This is totally a display of form over function.

The main issue for newcomers is the paradox of choice, and unless you are some exceptional case you’ll end up clicking more than one of the options and be facing a wall of options to choose from.

Also, what is the use case for recommending Emissary?

I will take a look at the login issue. Seems like I need to update alien.top to a more recent version of Lemmy.

If you already have a Fedi account and just want to help with the community mapping, please take a look at https://fediverser.network/. The “fediversed” instances (like alien.top) can update their own mapping based on changes from fediverser.network, so any on one place can be used by admins elsewhere.

Nothing can be easier than going to https://portal.alien.top/, signing up with your Reddit account and seeing your account already subscribed to communities corresponding to your favorite subreddits.

I have to ask, then: what motivates people to do it?

If mods are not financially compensated for it, the only rational explanation is that they are either getting some form of benefit (soft power, access to privileged information) or they are getting some pleasure out of it, i.e, power tripping.

Thank you. I wouldn’t take it hard evidence of anything, but I did miss the part where he was actually a mod on Reddit as well.

That is what their mod was accused of having done

He was accused of lots of things. But was there any concrete evidence of that? All I saw was a comment from reddit where he said something stupid.

AFAIK, it goes something like this:

1. One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.
2. Someone on Mastodon found “bad” posts from said moderator.
3. The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.
4. The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.
5. Regardless of actions and reactions, the mob now successfully tainted the name and reputation of the instance.
6. Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.
7. One of fosstodon’s admins (the author of the blog post) is now saying “Screw you guys, I’m going home to Bluesky”

EDIT: There’s more to it. Seems like said mod is also active on Reddit (https://lemm.ee/post/60365167)

I’m having trouble parsing your sentence. Do you mean that the mods/admins of fosstodon were using their position of power to suppress anyone?

• Sign up to Fediverser
• Search for communities for your interests.
• The community should be associated with a subreddit. If it’s not, you can make a suggestion for the change.
• Apply to become a Community Ambassador. I’ll approve it. Once you are approved, you will be able to do the following:
  • See the posts from the subreddit that is associated to the community.
  • Send DMs to people on Reddit, inviting them to join Lemmy and your community
  • Add other sources of contents (RSS feeds)

There were more things that I had planned, such as the ability to do one-click repost of interesting links, but I didn’t get to it because that would mean effectively that I would have to turn the fediverser site into a an alternative Lemmy frontend.

I really wish more people had taken on the “Community Ambassador” work that I’ve done for https://fediverser.network/. It could be really helpful in creating a focal point for everyone that wanted to help the migration of people interested in a specific niche.

She touches on the aspect of monetization and claims that “you could save money by being on the Fediverse”.

Yes, in theory it is possible. In practice this is something that only is available for the already-famous journalists who have enough pull to move their audience from Substack to their own property.

For everyone else, the Fediverse is (a) too small and (b) too “anti-money” to encourage professionals to even try making a living here. They stay on Substack for the same reason that video creators stay on YouTube: it’s a horrible master, but at least it lets them pay their bills.

Generally, because I think all server-centric AP software is broken and I want to see a client-first application to browse the social web.

Particularly in relation to piefed: it seems to be focused on the exact opposite (giving more power to the server admins) and it takes a good page of social engineering / “nudge theory” principles to guide its design. Much like Mastodon, it seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture.

I know. The second question is meant to cover this…

Sure. But at the end of the day, economics is just a big game of resource allocation. 5M€ can get you quite a long way, and I’m wondering if we could have better use of those resources than by putting it on Mastodon.

We need to grow our annual operating budget to €5 million in 2025.

What for?

How many active users are going to be served by mastodon.social and mastodon.online? Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?

How many more users are going to join the Mastodon network of servers thanks to the missing features that are planned to be released this year?

How many billion dollar companies were built on dynamically typed languages? Do you think that companies/bosses/investors care about the compiler warnings or whether you can deliver/iterate faster than the competition?

nobody likes plumbing, but we all know it’s necessary.

Is it, really? Are we all working on mission critical software? We are living in a world where people are launching usable applications with nothing but the prompt to an LLM, ffs, and you are there trying to convince yourself that pleasing the Hindley-Milner gods is fundamental requirement in order to deliver anything?

Good engineering is about understanding design constraints and knowing where to choose in a myriad of trade-offs. It’s frankly weird to think that such an absolute, reductionist view like yours got so much support here.

Right, but the problem with them is “bad usability”, which amounts to “friction”.

Like I said in the original comment, I kinda believe that things will get so bad that we will eventually have to accept that the internet can only be used if we use these tools, and that “the market” starts focusing on building the tools to lower these barriers of entry, instead of having their profits coming from Surveillance Capitalism.

requiring a proof of identity or tracking users is a privacy disaster and I’m sure many people (especially here) would outright refuse to give IDs to companies.

The Blockchain/web3/Cypherpunk crowd already developed solutions for that. ZK-proofs allow you to confirm one’s identity without having to reveal it to public and make it impossible to correlate with other proofs.

Add other things like reputation-based systems based on Web-Of-Trust, and we can go a long way to get rid of bots, or at least make them as harmless as email spam is nowadays.

Not even the biggest tech companies have an answer sadly…

They do have an answer: add friction. Add paywalls, require proof of identity, start using client-signed certificates which needs to be validated by a trusted party, etc.

Their problem is that these answers affect their bottom line.

I think (hope?) we actually get to the point where bots become so ubiquitous that the whole internet will become some type of Dark Forest and people will be forced to learn how to deal with technology properly.

This is not a matter for instance admins but for proper community moderation.