If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.

But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.

A lot of times. It doesn’t really help to find a problem, but rather when the problem was introduced. It’s a really great tool.

Because nobody has windows user as a core part of their identity.

The reason is that Meta is an extremely harmful company. They’ve enabled the worst kind of people in their pursuit of “engagement”. It’s no exaggeration to say that Facebook enabled a genocide. So if people are (correctly) quick to block instances where fascists congregate, why would Meta be treated any differently just because they have a ton of users? They enable fascists, they provide them with a platform. And now they want to bring that platform to the Fediverse, which has been a place that has traditionally been anti fascist.

And that’s just assuming they’ll be good citizens and won’t do an embrace, extend, extinguish thing, which we all know they will do whenever they feel secure enough in their position to do it. So rather than waiting until Meta is already integrated and it’s harder to do it, the idea behind all this is to prevent the issue from coming up in the first place.

It’s my favorite series of his. I read the first couple of Laundryverse books, and while they’re fun, I’m not a fan of the lovecraftian horror thing. But Merchant Princes hooked me right from the start. Tons of politicking, and by the end it gets messy, like really messy. It’s basically The Godfather meets Game of Thrones meets Sliders. And then the followup series (Empire Games) is a Cold War spy thriller with portals. You can just start with Empire games, it’s written to be a separate series, but it does have massive spoilers for the original series.

The Lost Fleet series by John G Hemry

A note on this: the series is written under the Jack Campbell pseudonym. Took me a while to find. The first book is Dauntless

I think Charles Stross does this pretty nicely, although his science part is not very hard science. So he’s basically not predicting anything, his science fiction is more of the “ok I know this is not real but what if it were” variety.

The Laundry Files series is “what if Lovecraft was right and there’s magic math that can summon the old gods”, but then add to it that we do have a way to do tons of math stuff in the form of computers. So of course what happens? Well, there are spy agencies tasked with controlling this, because we can’t get rid of computers, too important, but also, we can’t let that magic math run wildly.

The Merchant Princes series is “what if there was a way to travel to an alternate dimension”. So what happens? The dudes from the alternate dimension, who are the ones that discovered the secret, and come from a medieval-like world, use that to smuggle shit. They can go near the border, jump to the other side where the border doesn’t exist (or at least doesn’t exist right there) walk a couple of miles, and then jump back to our world. They of course build a massive criminal empire on our side. On the other side, they bring our advanced tech gadgets back and they are a hugely powerful merchant family. There’s also all the implications for security. You can jump inside any building as long as you know exactly where it is on the other side. And the shit the US government gets up to when they discover this exists is pretty disturbing (especially when you consider that it makes sense given what was done in the name of the war on terror).

Always a good opportunity to learn something new.

Nice, that looks like exactly what I was thinking about. I’ll suscribe, thanks!

I don’t even think it’s a difference with Reddit. Reddit also has community duplication. Sure, maybe not as bad, but it’s there. Compare /r/meirl to /r/me_irl. The only difference is that in Fediverse you’ll see the same community name in different instances, but is it really that much more confusing than the meirl case?

There is, yes, a lack of discoverability for communities. Maybe we need a “recommend me a community” community. Like “I’m looking for a Spanish speaking science fiction community”, and people can say “oh, yeah, try this one”.

Other than that, the main advantage Reddit has in this area is that it has had a more or less stable population for a very long time, so which community wins out out of an initial set has already been resolved, while this is younger (yes, it’s been around for a couple of years, but most people here haven’t) and therefore that process is just starting to play out.

Yes, news and worldnews are different things. But the ones I mentioned above are the same thing, different subreddits. Like me_irl and meirl. No reason for there to be two, but there are.

So sure, maybe the Federation thing makes it even more common. But it’s not a new problem, and it mostly self corrects. People gravitate to the bigger community. The smaller community will get some strays asking why there is not much movement here, and somebody will reply because we’re all at this other place and then the next stray sees the message and doesn’t even have to ask.

Lemmy does have some rough edges. The 0 at the front of the version number is supposed to mean that.

But really, some people will buy the crappiest early access game on steam and then complain that a beta version of a service that is actually trying to do something fairly complicated is not perfect for every use case.

The problem with the multiple redundant communities is real, but it’s also real on Reddit. It’s just that Reddit has been around for much longer and there has been time for everyone to reach a consensus on which community is the real one. And even then there’s different ones still. Is it workreform, antiwork, or workabolition you’re looking for? Or for something with less of an ideological debate behind the separation, is it tabletopgamedesign or boardgamedesign?