Unless... maybe... he WASN'T!?!?!?😅

That's kneet.:-)

Funny answer: well it's not like we're going to pay teachers a living wage, either way!?

Brace yourself for a significantly worse one now: Project 2025 may end teaching almost entirely. Factory workers don't need "school" like we have had it all of our lives - I mean they would to avoid getting scammed and such, hence why schools would be taken away, bc they lead to such things as unionization, which henceforth is to be consolidated "bad" (bc sharing = caring hence socialism = communism and... fuck, nobody can explain this with "factual terminology", you just have to turn off your brain in order to feel the Truthiness of it, yeah!? 👍🤮).

Similar attacks on basic infrastructure are ofc also taking place elsewhere across the world as well. And ofc even if any individual attempt to roll back provision of education fails, it will simply continue on with the next attempt, and the one after that, etc.

Therefore I vehemently disagree: learning via computers may be the only method of instruction left to people who cannot afford access to human teachers, in the world that seems inexorably and progressively advancing upon us.

So it is what may offer us perhaps the best source of hope for our future!

Yeah some amount of that is inevitable, but see e.g. https://hexbear.net/post/3820065 for an example of the type of content that you are "missing", being on lemmy.world that has defederated from hexbear. Also note how it's not just the post itself but how supportive of the position the comments are (overall), with several of them expressing an explicit desire to do such again, and the overall theme being how "funny" it was.

Now mind you, there is still a lot of similar content that you aren't "missing", from places such as lemmy.ml, but hexbear.net is most definitely a special place full of toxic trolls (many of whom continue to troll us after the defederation via their lemmy.ml alts, bc consent means little to them). Here is another example, this time from lemmy.ml that almost no instances have defederated from, since the admins are also the developers of the sourcecode for Lemmy: https://lemmy.ml/post/22043103. The cognitive dissonance is in full display on that instance by declaring that what the Western nations do is "genocide" (I mean...), yet somehow what Russia and China are doing is not genocide - either directly (Uyghurs & Ukraine) or indirectly (the USA has sent support to Israel, while Russia has also sent support to the other side of that conflict). Realistically, both the USA and Russia are supporting genocide, but NOT EQUALLY SO, as one of those two nations is also actively engaging in that activity directly.

Because of so very many posts from this, and toxic trolling from many of their users, I have gone to great lengths to find a way to block both hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, even switching instances to piefed.social that allows a normal user, without needing admin support, to block all users from any instance of my choice (https://piefed.social/post/307636 ). There are also some apps that can do that as well, though you won't find that option provided in basic Lemmy. I'm not necessarily advocating for such a switch, but it's nice to know that it's possible, and it is good to be aware of what content is out there and in particular note where it comes from - i.e. you may want to block at the very least communities such as !memes@lemmy.ml, if you don't enjoy having the above-mentioned content finding its way into your feed.:-)

On top of that though, the world is literally different today than it was then. Some things changed EVERYTHING - agriculture, fire, medicine, even just knowing to wash our hands, etc. The advent of vaccines may have arguably altered our world in beautiful, wonderful, and potentially terrible ways - allowing children to have an extremely high chance to reach 80 years of age, as opposed to an enormous chance (way more than half) of dying prior to 5 years old.

And the information era radically altered our world. Except it also birthed the post-information, or perhaps we should call it the disinformation era. When companies such as Google were playing nice, we had free access to ALL of the information in the entire world. Whereas now... we don't, but as soon as they can figure it out, they'll have us sign up with a subscription to be able to "know things". What came before was always temporary, but we lied to ourselves telling one another or at least acting as if it would last forever.

My proof: https://hexbear.net/post/3820065. I know it's hexbear, but click it anyway. Hint: it's dis-information - active retelling of the story so as to ignore the facts and substitute their own presentation of their own... "alternative facts".

And for someone who isn't smart enough to know the difference, how can they tell the difference? WE heard the horrific screams of the police officer as they were brutally murdered. We know of the other ones who died, including one who later committed suicide. We have empathy for their families. We saw the hearings. We heard the testimony, of the officers. We have seen the people involved admit their actions, and some apologized.

