

I will be dead in the cold cold ground before I ever type “/s”
/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021
Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website
I will be dead in the cold cold ground before I ever type “/s”
I know it sounds insane but I swear to god BlueSky has astroturfing accounts on Lemmy. Every conversation (including yours here) about BlueSky is met with countless Sealions either saying it “will be federated soon” or asking “Why does federation matter?”
Everything now is rage-bait designed to get more clicks
IMO the greatest strength of the Fediverse is the increased number of mods and admins looking at everything. Don’t want rage bait? Join an instance that has rules against it.
Additional PSA to admins not running a “universal free speech” instance- if you see someone someone being obnoxious it’s probably annoying your users just as much as is is you. Don’t put the onus fully on users to curate their experience. The Fediverse needs our adults in the room!
Healthy for Lemmy, totally catastrophic for Pixelfed.
I know this comment is satire (well done… I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.
I’m clearly not paying enough for a therapist.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.
For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.
As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.
Urban dictionary says it’s a term that refers to when an undercover government agent fails to blend in with whoever they’re trying to blend in with.
Absolutely, if you’re seeing propaganda, it’s because it’s allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.
Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.
There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".
Yeah BlueSky is a solid side-step. It’s still for-profit and not federated but every BlueSky user is one not on X. And a lot of BlueSky’s userbase is comprised of particularly influential X users so them leaving is particularly harmful to the ecosystem.
I also think it’s funny how the journalists who repeat BlueSkys “decentralized” nonsense thought Mastodon was too weird and technical, and yet are promoting Pixelfed. Not complaining, but it is funny.
What bugs have you encountered lately? I’ve been playing around with it (only a couple of days now) and it’s overall been very smooth experience for me.
The only thing I’m aware of that they do even remotely better than anyone else is privacy.
Where did you hear this? Its my understanding that they are one of the worst when it comes to privacy.
“Many small instances that can survive with a couple of donations” seems much more sustainable than a handful of large ad-selling business “powered by Mastodon”.
Well said! My instance doesn’t need ads because the servers don’t care about profits.
I’ve never seen an ad-based tier on a Mastodon instance and the network does just fine 🤷♂️
Without executives leeching money from going to the actual cost of servers things seem to work better! Go figure!
I have had similar thoughts, I think the answer ultimately lies in active mods that can really get to know a community and it’s users and identify when users are pushing a narrative even if they can’t confirm if they are a bot or not.
Also as @[email protected] pointed out, user registrations. On startrek.website we have a question that is easy for a star trek fan to answer but not easy for a bot (although getting back to your concern, chatGPT probably would have no problem)
I was just thinking the same thing. It’s rare that the bullshit from tech companies is so quickly identified packaged and labeled like that (even if we are still calling it “AI”).
I haven’t seen much arguing, it is unquestionably centralized and for profit. There truly is nothing unique about it.
I’m not an expert with the AT protocol but it really seems like what Dorsey and co have made is a super complicated protocol that (under specific conditions that cannot exist in the real world), has the potential to be federated in a meaningful way. That way they can steal all the talking points of the fediverse and muddy the meaning of words.
There are also a lot of people on Fedi who will seek out threads like these to explain how line 2532 of the AT protocol handbook explains how having 100% of users on a single server is actually decentralized but I’m sure they’re all authentic accounts.