I guess along with all the google money, they also got Google’s pathological need to cancel everything, too.

Not really: if you’re astroturfing, you don’t do all your astroturfing from a single source because that makes it so obvious even a blind person could see it and sort it out.

You do it from all over the places, mixed in with as much real user traffic as you can, and then do it steadily and without being hugely bursty from a single location.

Humans are very good at pattern matching and recognition (which is why we’ve not all been eaten by tigers and leopards) and will absolutely spot the single source, or extremely high volume from a single source, or even just the looks-weird-should-investigate-more pattern you’d get from, for example, exactly what happened to cause this post.

TLDR: they’re doing this because they’re trying to evade humans and ML models by spreading the load around, making it not a single source, and also trying to mix it in with places that would also likely have substantial real human traffic because uh, that’s what you do if you’re hoping to not be caught.

If this worked for other forms of content than microblogging it’d be more interesting.

I don’t have an issue with paying for people who make long-form video content, or people who post actual real long-form blog posts, or newsletters of interest but microblog shit?

There’s barely enough of interest there to justify reading it most of the time, let alone paying for it.

Tweets and toots are just advertisement for the actual content, not the actual content, IMO.

This would be more interesting if it was a way to monetize Peertube or the various blogging platforms that are federated.

None of my youtube creators are producing content on peer-tube.

That’s probably more of a monetization issue than anything related to peertube. If your job is making Youtube videos, then at least some portion of your income is AdSense. Sure, it’s not what it was, but at scale it’s not nothing, and the peertube alternative is… $0.

(Also, for the non-commercial ones or the ones that are funded outside of Youtube, maybe ask if they’ll use Peertube. I’ve had luck with a couple of people I watched being willing to upload to multiple platforms, but you don’t know if you don’t ask.)

Stripe is pretty much global, outside of some weird prepaid/debit cards in various places which just don’t work.

The bigger problem is that the number of chargebacks you need to get your merchant account killed with them is very small if you don’t have substantial dollar/transaction volume which a Lemmy admin isn’t horribly likely to have.

And of course, their chargeback fees in general are unpleasant though that’s more of a universal problem than a Stripe problem.

Another paper that equates not changing the world with being a complete failure.

A valid viewpoint, I suppose, but some Fedi-things have certainly improved my life, which really, is how these things work: you improve people’s lives incrementally, and not by the hundreds of millions at once.

Of course, that means this is a complete failure because we won’t accept anything other than massive global success as success anymore because… reasons?

Use a better client that shows you the information? The default UI does, so that’s firmly a problem you’ve inflicted on yourself.

thus I don’t really see a problem

Except you no longer can edit, delete, etc. the posts.

You’ve lost complete control over your data, and there’s no way to get it back if your instance vanishes.

If I were a dev, I’d probably prioritize that awful ‘THIS HAS FAILED!’ error when you search for a new community that your server doesn’t know about because well, new users who don’t know that doesn’t mean what it says are going to walk away thinking something either doesn’t exist or is broken.

I also kinda think that community lists and activity stats should somehow be federated between all the servers that know each other.

Like, lemmy.world knows uncomfortable.business exists, so both servers should know the full list of non-private communities that COULD in theory be federated and be pre-populated in the search results.

And then feddit.org is federated with lemmy.world, so all 3 of the servers should be fully aware of each other’s communities so that a user that lands on ANY instance immediately has a working searchable list of all communities that exist.

Some overhead, sure, but the amount of data here is probably just a one-time big sync and then a small number of updates which is certainly not going to break anything given how chatty lemmy already is.

As a slight side note, that really only directly applies to people in the US.

Other countries have different requirements around what you’re required to do, and some are stricter and some are uh, not as strict.

That’s kind of my comment: pulling from Reddit is probably pointless. If you’re still on reddit at this point, there’s nothing short of Spez showing up and killing your cat that’s going to make you leave.

The Fediverse in general needs to think about being more than just a ‘we copied twitter’, and a ‘we copied youtube’, and a ‘we copied instagram’ and of course a ‘we copied reddit’ collection of things, because you can’t pull people from the thing you’re copying unless you’re better in some way that a normal person will care about.

And I use all these fedi-things to the (mostly) exclusion of the commercial versions, but if we’re being very honest, they’re all carrying a lot of rough edges still.

The Fediverse needs to be able to define and sell itself to people without having to say ‘we’re like x’. If you can’t explain what you’re doing and why someone should care in a way that makes them care, nobody will.

