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This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.
This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.
wow the /c/greentext community has posts that remind you of 4chan
:0
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.
An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.
I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:
Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.
They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.
It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.
I am quickly fragged by space-aged weaponry, provided I don’t explode from the strange atmosphere. Best case scenario isn’t good, food seemingly doesn’t exist.
I’ll call for their manager and attack the manager specifically. Is there a term for that yet?
Security is a cat and mouse game. There’s always a way to steal from anyone, especially a convenience-oriented business.
The best deal is always free. So, I’d rather inconvenience the conglomerate haute-booj than the petit-booj, even if it’s only a few dollars.
Huh, I’ll have to look for a mute button, thanks for the hint. Mine keeps yelling at me to finish unloading then churns out a nonsense marketing phrase. Utterly annoying.
Thanks for the detailed reply :)
I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I’m still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw ‘spyware’ around to describe anything and everything, so I didn’t realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it’s applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.
I do appreciate when a worker in a restaurant has a legitimate conversation and is social, if they can see when it’s appropriate and welcomed. And to add context, I’m not talking about the waiter hovering like you’re describing, I’m talking about something I’ve only ever seen from immigrant family restaurants where they’ve come from a culture where eating is still a social community activity, or possibly when a chef takes pleasure in knowing you’re enjoying their experience. The always transactional nature of eating in society has started to annoy me. But it’s very different to when someone is being paid to try and make your experience good, that’s inevitably plastic and coerced.
That website has a very strict, unusual interpretation of ‘spyware’. Even if all the telemetry and unprompted connections made by Mozilla Firefox are in good faith and legitimate features, that website still labels it ‘spyware’, as it is revealing unnecessary information without your consent.
The same website gives Tor Browser a ‘Not Spyware’ rating, as it (necessarily!) removed the default features of Firefox that concerned them.
Side note - I think you may have accidentally marked your account as a ‘bot account’ in the settings.
It’s Chromium-based, so I don’t understand how it could be “configured in the same way”.
That website is […] full of verifiably false information
Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn’t notice any last time I checked the site.
they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.
They’re very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn’t make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.
They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.
It says “Not Spyware”. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor
Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.
The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.
Honestly, brigading is still a valid thing that can exist here, but yes, people don’t realize that if a post gets popular on a popular federated instance, people who appear like ‘foreigners’ (for lack of better word) will jump in and flood it. It looks as if a brigade, but it’s entirely organic, non-malicious, unorganized and unprompted.
I’m not sure how to classify things like ‘dunk tank’ posts, where someone on an instance will say ‘lol look how dumb this post over there is’… it’s not really calling a raid but many people will go to the source comment and dogpile them. And sure, that’s just part of being a public website, but it’s a bit easier with federation to go over and interact, just like it is moving between subreddits on reddit.
In reality, it would be more like a series of lines on different topics weighted differently by an individuals priorities so no singular generic representation will ever be truly good enough.
In reality, there are no lines. And that’s exactly why I say, it’s not a step forward to add another vague idealist axis on top of a vague undefined idealist axis. Politics is not geometrical, there isn’t a concept of ordered values. The entire method of thinking is wrong, and that video helps explain what a more appropriate alternative model based on human history is like.
Adding an axis is just walking forward down a wrong path; a move in the wrong direction by suggesting the issue is about how much fidelity we have.
I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren’t appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a ‘link aggregator’, that’s what it was designed for. People post links to content.
So it’s no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.
It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.