard pass for me.

Can you give any reasonable by means in which they could do this and succeed?

So much of this stuff just sounds like infeasible conspiracy theories. If, hypothetically, Meta did do such a thing (somehow, still not clear how or frankly why?) all that it would mean is that anyone who disagreed could defederate from Meta, or would be defederated from Meta... which given half the servers in existence seem to want to defed them up front anyway, doesn't seem to make any odds.

It's all just very confusing hearing about these lurid ideas for things Meta could do with the fediverse that simply don't make a lick of sense either in terms of motivation or implementation.

Gotta say I have no love for the big leftist subs but that's a pretty cheap shot.

Their choosing to purchase luxuries, in a world where luxuries must be paid for in a system they didn't design, choose or want to live under, doesn't negate that they are opposed to capitalism.

If you want to argue that they're possibly a bit too sanguine about the prospect of their favourite luxuries existing under communism or whatever, fair enough. But that's a separate argument from whether they're stupid to pay money for stuff that makes them happy.

OK, more concretely then, sexualised drawings of people who are or appear to be under 18 are illegal in the UK.

This is an odd hill to die on if you're not interested in looking at sexualised drawings of people who are or appear to be under 18.

That's not just a Reddit thing, it's an Internet thing.

Americans absolutely dominate the English-speaking Internet.

But then the population of the US is greater than the population of Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Canada combined, twice over.

Yeah but that would be bullshit, and frankly your definition (which appears to be being skewed by a desire to look at sexual cartoons of children) would not need to be believed by anyone else.

"Canonically" also doesn't matter because someone saying "actually this person who looks exactly like a five year old girl is a million years old" also doesn't have to be believed by anyone else.

That is why the UK law is "appear to be" - specifically to avoid consumers of child pornography, real or drawn, pulling dumb stunts like that.

OnlyFans in general is a complete fucking racket. Most "creators", who are young and often vulnerable people, make nothing or next to nothing from subs, even while taking on risks they may not know about or be able to mitigate them if they do know about them.

The world would actually be better without it.

If Spiderman shot webs out of his arsehole I might actually go and see one of those dumb films for a change

I don't want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments.

I hate to break it to you, but the very nature of the fediverse (as a distributed network where posts and account information automatically get distributed to hundreds if not thousands of independent servers you may or may not be aware of, that do not necessarily have to honour your deletion requests) means that it would be absolutely trivial for either Facebook or any other random bad actor you could think of to have access to all of that, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

This is an example I've given a few times, but if Meta were really just wanting to suck down data for the evulz (why they would do this I have absolutely no idea because it's not like they could use that data for anything), they don't need to start an instance amid a blaze of publicity. They could just go on Mastodon.social, sign up for a no-name account, grab an API key and suck down the contents of the fediverse in real time and that's the end of it. The fediverse is not private and its very nature means that control over one's own data is not quite as secure as ActivityPub advocates would like to pretend.

The flipside is that a standard's not really open and a network founded on one isn't really resilient if certain groups or corporates arbitrarily aren't seen as "allowed" to use it, or if conversely a big corporate joining it is so toxic to the entire endeavour that it must be blocked on sight.

Chris Trottier, someone who I disagree with quite a lot and is a far bigger advocate for decentralisation as a public good than I am, is quite sanguine about P92 on those grounds.

Personally, I have no plans on my instances to submit P92 to any more stringent rules than I would with any other server blocks, that is I will give them exactly enough rope to hang themselves with.

YouGov is a top-tier reputable polling company that weights its samples to avoid any such confounding factors.

Yeah but you can tell from the context that search results are just a list of random web pages that maybe what Google says is bollocks.

Google gives you a bunch of results and says "here, look at these". LLMs confidently tell you things that they may have simply made up and present them as if they're real.

The EU or the UK. The Information Commissioners Office would take an exceptionally dim view of this shit.

That kind of oversells what bias they might have.

They're well known as a reputable and honest polling organisation, regardless of their origins.

My view is if they did do that last thing, we'd be in exactly the same place as we were when we started - with "fediverse" as a tiny niche social network mainly populated by nerds, off to the side of all the others.

I think people have kind of failed to keep a sense of scale here - fedi has something like 2million active users, Facebook has a thousand times as many. We are quite literally a rounding error.

Everybody gangsta until they realise that their usage of services incurs costs

For some reason, your link doesn't work.

The second part of your comment doesn't answer my question, nor would "they want our data!!!" explain why Meta would want or need to create an instance in order to get it, or how the "data" (what data? Your posts? The ones that ActivityPub syndicates to hundreds of other servers automatically? Do you know exactly which servers your posts are on at the moment?) of other users on other fedi instances could somehow be "monetised" by them.

No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).

XMPP was irrelevant before Google and Facebook had anything to do with it.

God thank you, I swear some people fail to realise just how ActivityPub federation works!

Post something on fedi and you lose effective control over it; for all intents and purposes, it's out there on hundreds of different servers who don't have to respect your deletion requests, and it's never coming back.

And to be perfectly honest, I'm more comfortable with Meta archiving all my shitposts than, I dunno, all the nazis.

That statement is refreshingly sane. Really sick of the amount of heat over this situation and the lack of light.

