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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2024

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  • Anubis does its thing, shows me cute art, then leaves without elaborating. It’s a mostly non-intrusive, individual/community effort to protect people against big tech and abusive scrapers. I usually see it in open source community websites that were getting hammered by LLM scrapers.

    Cloudflare’s is a corporate solution from the company that man-in-the-middles half the internet and makes me click shit every fucking time. I see it whenever I make the mistake of following a stackoverflow link.

    You’re goddamn right my reaction is accordingly different.


  • Most people know this in some capacity, but it’s not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.

    Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.

    I’m not saying you shouldn’t be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you’ll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn’t scale. By the time you realize there’s a shift, it’s too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.

    I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we’ve copied too many of its faults. We’ve already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.

    Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They’re now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that’s compromise.

    I’d like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that’s a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.


  • Thats part of why I try really hard not to let perfect be the enemy of good.

    That’s fair, I hope I didn’t come across as attacking usage of “imperfect” solutions. It’s definitely not my goal, I’m in the “try to use the least bad thing” camp.

    Thank you for taking the time to acknowledge and engage with that context. I spend too much time on the internet and fully understand it’s unsustainable for most—it’s not doing me good, either—so I’m glad I get to share relevant content I’ve accumulated from time to time.






  • Just for the record, I know little about gotosocial, but I’ve looked into Misskey a fair bit and I think it’s irrelevant here.

    FediDB data on active users seems off (a low ~12k MAU), but even if the real number is much greater, most are on the flagship instance (misskey.io) which has multiple CSAM censures on fediseer.

    Put another way, it’s almost counterproductive to include Misskey in these topics because simply federating with its biggest instance could be a liability for most 1st world western instances.

    I doubt the Swiss government would get much out of Misskey.



  • I didn’t want to rain on your parade, but:

    • Firefox has hundreds of millions of users.
    • Lemmy has less than half a million total users, and YTD MAU peaked at 52k.

    Even putting aside technical details, I fail to see how “Lemmy integration in the browser” could be a good product strategy. A plugin/extension can also be developed by independent developers, which seems much more fitting for the size of the target demographic. Maybe I’m missing something.