Gone Quill

Since this post was linked from another thread, @Difficult_Bit_1339, you’ve unfairly characterized @socialjusticewizard as a beehaw.org user coming here “trying to stir up shit” as you’ve phrased it. Their sh.itjust.works account predates their beehaw.org account by two weeks. This post, the one we’re commenting on right now, is NOT clearly labeled as being the rules for vote posts. It’s just named “changes.” You should consider putting the rules for vote posts in the sidebar and in the vote posts themselves.

If you want to label me as a beehaw.org user coming here “trying to stir up shit,” too, so be it. At least my first account was from beehaw.org, and I came here looking to see sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world posts. At this point, I’m entirely done with this instance based on the overall handling of this situation and will be using my @Quill7513@slrpnk.net account for the purposes this account was originally meant to serve. Here is some advice I have, as a sort of exit interview.

1. Be nicer. Come on. The way you moderate this community will influence the way this entire instance operates. Your rudeness and dismissiveness sets the tone for the entire instance and how people will perceive users with @sh.itjust.works as part of their identity
2. Define an executive process for defederation, just as you already have an executive process for moderation. Defederation is part of moderation and 1 month is not a fast turn around for this sort of situation
3. Increase the transparency of the audit scripts you’re using to tally votes by linking a link to a git repo containing the script. I think it’s fair to say that your automated script for what the vote talley is and what someone reading through the vote sees as being the vote results are quite different

Then why use a platform with federation / defederation as a core feature? Why not Nostr or SSB? Why activitypub?

No. People like tits.

Also good for confronting racist comments

Russia’s military is notoriously bloated with beuarocracy (however that stupid word is spelled) so Wagner became a useful instrument for Putin when he needed something done and he needed it done quick.

Don’t feed the troll

Raises questions about all the other figures they’ve cited with regards to their value to investors and all the traffic they get

Even if it was Ernest wouldn’t be the expected admin I don’t think

Even if an app just went pure activity pub, Lemmy and KBin spec which activity pub constructs map to which constructs differently. An app would still need to pick one as a first class citizen

And much like security, you have to design accessibility into the app. It can’t be a feature you implement later once everything else is in place. The fact that Ernest is taking this seriously from the start tells me that while he won’t hit 100% of the targets 100% of the time, the notion that accessibility won’t be a focus because there’s bigger fish to fry doesn’t quite ring true. If he’s thinking about these things, he’s going to be approaching requested features with the idea in mind that the new feature should work for people with accessibility needs first, and be pleasant to use for everyone second

It’s hard to articulate. Reddit is at its core only a platform. All it did was give users a place to create, curate, contribute, and connect to, with, and for communities. Reddit was our magic feather. We didn’t need them all along. All it did was tear down some mental blocks, so we could get started.

We wouldn’t even be that mad if Reddit was trying to be reasonable. They’re just being parasitic toward us, if we’re being honest with ourselves. They want us to do all the work, so they can make all the money from our work, and then they want to charge us money for the honor of having been monetized. And it’s not even that they’re just chasing multiple different monetization schemes in moderation so that everyone profits. They intend to be greedy fucks in every transaction. They want users to pay subscription fees for Reddit premium (which isn’t well priced, and therefore doesn’t sell many subscriptions). Furthermore, they want developers to pay outrageous API licensing fees (which aren’t well priced, and therefor almost all the developers are just shuttering). Not only that, they want to charge API fees toward AI training companies. My guess? Their prices are again too high, and the result will be that AI studios will just not pay for an official license and will do web scraping. It will require more work for them to get the scrapers to properly parse the threads, since what AI studios are interested in are threaded conversations right now. The AI studios will determine it is worth it to pay some engineers to do that rather than to pay the money Reddit wants (per my understanding, Reddit is charging the same money for AI studios as 3rd party apps).

So, where does that leave Reddit? Only with advertising revenue. They could lower the prices for their other services and make more money than that, but you would need to understand long-term cause and effect to do that, and u/spez has NOT demonstrated that kind of awareness. As evidence, note that advertisers are starting to reassess their contracts with Reddit (which by the way, their ads suck! You’ve collected all this demographic info about your users, but you can’t provide advertisements that draw any kind of interest!? And you think you can be of value to AI companies!? What the fuck are you doing!?). Reddit’s greed is losing them money.