I think it's just that they spend all their time around other people who get off to that shit so they think it's normal and fine.

It was already bad enough indulging racist/sexist/transphobic shitheads with platforms just so they could have "polite debates" (that they didn't actually care about, they just wanted pulpits); having a place specifically for them to come and have more debates they don't actually care about was an especially stupid idea.

I think you've hit the nail on the head a bit, Reddit users were for all intents and purposes anonymous - you'd find usernames you recognise but it's among a sea of thousands of others, and the posts would all blur themselves into one. By and large, you go into a thread on a topic, not because Person X posted it, but because it's a topic you want to read about, and you upvote a comment because you liked it rather than because Person Y posted it.

Twitter is all about who you follow and you curate a follow list that matches what you want to see, and by return you engage with the people who engage with you. If the people who you'd want to follow on a replacement for Twitter aren't there, or nobody can or will engage with you, it's a shitty replacement for Twitter for your purposes. This is especially true with Mastodon, whose model is that you only see posts from the follow lists of people already on your instances, so if it starts off sucky then absent some external force, it stays that way.

That is precisely why I run my own instance, it's essentially a backup from YouTube of my own dumb videos: https://peertube.bloonface.com

But honestly that's pretty much all it is. It's not really worth much more than that to me.

OK, I've read that link and it still doesn't really explain how exactly Meta intends to monetise other peoples' posts - "collect data from and monetise", how exactly are they going to monetise other peoples' posts on other instances, when they have no ability to e.g. serve ads to those people?

It's amazing seeing a company try to give itself Galapagos syndrome.

Truth be told, he doesn't give a shit about us, the money is in selling ads to show to people who want to go on an app to look at cats and memes.

Absolutely no judgment on those people, but the sort of people who get upset over APIs are not who spez wants to cultivate as a userbase, as a deliberate business move.

Nobody. But they want to have Reddit coins to reward people who do things they like. So they have to pay for them to satisfy that want.

They might also pay for pizza, beer and cinema tickets too. Same difference.

Facebook didn't "destroy" XMPP. XMPP was a tiny messaging protocol nobody used, Facebook picked it up for a bit, stopped using it after a while, and then XMPP returned to being a tiny messaging protocol nobody used.

People are acting like Jabber was hot shit when Facebook picked it up, and its present state of irrelevance is because of big bad Zuck. No, no fucker used Jabber and it saw basically no mainstream adoption until Facebook and Google got involved, and as soon as Facebook and Google weren't involved (as it turns out that XMPP actually kind of sucks and its unique features are things end users don't care about) it returned to being a complete irrelevance. A well-intentioned irrelevance, to be sure, but an irrelevance.

Fediverse is the same, mutans mutandis. We're tiny. I know it's nice for us to psyche ourselves up and say that we're going to destroy the big bad corporate media! but in reality we are a niche constellation of social networks that has literally 0.1% of Facebook's user base and whose adoption has been, shall we say, not stellar.

Interesting assfuck.

That is all.

But that wasn't my point. It's not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it's that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.

This is another one of those things where Meta's claimed motivations for this don't seem to stack up.

How exactly are Meta supposed to serve "targeted ads" to me, @bloonface, if I am on finecity.social and not [whatever Meta's instance is]?

If I don't have an account on their service, and never visit their website, they have no opportunity to put a tracking cookie on my computer, no opportunity to serve an ad to me (other than directly messaging me, behaviour which would absolutely get them defedded instantly by anyone who is even close to being on the fence about their presence), no link between my finecity.social account and any Meta accounts I may have... what benefit do they obtain from this?

Bluntly - how is this dastardly plan of theirs actually physically supposed to work?

A lot of people seem to have ascribed omnipotent powers to Meta far beyond what they are actually technically capable of. They can't deliver you a tracking cookie or make your instance display a banner ad to you through ActivityPub, ffs.

Because all of the users they like and want to talk to stayed there too.

Network effects are a powerful driver. They can be overcome, but not easily.

I mean... realistically, why would that be their fault if they were to start a fedi instance and everyone else blocked them?

That furry spam was infuriating. Especially since on Kbin, you have to navigate to the specific domain itself using the Kbin interface, which means seeing more furry porn.

While it's just annoying in the case of furries getting to shove their fetish in peoples' faces, it poses a serious issue in case there's a domain that starts posting less-than-legal porn or whatever - in some jurisdictions, even having that in your browser cache is a crime, so specifically having to look at all the content from such a domain is... sub-optimal.

On the flip side, they provide an inherently unprofitable high-cost service that, unlike virtually all others, actually does compensate its content creators.

Nobody I talk to about this ever seems to have any idea as to where the money is supposed to come from other than not ads and not blocking adblockers and not reducing bandwidth costs. So in other words... Nowhere.

Honestly... Leave YouTube alone. Even with ads, everyone's getting a pretty good deal out of Google on that one. You don't want to be sharing or taking on their costs.

Let's be real, fedi's favourite subject of discussion is itself, and its second favourite subject of discussion is how bad all the sites fedi is supposed to be a replacement for are.

I'm hoping that dies down soon, one of the signs a site is doing well for users is that it stops with the navel-gazing shit.