Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

All the rest: yup.

Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.

this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: https://lemmy.world/comment/13157556

Nothing can explain Twitter :-P

Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.

Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.

And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.

Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.

And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.

Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).

Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)

When my instance switched from 0.19.3 - which your lemmy.world is still running on (awaiting 0.19.6 iirc for reasons) - to 0.19.5, downvotes became hidden by default and I had to turn them on specifically.

I turned them on bc for me, more information is better - e.g. I like to distinguish between e.g. “1 upvote” that has not been seen by anyone yet (perhaps due to server sync issues, which just happened to me yesterday on startrek.website - e.g. my post has different numbers of comments and differences in voting numbers depending on which instance you view it from; such issues are still somewhat common on Lemmy, often due to keeping up with Lemmy.world that has 80% of the userbase, though 0.19.6 promises a reprieve iirc), vs. 1 net upvote that is made up of X upvotes + X downvotes.

A lot of my posts tend to be controversial for some reason - e.g. this video that points out bias in news media reporting (towards more “exciting” content that sells rather than actual facts) got only 6 upvotes (above the default +1) and 5 downvotes. So… it’s actual information to know that (a) people actually did see it, rather than it still sitting at just 2, and (b) as many people didn’t like it as liked it, though far more people simply ignored.

We cannot make people like things - even (literally) award-winning content that arguably they “should”. All we can do is be sensitive to people’s reactions. Like the man vs. bear debate - perhaps choosing the bear is “silly”? Then again, is it, really, truly, and anyway it’s not our call to make, only others to choose as they wish. At which point, it’s at least good to know what people’s opinions are?

Hrm, I suppose that would depend: did the person who said that really know somehow that he was a pedo (especially if it predated all the news stories then how would he? maybe the news stories were rerun a second time), or was it just a wild guess that turned out to be correct?

Anyway yeah, not many people seem to actually care about the truth - it is often painful, always seems to be difficult, almost always goes against the fantasy stories that we tell ourselves, etc.

I have never known Jon Stewart not to be. Unless he says in advance that he might be. His discipline, his willingness to listen to feedback, his dedication… all of that means that his wrong thoughts tend not to make their way on the air. Although this might have been before Jon Stewart’s airing of that episode?

I suppose it could have been wrong - like if Biden really did just have a cold or some such. But either way, the logical foundation that the article set forth intrigued me.

Hexbear has downvoting disabled. Which is in part why they brigade people to express disapproval rather than merely use that.

Edit: for context though, my own downvoted posts tend to be genuinely unpopular. e.g. this one may arguably have the distinction of being the least popular post of that entire community, if you sort by controversial and see that it is the first one with double-digit total numbers. It doesn’t matter how that whole situation turned out - people just did not enjoy seeing it, like at all, though I indeed found it interesting.

Indeed it is good to think ahead, rather than make rash decisions:-).

I mentioned elsewhere, to the developers of PieFed that I will switch to, that Dessalines is still an ally in the flight against for-profit corporate control over everything, e.g. Reddit, Facebook, Threads, X, etc. But while I have ENORMOUS respect for having offered the Lemmy codebase, the way he runs his personal instance… it’s not all good, nor all bad, but definitely does have more worrisome elements than most Lemmy or Mastodon instances.

The lack of transparency in governance in particular, as well as how heavy-handed it is, and again the fact that the unwritten rules are so hard to guess at, and could change at any time. It leaves people feeling insecure in the situation, which seems to make it unreliable, unless you constantly dance to his tune, which he never states quite what that is. And even if you never so much as mention e.g. Ukraine or Uyghurs or Gaza, the fact that someone else in your community could, and therefore mandatorily become booted from the community (along with the entire instance), is not ideal. The rules merely state that Lemmy.ml is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but there’s far more (politics) going on besides that.

At least Reddit was more honest about Huffman’s opinion - “you are landed gentry and I will harvest your data and no longer allow third-party apps unless they pay my exorbitant fee”. Okay… good to know I guess.

Anyway, if I helped any then I am glad ☺️.

Yeah that’s what I am starting to realize over the last couple of days - that while Reddit was bad, in some ways at least, they were less bad than Lemmy, or as you say at least lemmy.ml.

The key ingredient there is the transparency: Huffman may be a dick, but at least he is upfront about things: “you are landed gentry, under MY dominion, mu-wha-ha-ha now all will bow before me” indeed, but contrast that to claiming that lemmy.ml is for “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but did you get banned for spouting paid software? Or for violating privacy? No, or at least doubtful (I didn’t look:-). Look at the four rules - which ones did you break, that would warrant a site-wide ban? Some people get banned for none, e.g. for claiming that they have Uyghur family members staying with them who have experienced discrimination and potential genocide and… BAM, ban hammer. Bc neither Russia nor China can ever do any wrong - it is the USA that is “evil”, that is “capitalist”, and “democratic”, and “doing genocide”, but again, not precious Russia or China that does so.