Or, you know, iT wAs PEacEfUlL, "it was hilarious and looked like tailgating gone wrong after too much booze", or as one commenter said "I hope it happens again" (11 upvotes as of now).

So... WILL we learn the lessons that we would need to in order to survive? I am not so certain myself. But maybe! Either way, we indeed will HAVE to, if there is to be any hope of the survival of our current way of life IMHO.

Oh I see - I was making assumptions about what you said and I apologize for that. You aren't saying "eVerY tHiNG iS goInG to BE FiNe", but rather, the USA could end, and yet... humanity will go on. (that might still be debatable as well...)

Yes, your thoughts exactly mirror my own: the only way is to move forward, and what will be will be - hopefully we can minimize the pain, and things WILL change regardless, and yet we still go on, having learned all the more from the doing.

And in a couple of months, the USA could switch sides and outright join Russian aggression - or at least significantly scale back the current level of opposition - at which point the Ukranians too, plus ofc Taiwan, maybe Japan, and anyone else that China sets their sights on. Plus with the USA backing those Axis powers, the sky's the limit really.

Meanwhile companies like FaceBook or Reddit don't really seem to care, only chasing profits, and Twitter has flat-out joined the fight on the other side, by cancelling itself into becoming X.

These are dangerous tools that we are playing with - far more so than guns - b/c knowledge is power, after all.

We have more people than are necessary anyway. With the combined effects of both globalization and automation, more and more jobs - even middle-class ones such as (low-level) "lawyer" and "manager" - are becoming superfluous.

So I think at this point that the wealthy wouldn't mind, and based on what e.g. JD Vance is currently saying even outright prefer, to have the mother stay home and take care of the children. While in turn they pay the man lower wages, and possibly also pay in "company scrip", where both healthcare and potentially even housing (and perhaps starting to add in things like food) could all be tied to the job.

And I am not sure that they care what the children actually learn. Although "they" control e.g. FaceBook, X, Threads, etc., and books that are less trackable are already starting to be literally and physically and actually burned, so they already control what they learn.

1. bold of you to presume that American democracy will last that long

2. the kids have their own issues, including not knowing or being able to do much of anything, which is not entirely all or even mostly their own fault

The internet, like every other man-made thing, is a tool. And therefore its usage is determined by how people wield it. e.g. much of the anti-vaccine disinformation has been traced back to Russian troll farms - this is a known fact. The movement might have predated that, or it might not, but either way it undeniably received a massive boosting, especially in its formative stages, by such outside agitation.

At the same time the internet also provides tools to debunk such anti-"knowledge". Though like so many other things, it falls into an arms race where the disinformation can move quickly ahead to cover new ground, while getting properly factual information out to people takes more time, especially if refusing to use tools like rage-baiting that increases a message's ability to spread quickly.

Sadly, we just don't seem to have an immune system to attack sources of disinformation - at least not one that could ensure that all or even most people who can and will vote have what they need to be properly equipped to handle the continual onslaughts. Which makes me very much fear for the structure of democracy itself in our current age.

But that gets back to something similar to OP's statement. As in, you can spin up your own instance (though a not entirely trivial process), or you have the freedom to choose an instance that matches your style [edit: and people tend to gravitate towards an instance admin policy that matches their preferences].

Some people want some content blocked - e.g. NSFW, or even NSFL. Or even better, slap a label on each content item, which rather than have to choose between the binary options of forcibly remove or allow fully, offers each person their own choice to view or not. PieFed even has a NSFL/gore/gross tag that you can set, though only for posts ATM not comments.

I find the Fediverse really friendly in regards to NSFW/NSFL content, in that it is both here but virtually never unlabeled (ONCE in the last year iirc there was a particular spam account that got through...). Politicial or extremist content not so much unfortunately, so we're back to blocking or defederating, for those for whom consent of the reader of their messages means little to nothing.