Also check out AtomicPress if you’re an android user. The developer sought to take the James Hoffman dice and make them… A bit more unreasonably random. Sometimes the random recipes stumble into something truly excellent and unexpexted

Nah, UNIX certification requires paying money and almost all of the BSD spins said “That’s dumb, we barely have money as it is”

Sup. I’m doing that. It’s working pretty well for me. I recommend it to anyone who wants to participate in the communities on beehaw but also wants the very permissive pattern, particularly if you have a favorite community here or on lemmy.world. I see plenty of people who are upset that they really liked a community on beehaw and now because their instance is defederated they can’t go there, but consider that that community was the way that it was because of decisions made about moderation

The Fediverse, and what you see in it, should be what you want it to be. That’s what the prevailing design decisions of the Fediverse have always been. You want more exposure to more of the Fediverse than I do. That’s great. You should have that. I want a more curated experience where I don’t have to deal with what I consider bigoted or abusive behavior. I should also have that. It’s why instance choice matters. If you don’t like how an instance federates, you are free to pick another instance or self-host. For me, what works is two accounts. One that sees more, and one that’s more curated. That’s been a pattern of use on the Fediverse for a long time

That functionality doesn’t exist yet as far as I know so the best bet is to ask the instance you’re on “Would we defederate over this” and if the answer is no, change instances

In real life, you can filter by not hanging out with people who speak abusively about and to you. You can walk away. And yeah, sometimes those abusive people follow you. So a lot of them seek online support communities as a retreat from the abuse. Saying “they should just toughen up” misses on what their daily life is like, and that no one wants to be subject to constant unending abuse

There might be an issue on GitHub you could comment on to suggest this. It’s the lack of flexibility in the mod tools that are currently available that’s leading to this “on / off" style of federation

I’ve been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don’t remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don’t understand what the Fediverse is for and about. There’s a lot of anger and hate that the Fediverse is supposed to be free and open and all the instances all federate with each other, and it’s just like… No. That’s not the point. Why would we even architect ActivityPub to have whitelist and blacklist functionalities if we didn’t want server admins to be able to use them? The point of the fediverse is that you own your relationship to your server’s moderators, and you pick your server’s moderators based on their moderation style.

Think of it this way. On reddit, the administrators have full power over all communities. Don’t like it? You are welcome to have no avenues to participate in any of the discussions. On the fediverse every server has a team that has full power of that small section of the internet. Don’t like how they federate? Pick a different instance that better matches how you would like to interact with the fediverse. If you’re angry that Beehaw is doing this, it just means Beehaw isn’t a good fediverse home for you. You can just… Not go to beehaw for your fediverse needs. Do you like it here, but still want to see posts from Beehaw? Maybe an instance that federates with both is right for you. Because if you like what’s on beehaw, to some extent, you are enjoying the community that is there because they like how things are run there. There is an extent to which you have common ground with those moderators. An instance that federates both there and here is saying “We like what both of these moderation teams are about.”

Here’s another way to think of it. Let’s think about the internet as being the world. The Fediverse is one country in the world. Each project is like a city. You pick which city you want to live in based on what’s going on in your life and how you want to go about things. Here in the Lemmy city (which is very near the KBin city. Think New York and Newark), every instance represents a house with a garden. When you move into the Lemmy, when you pick your instance you move into a house where your profile lives, and then you go hang out in the communities in the back garden. Who your administrators choose to let into the garden is just them creating the atmosphere they want for their garden party. And almost every Lemmy garden has defederated from someone. Almost every server has set up rules about what it takes to walk through the back gate to come kick it in the back garden. The largest instance with a fully open door policy is lemm.ee, not lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. They’re the 3rd largest instance overall.

All beehaw.org is saying is that our house is very crowded and their bouncer can’t keep up with all the people trying to get into their garden party. And it’s what makes the fediverse beautiful. That’s the point of the fediverse.

Yeah but there will still be decay. The teeming masses are there to see what the power users are doing. A dip in content quality will lead to a migration like what came a couple years after the Digg migration when the Stumbleupon folks needed a new home