epicspongee [they/them or he/him]

Where do they do this? Do you have links? So far what I’ve seen is they comment on posts that go viral on their instances, as they’re allowed to do. I can’t say I’ve had any problems with Hexbear users.

To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.

No it’s just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit’s way of doing that.

True. This should get better over time though! There’s not a lot of optimistic UI in Remmy and that causes the app to feel a lot slower. There’s a lot of PRs up rn to improve the frontend so maybe something will make it in soon!

Nah this is not how moderation works on the fediverse. If you defederate from Nazi instances, Nazis have an incentive to go to those instances instead of yours - namely because they can’t interact with Nazi content. They can still harass your users of course, but they can’t build a platform and get banned quickly. So on the Fediverse you end up with a lot of Nazis on only a few servers, and everyone just bans those servers. Same goes for pedos, TERFs, etc.

This makes it a LOT easier as an instance admin to moderate content and keep users safe. As a Masto admin, I only get about 10 reports a week because I block about 200-300 servers. It also incentivizes me and my other fellow admins to block that kind of content, because if we don’t, Nazis will come to our servers and we risk being defederated from.

Evergreen meme:

It’s the deciding which ones are worthless that gets dangerous

Not making a decision is in and of itself a decision. Saying ‘Nazis deserve a voice because everyone deserves a voice’ removes the voice of minorities because Nazis murder and oppress minorities. There is a decision that has to be made somewhere. Saying ‘everyone deserves a voice and Nazis deserve a platform!’ is limiting the voice of minorities.

Idk, gonna be a very hot take, but I like my beliefs challenged and believe that everyone deserves a voice

Nazis had a voice once, and folks listened to them. And we ended up with the Holocaust.

Might be controversial but I don’t believe that people who want to murder minorities deserve a voice. I feel like that’s a pretty reasonable bar to set lol.

Blocking instances actually makes the lives of instance admins a lot easier. It not only reduces a whole chunk of problematic content for you to moderate, but it also encourages Nazis to go to the servers you block instead of yours. Nazis can’t subscribe to the subs they want to on your server, and they get banned if they say Nazi shit, so they just leave and go to a Nazi server instead. It’s like fly paper for Nazis lol.

As a Mastodon admin with a few thousand users, I rarely see Nazi content that I have to moderate. And that’s because when I started I spent an enormous amount of time sifting through every server we federated with and blocking all of the Nazis and all the pedos and all the TERFs. And because I did that at the start, I only get maybe 10 reports a week, none of them are content that would traumatize me (almost always spam), and I also helped the servers that now use my list to do the same.

Blocking instances not only makes it easier for me to do my job, it encourages other admins to not tolerate these kinds of behaviors as well. Because if they don’t moderate well, that attracts Nazis, and then we have to limit or ban them because we’re volunteers. So everyone just ends up blocking the shittiest servers and moderates their user base well. It’s a win/win for everyone.

Nazis are not entitled to access to minorities on my server. TERFs are not entitled to access to trans users on my server. Assholes are not entitled to have access to an audience on my server. There are tons of white supremacists or TERFs or other assholes hosting plenty of other servers where they can go and do that. But I don’t want that on servers I host and my users don’t want that on servers I host. If you truly believe free speech is such a big fucking deal, then you are welcome to leave and join one of those rotting servers as well. See how fun that is for you and how long it takes for you to come crawling back.

Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That’s 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it’s written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it’ll be even cheaper to host on donations.

It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle.

Folks have been saying this about Mastodon for years and it’s only grown. Facebook’s now looking at investing in ActivityPub. It’s a W3C standard for federation on the internet and the amount of apps supporting it is only growing.

I think probably the most bleak thing that could happen is that maybe Lemmy has a smaller user base and only a small amount of people convert over from Reddit. But even then I’m kinda happy with that. I like what I’m doing on here and I like the community so far. And I could deal with a smaller set of communities that are ad-free, have a pretty great experience, etc. etc.

I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501©(3) status).

Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we’ve gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.

Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I’m sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don’t need advertisements or to profit.

Okay, what I’m saying is a vast majority of the time people just say stupid shit online. And that’s it. This is a good way to say it, not ‘what does this person have to gain by doing the thing that internet users have done for forever to earn imaginary internet points? Are they trying to destroy Lemmy?’

Please stop spamming this in the thread, it’s annoying af.

Sometimes people just like spreading drama. Other times they just have weird or different beliefs. Accusing someone of having ulterior motives isn’t useful or helpful unless you can demonstrate that this person isn’t just having an internet debate that they feel strongly about.

It impacts as long as those problematic instances are federated

How? Like in what way?

but they can write malware and commit it to their repos.

Why would they do that lmao

Girl calm down, please just take a step back. Maybe read up on communism or communists / the far left before blaring off takes like this. I’m not an ML and not a fan of them as an anarchist, but this is suchhhhh an overreaction to what they actually said.

Additionally if you don’t like the dev team, then fork it. Or volunteer to be on the core team. Submit some PRs. Start your own alternative. One of the cool things about having anticapitalists develop software is that it is open and you can do that. It actively does the opposite of what capitalism wants us to do. I think just that fact alone should make you pause and maybe reassess the language you’re using (Hitler and other fascists rose to power actively aided and funded by capitalists because it helped retain their power).

This is so weird to me lol, maybe I’m just odd but it’s so weird seeing McCarthyism still rearing it’s ugly head after what… 5 decades? I am by no means an ML (can’t stand them as an anarchist) but this is wildly blowing out of proportion what @dessalines@lemmy.ml has said and done.

I mean like why link a ‘Socialist FAQ’ that’s literally just a ton of links to education on socialism and the different schools of thought it has? Not all communists are tankies (not even most) lol. Just generally shows a lack of familiarity with actual leftists / anticapitalists.

I mean you’re more than free to start contributing to Lemmy and / or offer to be on the core team. You can fork it and start your own version of it not owned by them. The nice thing about having a communist (or at least an anticapitalist) developing it instead of a capitalist is that you have the freedom to do that. You cannot do that with Twitter, or with Reddit, or with Facebook, or with Instagram.

Capitalists will not voluntarily do that because it is unprofitable to them. Companies that do end up floundering or dead.

Idk to me there’s a very real difference between the two and I’d rather have a tankie developing a platform than someone like Elon Musk making it go to shit.