It has been awhile, but there were some Lemmy instances that people made to discuss Alt-Right viewpoints. They are all defederated now, but they caused quite the stir back in the day. Look it up. Here's a start:

• https://lemmy.one/post/826991
• https://lemmy.one/post/906167
• https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/841229
• https://lemm.ee/post/4644626
• https://rammy.site/post/328763
• https://rammy.site/post/328192
• https://lemmynsfw.com/post/614579

So, granted that there are not really (self-proclaimed neo-) Nazis here now, but this is still a fairly recent series of events in the shared consciousness of Lemmings. Also, fascism is alive and well world-wide, and on Lemmy very much in the open and in the here and now.

You were not the first that this happened to - they've even kicked out mods without any warning (and literally told people to kill themselves), nor will you be the last. At this point it seems to be a right of passage that people must go through, bc it is administered by the Lemmy sourcecode developers so very few instances seem to want to risk pissing them off.

Blocking especially Hexbear alone solved 90% of my issues with toxicity on the Fediverse, and blocking Lemmy.ml brings that up to like 99.9% - there are trolls elsewhere ofc, just like there are some people who might have been worth talking to on Lemmy.ml, but overall it acts like a spam filter that much improves my happiness here.:-)

Yeah I'm not sure that there are any real conservatives left. Like I would have thought that Liz Cheyney was one, but look what happened to her, despite how high-profile she was.

George W. Bush was even a progressive, funding schools and feeding homeless people etc. But then the Tea Party - Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, etc. - started taking over control from that old guard of actual conservatives, both fiscal and cultural (wouldn't Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham qualify here as good examples?). However, before that process could finish, the Alt Right started up, with even moar-er(-est) "alternative facts" and literally neonazi propaganda, leaning heavily on the blatant racism components (rather than hiding behind "wish we could help but the budget you know..."). And now I'm not sure if what is here is even still the Alt Right or something else altogether.

I think if Ron Desantis had won the nomination things would be different, but as it is the entirety of the Republican party bows now solely to Trump, making it more about loyalty to him than about any particular policies anymore. i.e. should we say that the Alt-Right is dead, killed ironically for not being extreme enough for some of its most outspoken members, and now Republican party = Trump? JD Vance certainly is showing how that works, having once decried Trump but that was then and this is now. Speaking of, JD Vance seems to want us to call the current movement the New Right, which if they win, basically means (as best as I can tell) that Trump will not be a President but made into an actual monarch.

Very well put!:-)

Hahaha absolutely yes! That series is hands-down my absolute favorite of all of YouTube, which is really saying something next to the likes of Kurzgesagt and Crash Course series. Also Ian Danskin's other videos like the agency / protagony one - chef's kiss! 😘

Mostly that's true but not entirely. The common analogy is that the Fediverse is a bunch of pirate or free trading ships passing in the night, each passing messages from one to another until they all have all of the messages - "federation". However, some captains have some bad blood between them and other captains and refuse to pass messages from them along - "defederation". And for good reason I need to add, bc if outright illegal material were to make its way onto your "ship"/computer then you could be in big trouble, like literally with the FBI or other equivalent governmental agency in other countries. Or imagine that some captain decides to send out a virus - not all of these captains are apparently ethical!

In practice, any captain of a ship can decide which messages they want to pass along to share with others vs. keep private solely for themselves (their own internal set of users). And likewise they get to decide which messages to receive too - like none from a particular source, or maybe only some if they are structured a certain way. And then on top of all of that, Lemmy.World in particular has decided to edit certain messages to filter out banned keywords that they deem offensive to their users.

So like an irl example is that a few years ago a bunch of people/captains decided to create Alt-Right instances, and these spewed forth violent rhetoric and pedophilic content throughout the Fediverse - which in addition to being not nice was highly illegal. So rather than allow that to get us all in trouble with the FBI, in response all the other captains/instances decided to block/defederate from them. In theory I suppose you could spin up your own instance - becoming captain of your own ship - and you could choose to receive to those messages (but again, be careful about content that is literally illegal!). Although actually I think those instances may have shut down in the meantime, deciding to switch to the likes of Truth Social, so they probably are not around anymore to be federated with even if someone wanted to. Still, to be on the safe side, every instance I've ever seen has defederated from them, I guess in case they ever decide to come back.