(This is what I get for spending time with people who do marketing stuff, I guess, lol.)

I mean, by themselves, nothing.

The issue is the posting and visibility requirements for a Mastodon post lead to some ugly garbage when translated here. You get shit like

@community @user1 @user2 @otheruser Yep, I agree, this could be better #hashtag #hashtag2 #hashtag3 #hashtag4

Which uh, is not really parsed in any meaningful way, and is 75% noise when put into the format Lemmy uses for a post and/or reply.

I mean, I’m not opposed to more users from larger platforms, but right now it’s a shitty experience for Mastodon users trying to follow a Lemmy community, and it’s a shitty experience for Lemmy users when a Mastodon user posts into a community too.

You need BOTH sides to make concessions and fixes and changes to make the experience not shit, and like, that will is just plain not there.

I also agree that the use cases of the platforms are wildly different and that leads to some added friction, but if the software actually interoperated well you could probably fix that with just polite social pressure.

But, well, neither side of this “interoperability” is… useful, and Mastodon doesn’t seem interested to fix it.

I also think recruiting new users might be a more useful use of time than trying to just rely on poaching them from somewhere else, but uh, I couldn’t tell you really how that should or could be done.

I have a question, and I’m legitimately asking in good faith, because I am confused by this obsession about Mastodon compatibility.

Basically, why?

Mastodon doesn’t give a shit about being a good citizen and very much has issues they’ve said they won’t fix. And frankly, if Mastodon devs don’t appear to care, why is everyone else so concerned about it?

Let them silo into their own little safe space, and maybe push people to use other platforms that ARE willing to be good Fedi-citizens.

(Also I hate how Masto-user posts show up with the @s and endless hashtags: they don’t conform to how Lemmy posts look and work, and I’d legitimately consider just blocking all the Mastodon posters until they don’t look and feel weird and out of place.)

Counter opinion: mbin and the devs are fine.

There’s a couple of people here who won’t stop hopping into every thread about anything to talk about the things they make/businesses they run/etc.

Feels more like they’re just a little too enthusiastic over their shit than actual shitheads, but that’s just me.

Was reading that and had the most insane sense of deja vu, then noticed it was posted a year ago and went ‘oh, okay, I have seen this before!’.

Surprised they lasted a whole year longer.

I’m not one to tell developers what to do, but from a user perspective, comments (which is like, most of the damn point, no?) are effectively broken and that makes the whole platform kinda… defective.

I’ve discovered I follow topics but very very rarely care about who is posting/commenting, which makes microblog feeds doubly not my thing. Forums and Lemmy match far more what I’m after than Twitter-style feeds ever will, because the amount of curation to find a single interesting person (who then doesn’t turn out to be an utter monster) is just… too much involvement for some idle time-wasting.

Also I don’t know what you mean about the politics being insufferable on Lemmy, comrade. Perhaps you need to take a nice long vacation to the People’s Re-education Retreat and hot spring?

I’m going to get shit on, but outside of Lemmy, there are just… no active groups on the various fediverse group site aggregators that I’m remotely interested in.

It’s all news, politics, political news, and political peacocking. Which fine, if that’s what you’re after, but I’m here for nerd shit, and Lemmy is utterly completely awash in nerd shit.

The other problem is an ActivitPub problem. Even if you follow someone, if you’re not following every single human on fucking earth, you’re not going to see all the replies to their posts on your server. So your clever post was already made 8 hours ago, and unless you click on another link that takes you to their instance you can’t actually browse what replies actually exist before posting.

Which is just stupid: if I have to visit someone else’s shit in order to see if I should reply, I might as well just you know, use that server and save myself the trouble.

IDK, I liked the UX and it was interesting while it lasted, but it was really just a massive resource drain and had far less interesting nuggets than other options did.

As with all things in life, as soon as I touch it, it explodes, lmao.

I think this means I’m done with trying to host fedi-Twitter. Discoverability on a small instance sucks, maintenance on a small instance sucks, and the software available designed to do a reasonable small instance doesn’t exist.

That, and since relays are almost entirely required if you expect ANY useful content discoverability, you’re just wasting a huge amount of resources on crap you don’t want, don’t care about, and can’t really delete because all of these pieces of software expect you to keep everything from everywhere forever.

Think I’ll just do a rm -rf and get that ~25gb of disk space back and stick with Lemmy (which is my preferred interaction format anyways).

Doubtful. They always are optimistic how many people would subscribe, it turns out that nobody subscribes, and then it’s either them folding or speed-running enshittification and spying.