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.

Careful with the word “liberal” around here, it’s used as a slur for people who occasionally interact with reality.

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.

If other people want to pay and be paid, that’s fine, but for a lot of people in the open source sphere it leaves a bit of a bad taste.

Basically it becomes something very different once it’s a product you’re selling. I’m honestly not sure it’s a good advice - your users will rightfully expect a lot more from you if they pay for the product, and you’ll probably not make enough money for it to really make sense. So it’ll be more work, more obligations, and monetary incentives won’t be strong enough for it to make sense.

Encouraging users to make donations to cover the cost of operation, on the other hand, makes all the sense in the world.

Then again, if there’s a method to it and logic behind it, maybe these active downvoters are doing everybody a favour by screening content and downvoting things they consider to be of little value?

I don’t know. It would be interesting to hear their motivation for sure.

PieFed shows us that he has an “attitude” of -40%, which I guess means that of 200 catloaf votes 140 will point downwards. So I guess at least it’s nothing personal, he or she is just an active downvoter of things. I guess we all enjoy spending our time differently.

A cool potential feature would be weighted downvotes - giving downvotes form users with higher attitude scores (in PieFed terms) greater significance. But I’m derailing.

Yeah, I think your point is absolutely well made. And it’s a good reason to, even if features like this are implemented widely, we shouldn’t boast too much about voting being anonymous. It’s just too difficult or impossible to make it bullet proof.

I don’t think the automatic upvotes to your own posts count as real upvotes. At least they don’t federate, so they shouldn’t pose too much of a problem. I think they’re just there to keep people from trying to upvote their own content.

It will never be foolproof for users coming from smaller instances, even with changing IDs. If you see a downvote coming from PieFed.social you already have it narrowed down to not too many users, and the rest you can probably infer based on who contributes to a given discussion.

Still, I think it’s enough to be effective most of the time.

I was wondering what attitude was, but I never got around to checking it out in the documentation. I was wondering why PieFed insisted my attitude wasn’t 100%. Makes sense now - I guess it just isn’t!

(maybe a clickable question mark next to the attitude score explaining briefly what it is could be useful at some point)

It makes sense that Mastodon will dominate in terms of shares, as the platform is built around that.

I’m posting from PieFed, where boosting is not an option, but your post is perfectly integrated. :)

Sounds like you’ve got your priorities in other - enjoy it for all it’s worth! :)

You’ll need a GitHub account, unfortunately. (ActivityPub support in GitLab will be amazing for fediverse projects)

Ah. Part of me agrees, another part of me thinks we’ve been calling threaded messages threads for decades and I don’t feel comfortable letting meta ruin it.

Threads doesn’t really communicate with what’s referred to as the Threadiverse anyway. Sometimes to mbin I guess, but only profiles that are actively invited by being followed by users on an instance. So I’m not sure this would change all that much.

I think one of the best things we have are users like @[email protected] and @[email protected] who almost single-handedly curate fantastic communities of content they’re passionate about.

It’s a huge job, and not something one could easily ask of anyone. So I don’t have a quick fix how to attract more people like them or anything like that. But I think people doing these kinds of efforts deserve a shout-out.

I’m not very worried personally. I like it here, and it seems healthy enough in my eyes. I see people ask quite specific questions about many diverse topics and get incredibly helpeful answers, and I’ve been in that position myself as well. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth discussing the state of the community though, and I’m curious what people have on their minds. :)

True. Disabling downvotes would make a whole lot more sense than making them public and shame people who use them.

Yeah, they certainly don’t have the same sense of urgency as the rest of us. I don’t think it’s bad intent as such, it’s just that their priorities are very different.

Don’t get me wrong - this is a massive part of the reason why I’ve never bothered to use Lemmy. So I absolutely think you’re on to something.

I think everyone is always interested in improving, but there are a billion different ideas of what improvement looks like. Especially with content moderation.

What is a brilliant way to handle some issues might cause new problems that may or may not be difficult to predict. A lot of people have a lot of ideas, and people feel strongly about it. And most importantly, it’s a lot of work to implement and typically not the most fun work for developers who tend to be be underpaid at best anyway.

It seems every fediverse service that gets big enough has people chanting about a hard fork because the developers don’t care enough about content moderation. I believe it’s probably more that it’s extremely difficult, and that developers facing the reality of the situation might come across as dismissive when responding to ideas and suggestions.

The Lemmy developers initially included a filter for numerous slurs - I have a hard time believing they don’t want content moderation to be their own vision of as good as possible.

In the end our strength is in fragmentation. I believe, no matter how little moderation tools improve, the small instances I’m on will never get as awful as Reddit. And if they do, I’ll migrate to another one that’s more trigger-happy about defederating. :)

That said, not sure whether you’re wrong and absolutely not correcting you! Just my five cents.

It seems like his health condition got bad enough that he quite literally prioritised his life.

I hope he’s well.