So one practical way that this affects you personally is that Lemmy.world has decided to defederate from hexbear.net, a known nest of trolls (they enjoy a highly contentious argumentation style, but they don't stop that even outside of their communities where it is consensual, and it is this refusal to consider consent of people outside of their echo chambers that makes them trolls). So no, this content in particular is not "everywhere" - it is blocked quite often from many/most instances.

If you truly wanted to experience the Fediverse with as few filtering of messages as possible (although remember that not all of it is offered in good faith), then you may want to make an account on lemm.ee rather than lemmy.world. But otherwise lemmy.world is a great instance - it is where ~80% of all the people on Lemmy are located.

Ofc, there's an xkcd for that:-)

Unless you are saving it for something else, like the header of a table:-).

This reminds me of Innuendo Studios' latest offering (yes Ian Danskin is sharing some videos again!) Why Don't You Respond To Criticism?.

Damn those are actually some great thoughts imho - like https://lemm.ee/post/42493021. Fwiw I would have upvoted that one if I had seen it (I'm purposely not subscribed to showerthoughts, so I only see the ones that hit All).

Likewise, I see that Lemmy has a bit of a hive mind issue. At the same time it has an enormous toxicity issue, e.g. it is hexbear's own self-stated purpose for existence, and they refuse to limit their "dunk" sessions to those who consent to such, continuing beyond the boundaries of their own communities and instance. So we simultaneously would enjoy greater diversity of opinions while at the same time we have too much trolling happening to make that possible.

By the latter I mean that modding efforts seem one of the primary limiting factors here - e.g. I used to be a mod myself for two small gaming communities in Reddit but there's no way I'm doing that here. Reddit was far more toxic overall, but Lemmy has greater swings of both maximum friendliness (& that overall) while also significantly worse toxicity allowed in certain corners of the Fediverse.

Anyway, one possibility is that your posts merely went out to the wrong audience - as I said, *I* would have really enjoyed the aforementioned post, and upvoted and commented in it, if I had known it existed, and surely while those of us who enjoy such may be more rare than common across the Fediverse, we aren't entirely non-existent either?

This is where having a larger userbase, to allow such niche interests to flourish more readily, could help. Then again, we already trend more towards deeper conversations than are possible on Reddit anymore, so maybe it's doable here?

If you end up starting a community to put such thoughts into, I would love to join it?

They do. I've seen some - heck I've posted some. Sort a community by Controversial and you'll see them.

If you had said "rarely" or "mostly" rather than "don't even" then your statement would have been correct. As it is, you are using hyperbolic claims that are easily refuted by a handful of counterexamples, thereby turning people away from listening to your POV.

It seems that Discuss.Online keeps archival copies of such older messages rather than delete them after a defederation action. Try viewing them on that instance.

On a separate matter, this is a brand-new message that for that and perhaps other reasons I doubt you've seen but that you may be very interested to know about: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6127949/5423163. The post itself is talking about the upcoming defederation between jlai.lu and lemmygrad.ml, which I'm sure you know about, but what I wanted to call your attention to is in the OP's comment where they immediately start talking about a method to use a 2nd account or some other method to bypass that defederation attempt. They also float an idea to change the Lemmy sourcecode so that admins can no longer control which instances their users can access - this seems like an enormous security issue to me though (e.g. CSAM and other outright violent rhetoric that could get someone in trouble if it were on their machines).

Anyway no matter how you slice it, it is uh... "interesting". The more of such discussions I see, the more glad I am that I switched to PieFed that does not depend upon the Lemmy sourcecode at all - even though Discuss.Online was great.

