They’re necessary, but any power will always bring a chance that someone will abuse it. So I usually prefer moderators with a lighter touch, that talk to their users before taking more controversial actions.

I miss Tumblr. Yes, Tumblr still exists, but the Tumblr I miss does not. This stuff makes me wonder if we’ll see an ActivityPub Tumblr-clone at some point, like Lemmy/Kbin to Reddit, Mastodon to Twitter and PeerTube to YouTube.

As a Dutch person, I freaking love this. And there’s plenty of valid reasons for it too, it’s not just them throwing us a bone.

Begun, the git clone wars have.

Hm, but it sounds to me like this will be a problem for Reddit’s plans regardless of AI.

If people start churning out upvote-worthy AI-generated content and posting it on Reddit, then Reddit will be happy with all the extra views coming from Google. They won’t mind.

I think “pile of goo that becomes a bigger pile of goo” does seem a lot more plausible than a literal ice cream cone. I’d take more issue with the self-destructing pokeball pokemon, Voltorb. What kind of evolutionary mechanism brought that on?

There’s plenty of games you can just buy and not pay a subscription to. Hell, any game with a subscription is usually impossible to pirate, due to being server based.

Movies and TV shows almost invariably do require a subscription these days, though, unless you take to the seven seas.

Ads can deliver viruses, many ads are animated or have sound, or both. If every ad were static and safe, I wouldn’t mind so much… but alas, that’s not a thing. So AdBlock it is!

As far as I know, there is an option to only federate with whitelisted instances. It kinda breaks the whole idea of being a federated network, still doesn’t entirely prevent “bad” posts from reaching your instance, and I don’t know of any specific instances that do it.

Yes, mainly because there aren’t many instances where you can reach every other instance. FMHY is nice in that regard, but if the mainstream instances defederate from it, I may have to do the same. Really hoping that won’t happen, but it seems inevitable.

And sometimes, justice requires breaking the law. Remember that the Holocaust was legal and Stonewall was not.

Sure, but some places do have more influence on the public discourse than others. Lemmy will remain relatively uninfluential until it becomes more user-friendly, and/or more well-known. So any left wing stuff here is going to have less of an effect than it did on Reddit or other such places, for now.

I agree. A thing can be sensitive content for more than one reason at the same time.

I agree that the de-federation and attitude is worrysome, but I disagree on your stance towards more tags. Servers that disallow NSFW now, might choose to allow NSFW but not porn. Servers that allow NSFW now, are likely to keep allowing both. Servers just don’t want to deal with liability and weird protocol quirks showing people stuff they don’t want, so they’ll ban any category that’s likely to include stuff they don’t want. More fine-grained tagging means they can ban a smaller selection of things.

I’m all for various kinds of tags to indicate why someone might not want to view certain content.

Interesting style! Reminded me of Jollyjack at first. I feel like you two have a similar use of colour and exaggerated shapes. The meme is funny too, of course.

In general on Reddit, no. Maybe on r/pics, but that seems unlikely. I just checked my comment history and the very first thing I saw (latest comment) was on a post titled “How do you guys generate conflicting characters?” on r/StableDiffusion.

The Onion, I think?

Yeah, this makes sense. The health of the instance we’re on is our concern too. Since a Fediverse instance is not a faceless entity and doesn’t pull the same capitalist shenanigans on its users, the users will probably be more willing to support it with donations if they see something like this. Many other donation-funded sites have something similar.

Initially, it’s probably fine to have it included in the server rules blurb on the side, but it should probably just be part of the API for mobile clients, and possibly communicated to other servers too? So if some valuable content is on an instance that’s not doing well, you can deal with that. If it regularly gets valuable content but can’t sustain itself, people might donate even if it’s not their home instance. Otherwise, it can be copied somewhere safe, if it’s basically abandoned.

Okay, this is a good article. I was on the fence about Meta, wondering how they’d cause any damage, and this article cleared that up for me.