• 10 Posts
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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I’d argue perhaps the opposite: if you want full moderation and admin freedom, running it on your own instance is the only way to do it.

    If you run it on someone else’s server, you’re subject to someone else’s rules and whims.

    Granted, I have zero reason to think the admins of any of those listed instances would do anything objectionable, but that’s today: who knows what happens six months or a year or two years from now.

    Though, as soon as you start adding stuff to your personal instance, you’re biting off more maintenance and babysitting since you assumably want your stuff to be up 100% of the time to serve your communities, so that’s certainly something to consider.




  • The biggest thing I’ve started not doing (stopped doing? whatever) that’s helped me is spending any time using search engines to find things.

    If I’m looking for something I try to find some sort of forum, or irc channel, or discord group, usenet group, or message echo or whatever and just ask what’s (probably) still an actual person.

    Maybe google would be faster but holy crap has my quality of shit-i’ve-found online gone way the hell up once I stopped asking a computer to send me to something obscure or old or odd, because every search engine has basically decided to go all slop, all the time now.

    The only drawback is if I’m asking someone a question about OS/2 on an echo, it might take me a couple of days until some greybeard comes back with an answer, but so far it’s been 100% accurate shit, rather than either nothing useful, or incorrect slop.

    It also fixes that weird thing where the internet feels like nothing but bots and AI slop generators, because you’re in a situation where you can almost 100% be certain the person you’re talking to is still actually a human and it also leads to lovely conversations about other shit, and really brings back the feel of the “old” internet before it got infested with big tech who capitalism-ed it into a pile of garbage.






  • That’s probably true, though I’m not sure who has ever actually made a legitimate determination since you’d have to remove the non-humans from the numbers first and, well, Reddit isn’t going to tank their MAU numbers by ever releasing that kind of stat.

    It’s also not helped once you hit a certain size and the nature of scale takes over and the level of toxicity goes up: even in small groups, when a new person shows up and asks the same question for the 20th time, they start taking shit for it. If you’re in a BIG group, it turns into a giant dogpile, and people stop asking questions because who the hell likes that kind of response, so you end up with a lot of people who are subscribed to something, but none of whom actually contribute at all.



  • A Lemmy community with 100 active members is more likely to be 100 active humans than a subreddit with 10,000 members is, based on the last time I went to Reddit: it was so, so clear that everything was either ChatGPT, or a repost of shit even I had already seen, or was just otherwise obviously not an authentic human sharing something interesting.

    So yeah, not entirely surprising.