I am looking heavily into alternatives that will allow banning lemmy.ml users across the Fediverse. One is lemmy.cafe, another is the Tesseract UI as implemented e.g. on dubvee.org, and another is Mbin (maybe, unless a bug no longer allows that? I saw one report of such anyway, but don’t have an account so cannot confirm), and I am leaning heavily towards joining PieFed, bc it’s so exciting what it is positioning itself to become in the future. Sublinks too but it never seems to be updating anymore, so I guess it’s stalled somehow.

Dessalines can do as he pleases. If we don’t like it, we can leave Lemmy. Those are our options.

The virus will affect us all… whether directly or indirect.

It tends to come from… ah… certain sources though.

Instance blocking despite all the promises turns out to be mostly a lie, and has actually gotten weaker with time. Although we were told to wait and then this feature would solve our personal defederation needs, the opposite turned out to be the case. On 0.19.3 it at least used to prevent notifications (confusingly enough), then on 0.19.5 it no longer does so.

I still see every comment, they can reply to me, I can reply to them, and the only thing it ends up doing is hide communities - including auto-name-expansion with the exclamation mark. I wanted an actual “block” of an “instance”, but apparently I must move to another instance to get that:-(.

Do you know if PieFed allows user-blocking of instances? Like allow someone to mention a community name such as firefox@lemmy.ml while blocking someone with a user account from lemmy.ml?

Yeesh. Things are not perfect in the USA but it does sound a bit better than that - until/unless Trump wins and then the gap will close a bit:-(.

I wonder where I will end up myself! I even wonder if I should take a break from social media altogether over the next couple of months, but that seems doubtful (if only bc it would take quite some effort to replicate the various functions, e.g. research a good RSS reader). Lemmy - like everywhere else - seems likely to become a shitstorm until the election is over.:-(

Though dropping lemmy.ml and hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml should help a ton.

Yeah it seems like there’s barely anything here for Mexico, which I guess uses just the standard sources. There is !mexico@lemm.ee, but… you see how empty that is. There is https://lemmygrad.ml/c/latinamerica but… fuck no, not on on that instance!:-P

Yeah I see !trees@sh.itjust.works at lemmy.cafe, though I don’t see trees@lemmy.world so perhaps nobody there has subscribed to it yet, anyway ymmv. And I see !animepics@reddthat.com, but you may want to check your specific communities.

Damn, lemmy.cafe is somehow even running 0.19.6-beta.9. Is this too good to be true - is this a trap?:-) Or is the instance admin that much on the ball?

Click “Blocked” at https://lemmy.cafe/instances - they barely block anything except those big 3. Unless they do it without it appearing there, which is possible, but highly doubtful. In any case it looks awesome from that perspective.

Also the welcoming messages at the top of the server are amazing - “Have you installed ublock origin?”, “check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca”, etc.

Mbin I think doesn’t “block” even places such as Chapotraphouse - or at least Kbin did not - but it uses an entirely alternative voting scheme with “favorites” rather than upvotes and “reduces” rather than downvotes. That means that the popularity of something is only determined by the people on other Mbin/Kbin servers, with the upvote information still visible but not used by the sorting schemes. Also, the identity of people who use “reduces” against you are visible, so you can block them rather than have to suffer in silence, if they are super annoying about it e.g. reducing everything you’ve done without regards to its content. But yeah, I don’t know about actually hiding messages from people from particular instances - that’s what we are wanting here, and I imagine that if it is not doable now then it hopefully would be in the works?

I also don’t think I want Mastodon… or maybe I do? But anyway I don’t think we need it from the same account. Lemmy is topic-based rather than person-centered and that seems to make the most sense to me. Likewise Discord and Slack, but those are more unwieldy e.g. not indexed by search engines (such as DuckDuckGo, what else would I mean by that?:-P).

PieFed sounds the best in theory due to high integration with all those other services. Unless I end up not using or wanting those other services? I haven’t so far… then again they’re all so brand-new.

Sublinks sounds really exciting - you can even view a working demo - as it has been for the last half year with no updates that I’ve seen. Perhaps any day now… maybe…

And until my instance upgraded from 0.19.3 to 0.19.5 I enjoyed the Lemmy web UI. Now I dislike it - for a long reply (as I am wont to make myself:-D) up and downvote counts can be multiple (and variable!) screen rolls / pages away from the buttons on the bottom, and sometimes are on the right of the screen while other times on the left, having been wrapped around by a long name - go home UI, u r drunk! 😜

dubvee.org has iirc a single owner, which is usually not a sign of stability - but damn it is impressive! https://dubvee.org/about he did it all, then doesn’t even accept donations for it and guides people to give to other projects instead - that’s the opposite of capitalism, not just making fun of capitalism as people do on lemmy.ml constantly but rather living one’s literal and actual life according to one’s principles. Also I think he’s stated somewhere that he’ll switch to Sublinks rather than Lemmy as the backend when it’s ready. So… it’s a strong option as well, if a bit outside of the Lemmy ecosphere, and yet fully within the Fediverse and fully compatible with Lemmy, plus like PieFed additional multimedia enhancements of its own.