Oh yeah sorry, I took that as a given. Liberals != Democrats, especially on matters such as gun control where even conservatives (~90% of Americans want some, limited forms of gun control), and conservatives != Republicans. Ahem, sometimes politicians LIE to get elected!?!?!! (How you can tell: their mouths move 👄:-) So yes you are absolutely correct, I meant the particular brand of lie that is attempted to be sold to their constituents.

And some (politicians) I assume may even be real believers, but not the ones who end up making it into the halls of power. Hence while I agree with all that you said, I don't think that it will ever happen. RCV would allow someone other than those who are willing to literally kill to get in power win, hence it won't be allowed to happen. I mean, it already has started happening, but it won't be allowed to get as far as being able to sway the election overall. Wow how I wish I was wrong!

Historically, no nation has ever survived having devolved into a 2-party system afaik, so I don't hold out much hope for a long-term future. Especially since governments themselves are starting to take a back seat to multinational corporations that have more money, power, and ability to control things than the countries are allowed to retain. The EU is able to resist this, the USA refuses to for the most part but it can in a pinch if it wants, but who else could hope to?

After all, the wealthy control the very sources of news that we all consume, and if we don't even know what's going on, how can we make decisions - like what would they be based upon? Which ironically is why the open-source Fediverse made so many of us excited, to think about breaking free from underneath the control of the Almighty Algorithm. But then we accidentally walk into a community in lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or some lemmy.ml posts and we begin to see the downsides to that - as this OP discussion is attempting to illuminate. Reddit at least allowed blocking of trolls, whereas if we want that here, we will need to expend the effort to make that happen.

Right! Except regardless of your wishes, "they" don't seem to want for us to have that ability to block "them". For a LONG time Lemmings begged, pleaded, and cajoled for the ability to make blocklists. The answer, as I see in the historical archives (hehe just older posts I mean:-), was always "just wait - we'll implement this in 0.19". Fast-forward to when that happened: it barely does anything at all.

A block of a "user"/account is iirc as full as it gets - I am not even certain that they can downvote you after that. A block of a "community" is likewise solid - those posts will not only not show up in your Subscribed feed, but even from your All one. However, a block of an "instance" merely blocks the communities from that instance, but the users themselves are still free to troll in other communities, free to reply to and ping you thus generating notifications, free to downvote you, and otherwise carry on almost as if you had done nothing at all wrt that particular instance. It is extremely weak.

Also I'm skipping over the details here but what little it used to do is steadily being rolled back so that it is even less effective than it was before (irt the generation of notifications). And since the developers of the Lemmy sourcecode are also the admins of Lemmy.ml, despite all the pitiable outcry from the users affected - there was one here just this week where an admin literally told someone to kill themselves, over a silly misunderstanding of something that happened inside of a video game - absolutely none of the largest instances will condone defederation from lemmy.ml.

And I get it: we are running their software. Abuse or no, we are the guests, and they are the masters of this Lemmy project. Yes it may be open-source, but if we want their future code releases, the boat cannot be rocked too awfully hard.

So, you can either block every user from that instance that you ever see, one by one, or... suck it up and take what "they" offer to you. Or find another solution.

But notably, I don't want to just block users b/c of the moderation practices of the admins - it's the users themselves that, trained within that echo chamber as to what they can get away with, troll people all across the entire Fediverse (unless they specifically defederate from that instance). From another comment I made elsewhere:

so e.g. I get to see Cowbee responding to people discussing tankie behavior with the "just trust me bro, no I refuse to share my references instead why don't you hit me up in my DMs, hey why don't you share YOUR references hrm, no I've never asked anyone to hit me up in my DMs in my life bro whutyoutalkinabout?". As funny as it may be to watch, it does disturb me that "normies" as we are talking about in this post will be exposed to such, and have to learn first-hand what types of behaviors to expect from which servers that the admins of most instances will not defederate from.

This is the way. Although I also block e.g. sports and hexbear - I already know that I don't want any of that.

Note that that approach doesn't actually block the users from that instance, only the communities.

