Small clarification, @MindTraveller participated in that thread, but was banned while a comment of theirs was removed in a separate post. That’s why they’re not included in the list.

I’m going to be fine without Lemmy, it’s not worth much.

That’s not the conclusion I’d like you to draw. I’m an admin of a Lemmy instance. I wouldn’t volunteer so much of my time if I didn’t think Lemmy was valuable.

Lemmy.World has a central role in the Threadiverse, but not an essential one. Sh.itjust.works, Lemm.ee, Reddthat.com or another general instance could easily take over that role if the consensus determines that Lemmy.World doesn’t deserve it. Beehaw.org is the largest instance to de-federate from LW, and if things continue or get worse, LW’s admin’s actions may result in a re-ordering of the Threadiverse structure. Lemmy.World is not the same as the Theadiverse.

This is a radical option that is not possible in any corporate form of social media. If it occurs or the specter of it instigates the LW admins to relent, it would be a huge victory for democracy on the Threadiverse. A Lemmy instance can’t exist without its hosts and admins, but it also relies on the consensus of its commenters, posters, and voters. This gives you as a participant unprecedented control of how the communities that you build engage with the news and the world.

They’ve also removed comments critical of the bot, and ignored the overwhelming negative feedback and the consensus that the bot should be removed when they’ve opened the discussion up to the community.

I’d be satisfied if my criticism changed the mods minds, but at this point they are not my target audience. My goal in these comments is to inform those who are on the fence about why the bot is a bad idea, and signal boost the consensus that the bot’s assessments are illegitimate.

MBFC claims CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone, one of the largest landlords in the world. Lemmy.World mods need to stop feeding flak organizations like MBFC. Corporate propaganda is harmful to democracy.

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality.

This is why a consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website.

MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. I’ve spoken with @Rooki@Lemmy.World about this issue, and his response has been that he will continue to use his tool despite its flaws until something better materializes because the API is free and easy to use. This is like searching for a lost wallet far from where you lost it because the light from the nearby street lamp is better. He is motivated to disregard the harm he is doing to !politics@Lemmy.World, because he doesn’t want to pay for the work of actual fact-checkers, and has little regard for the many voices who have spoken out against it in his community.

By giving MBFC another platform to increase its exposure, you are repeating his mistake. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.

From LW, yeah. They still federate with us though. And honestly, I get it.

Welcome!

Other leftist instances you might consider:

• Beehaw.org
• Lemmy.Blahaj.Zone
• Lemmy.DBZer0.com
• Midwest.social (USA)
• Feddit.uk (United Kingdom)
• Aggregatet.org (Sweden)
• Feddit.org (Germany)
• JLai.Lu (France)
• Slrpnk.net

Solidarity from SLRPNK. You’re welcome to participate in !anarchism@slrpnk.net and !notvoting@slrpnk.net as well.

danb.me’s criticisms and tone are valid, but it looks FUTO has taken down their ill-advised license page and are using an unmodified AGPL.

I’m struggling to assign malice here; Louis is a hardware guy, and not every software person is really up on what distinguishes free software from freeware. FUTO seems like a pretty small shop; I’d give them a pass on this one.

Is this what you’re talking about? Is AGPL controversial now?

When did Louis “Right to Repair” Rossmann become the bad guy?

Yeah, most laws have nothing to do with justice and are merely threats made by social elites to working people. I don’t need that explained to me. I think you misunderstood my politics from my initial comment.

I find it unclear what the relationship is between free speech and the UK using flawed but licensed proprietary software to wrongly convict innocent people of fraud.

Cracking, unlicensed MAME, jailbreaking - these should be free-speech fundamentals that are instead prosecuted as crimes.

That makes sense.

A late pattern in Reddit was personal subreddits - communities named after the account that created them. They were infrequently used, but it provided a smoother pipeline for people who lurked or commented in existing communities to become comfortable making posts and moderating communities themselves.

Ideally these communities would be prevented from appearing in the “Trending Communities” list or local/global feeds unless someone other than the owner was subscribed to them, but wouldn’t be private in the sense that no-one could see them. Just they wouldn’t get wide distribution.

Another pattern is the “Country Club” post - where individual posts in a community could be limited to people verified to post in restricted threads. This comes from BlackPeopleTwitter. The individual verification method is likely not the only way to achieve this. People who comment or vote could be limited to only those who share the instance, are subscribed to the community before the post is made, or are members of instances whitelisted by the community.

Both of these patterns are interpretations of ‘private’ to mean ‘restricted’ and not ‘secret’.

Chinese Billionaires

According to the Hurun Global Rich List 2023, China housed the highest number of billionaires worldwide in 2023. In detail, there were 969 billionaires living in China. By comparison, 691 billionaires resided in the United States. India, Germany, and the United Kingdom were also the homes of a significant number of billionaires that year.

Chinese income inequality

Congratulations!

It’s a good thing that birds aren’t real, and already have RemoteID built-in.

I’m really happy for Eugen’s success, and am grateful for his essential contribution to widespread adoption of the ActivityPub protocol, even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of things.

I think it was honest for him to acknowledge Google’s role in sidelining the XMPP protocol, and while I don’t want to quibble about the other mitigating factors, I do take issue with him comparing the trajectory of ActivityPub with SMTP with the visible adoption and mutually assured destruction of major corporations in maintaining email’s nominal interoperability.

If people haven’t read it yet, they should check out (already Fedi-famous for his article on Enshittification) Cory Doctorow’s article Dead Letters – about how it is impossible for even a well-known public figure with access to the best server infrastructure and technical know-how to run a small private email server hosting completely legal content serving nothing resembling spam in the age of Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft Outlook. There are several ways that federating with Meta can kill this movement, and ActivityPub becoming the new email is one of them.

Basically, if we allow Meta, BlueSky, and Twitter to federate, the very network effects Eugen mentions make it more valuable for them to federate with each other than any smaller server. Predictably they will underfund moderation staff who make errors or their faulty algorithms automatically de-federate smaller servers due to false-flagging spam. Small operators will have to work harder and harder until it is basically impossible for them to overcome the error or fix the problem and re-federate. Eventually small groups that aren’t directly sponsored by one of the giants will be weeded out, as their users migrate to more reliable services. Even if the disconnections and undelivered messages are not the fault of the sysops, they will be scapegoated, and eventually more and more will throw up their hands and leave the rigged game.

While having a protocol you championed become the defacto web standard may feel like a great accomplishment, the Fediverse will never be a “Social Web” until the tools we use to communicate are incapable of being taken from us by corporations. Eugen’s vision of a social media ecosystem where any small developer can write a platform and have access to the entire ActivityPub network is at odds with his enthusiasm for the emailification of ActivityPub.

There are social obstacles to building the “Social Web” and as good as the Activity Pub protocol is, the true technical solution is Solidarity.