Not ideologically pure.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • The trolls in the comment section at least hints at the fact that creating a more positive and constructive online space proved more difficult than they imagined.

    I was curious, and joined the queue for the closed beta a long time ago. Never heard back. They explored something new in closed channels, decided not to go for it, backed out. I don’t really think they need to justify the decision.

    Running a social media is a huge effort, and there’s a lot of trolls out there actively targeting Mozilla. I imagine it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.


  • Very cool!

    Do you be have any idea how tolling scraping these data is for the servers?

    If this is something you want to keep working on, maybe it could be combined with a sort of Threadiverse fund raiser: we collectively gather funds to cover the cost of scraping (plus some for supporting the threadiverse, ideally), and once we reach the target you release the map based on the newest data and money is distributed proportionally to the different instances.

    Maybe it’s a stupid idea, or maybe it would add too much pressure into the equation. But I think it could be fun! :)



  • I gave in to peer pressure and finally got Twitter right before shit completely hit the fan, even though I was already uncomfortable with it. I already had a Mastodon user, but not under my real name.

    Then, during the exodus, I created a Mastodon user for academic use. This was a few months before defending my PhD in social sciences.

    For a while, I was posting the same content on both platforms. On Twitter I am followed by a lot of people in my field, and many of them are still active. On Mastodon, there’s like… two active people specifically in my field.

    Still, whenever I post anything both places, I have gotten more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. On Twitter a couple of people see it and boost, and they can be somewhat central in the field. But then it kind of deflates. On Mastodon, I get boosts from the ones there in the field, people in adjacent fields (for example the #rstats crowd), interested people from civil society, commentators, a real variety of people. Hell, the other day I was boosted by a folk singer I’ve been a fan of for years but that I didn’t even know was on there.

    Meanwhile, I occasionally check the temperature on Bluesky, and I bridge my posts there. Many in my field signed up while it was invite only. Some of them posted one or two posts back then. I haven’t seen any actively since, and nobody from my field has followed my bridged account - but one R stats person has.

    I guess they must be on Twitter still, if they are anywhere.

    Anyway, point is, my field indeed failed to migrate. But I still achieve more by posting on Mastodon than on Twitter.



  • Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It’s shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

    Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.

    “There’s no such thing as free lunch” is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.

    It’s a dumb metaphor that doesn’t even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.

    That didn’t mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.







  • I subscribed to the lower tier for a while, but I kept running out of searches early on every month, and the price of the higher tier is just not excusable. So I found myself adding the !ddg bang most of the time to avoid spending my Kagi quota.

    And as good as Kagi is, it’s still primarily a meta search engine, organizing results from the dominant actors. So it’s not like the price is justified by them having to crawl the entire web themselves. Their own crawler, Teclis, is currently small web only and can probably best be described as an interesting project.

    Instead of making search cheaper or more affordable, they spend subscription money on creating AI services and various other non-search distractions. Maybe that’s good for some people, but I don’t want that shit. I just want a good search engine at a justifiable price. And for that, sadly, Kagi fell short.




  • I’m happy it’s working for you! Communick also seems to be a bit of a different concept than paying a monthly fee for a user on a Mastodon instance.

    At least personally, I’m willing to give a monthly contribution to my Mastodon instance to keep it up and running, but if it started charging its users (even if it was a smaller sum than what I currently contribute) I would cut the donations and flee elsewhere. I guess I’m neither a rational consumer nor a “good” supporter, but that’s just who I am I guess.

    Of course it’s great if people can have healthy transactional relationships. And we need to normalize paying for products like software and social media, even if it’s available for free. But having the user-generated internet hidden behind a paywall will not, for me, ever be an acceptable solution.


  • I don’t even disagree, but the amount of left-wing misinformation posted around here is astronomical.

    It’s also well known that Russian misinformation campaigns are seeking to increase polarization, so they are actively producing bullshit media on both ends of the political spectrum. Their goal is not (exclusively) to push European societies to the right, but to sow division by pulling people to the extreme on both sides. The bad actors don’t care which extreme you go to.

    I personally think centrist are cowards, and right-wing people are either naïve or evil. I’m firmly planted on the left. But that’s exactly why I consider the main threat in my media stream to be disinformation targeted precisely at people like myself: Left wing, believable, almost completely correct, but tailored for radicalization.

    And by god, there’s a lot of it. I’m being told on a daily basis to hate; that voting for Harris is the same as murdering children; that all Israelites are full of hate, never mind the huge protests in Tel Aviv or any of the numerous accounts of internal resistance; that the UN cannot be trusted, despite them being under constant attack by Israel, not Palestine; that Ukraine is responsible for dragging on their war against Russia.

    Reality has a liberal bias, but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly easy to produce misinformation with a leftist spin. And it’s being spread like wildfire in certain corners of Lemmy.



  • Well, there’s a whole horde of people seeking to discredit Wikipedia as well, whining as loud as they can about its bias in one direction or another.

    It’s information warfare, and it’s pretty exhausting. And it’s impossible to tell who has ulterior motives and who’s just a moron. Creds to the Lemmy.world crowd for putting up with it at all.

    Of course this media fact checking site is not perfect. But if your conspiracy revolves around every single well-reputed news source in the world refusing to communicate the truth… Maybe check yourself.