To block user content leaking through that block, there's apps like Connect or Sync, or the Lemmy alternatives PieFed and Mbin, which additionally offer a number of advanced features that Lemmy does not have such as Categories of Communities (but you'd have to switch instances to access those).

I have already personally defederated from the likes of hexbear.net (my prior instance had not done that) and lemmy.ml - the latter I even switched instances specifically to be able to do (although now that I'm here I'm finding it amazing what features are here that Lemmy lacks, like Categories on top of Communities).

There is a difference between a valid point of view, presented in good faith, vs... the opposite of that, masquerading itself as a merely "different POV". In essence, while I am aware that I blocked many good people and therefore some good content, I decided that it was a good trade-off for me to be able to halt the flood of what is essentially spam sent out to the Fediverse from those instances.

I would rather see receipt of such spam be opt-in rather than have to find a way to opt-out, but it is what it is. At which point yes, according to this perspective at least, under this set of value judgements, then it is helpful that so many of the spammers congregate into one place making that process easier. At the expense of others who are now blocked as well, having done or even intended no wrong but being caught up in that war of ideologies. We live in a society though and our actions impact others, whether we like or even acknowledge that or not.

The memes community on Lemmy.ml is anything but non-political, pointing to how it is not so easy to completely separate those concepts.

Welcome! People are kinder here, overall. You'll find yourself less defensive, more willing to engage, less snarky, easier to be around irl - man, Reddit was (is?) toxic AF, and whether or not I came here I was definitely leaving there.

Remember to block early and often here - back there that was almost pointless bc a never-ending stream of Reddi-trolls was ready to take their place, but here that actually works!:-)

Check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca for many more tips. You are going to like it here:-).

Also, since you mentioned PixelFed, check out PieFed as well as a Lemmy alternative - it has e.g. "categories" of communities rather than making you find and subscribe to each one individually, so it's a whole different style compared to Lemmy where you have to browse by All to find new content. I'm speaking to you from it right now.:-)

But either way, I find that (most of) the people here are more worth talking to than Reddit:-).

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I've ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just "no thank you, if you don't mind" but "FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?". I mean, I'm no lover of capitalism but... if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of "Truthiness" to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very "discovery" of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn't going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you've never so much as heard of existing (yes that's a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there's Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there's lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won't, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the "joke"? It's really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we're declining. I mean, I'm writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

Okay, but don't say that I did nothin' for ya m'kay!?

Here it is just for you:

I just said "Lemmy" and they went forward from there.

Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole "federation" concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it... BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven't heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what's out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

And credit where it's due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people's dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that's not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset... and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if "politically extremist" content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

I came late to Reddit myself but even I noticed that happening during the pandemic. The decline was rather speedy, sharp, and extensive (affecting all subs).

And we could even track some of those to specific implementations or lack thereof of features by Reddit. Like how their search feature sucked so bad, thereby encouraging people to write a (still yet another) post to ask rather than look up an existing highly crafted and well-researched answer that even if posted a mere week prior still would not show up in the algorithmic feed pushing all the latest noise to the absolute tippy-top. And mods were forbidden from pinning more than two posts. And even those only showed up when sorting by Hot. And maybe not even then in some apps. And you couldn't consolidate ones bc the moderation tools sucked so damn hard, e.g. posts made by Auto Mod could not be edited later by the very same mod team who requested that the post be made. Every damnable one of these things increases apparent engagement metrics like "number of posts", but at the expense of actually connecting people with the information that they wanted to receive. :-(

To which we can say "fuck spez", but it's deeper than that bc of the chasing after profits to the expense of all else that led to that, as in if it wasn't him that did it then it would have merely been someone else instead.

Well now I don't want you to feel left out so... this is for you:

So only 2% "not likely to be AI-generated or deepfake"... that means that it's almost definitely AI, got it!? :-P

Well I don't know if "wise" would quite apply...

And when it does happen, it's (a) always as a joke, and (b) fucking STOPS after the first person. That's the perfect level of buffoonery imho:-).