I agree - but I also appreciate that all instances of Mbin and PieFed combined currently have fewer monthly active users than lemmy.dbzer0.com alone, which is only the seventh biggest Lemmy instance. So for now it doesn't make much of a dent whether we're counted or not. :)
aasatru
joined 1 year ago
Fedidb observes 50k monthly active users. 65% of these are distributed between instances with more than 2000 monthly active users, making up the five biggest instances. Half (51%) are on either Lemmy.world or Lemm.ee, which are the only instances with more than 3000 monthly active users.
A fourth of us are on instances with less than 1000 monthly active users.
I don't think that's all that bad. But who am I to say, I'm not even part of the statistic. :)
I haven't tried it myself, but Nextcloud talk seems to be an option as well. Doesn't need to be self-hosted, but wouldn't be free. I think it should be possible to find it at a reasonable price though.
I cannot think of many people who speak to this moment in history to the same degree as Meredith Whittaker. Fantastic interview. @Mer__[email protected]
I can't avoid politics and shareholders completely, but it really boils down to cutting costs.
They are companies supported by venture capital, basically risk-taking investors wanting a high pay-off. The problem with receiving this money is that the investors end up owning the company, and you have to answer to them. And once they are making money, why wouldn't the owner feel entitled to their share?
The problem being, of course, that they never really had a strategy for monetizing the platform. So how can you turn a profit? Some try to sell premium features, but for a dominant social media company it always boils down to three things:
- Operate the platform as cheap as possible
- Sell ads
- Avoid regulators
It used to be that point 3 required certain base levels of moderation, but with the current US government, this has changed. Point 3 has become unpredictable. Censorship of political content that can be deemed extremist, such as opposition to genocide in Gaza or sympathy for Luigi Mangione, might help social media companies that are eager to comply in advance.
So basically, platforms now need to maintain the cheapest possible moderation (1) that allows advertisers to stay on the platform (2) in order to maximise profits.
These platforms are huge enough that they do not need to care about individual users - especially sites where users tend to be anonymous. So you don't really need to introduce expensive checks and balances; just ban users at any suspicion. There are plenty of fish in the sea.
Now, how do you get to a point of suspicion as cheap as possible? Machine learning models is probably your best bet. Reddit observing people's voting history provides them with useful data to this end. Running some LLM on the user's comments is good as well, which is how you end up being banned for quoting the Godfather, as I saw one newly recruited Lemmy user report. The more safeguards you introduce, the more expensive moderation becomes.
Advertisers don't care much about over-moderation. Nobody has any incentive to care about individual users in a site that is as crowded as Reddit. What matters is that there are enough users left to generate content (until AI can take over that as well), and that passive (harmless) users are there to click on ads. This dynamic is the same across all mainstream social media - Instagram just wants to provide you with a sufficiently addictive and toothless feed to have you keep looking at ads.
Last, the question is what needs to be moderated. Is sympathy for Mangione the same as encouraging violence? The regulators/political elites would certainly think so. Is it extremist to support Palestine? Where is the line drawn between legitimate political opposition to a fascist coup d'etat and inciting political violence? These are sometimes hard decisions, but following the above logic of unmonitored over-moderation, you don't even have to think about it. Just ban at first suspicion.
And then, suddenly, the social media platform is not only seeking profit, but it is also colluding with a fascist state takeover and suppressing the opposition. Which is why people give you political answers to this question even though the answer is really very simple: Bad moderation is cheaper.
pff - the real pros can make line go down
I posted it as a microblog in an attempt (more or less successful) to make it feel somewhat native to potential Mastodon/other microblogging users who would stumble over it - while I'm sure those in the Threadiverse will find these communities soon enough, I wanted to make an effort to spread the word a bit further.
For Lemmy users, it's visible in the main feed. It's just those of us on Mbin who have to live with it being a bit hidden, ironically. 🥲
Other communities to check out, in addition to the State-centric ones, are [email protected] for general discussion, [email protected] for brainstorming, and, of course, [email protected] for a more general discussion of the resistance.
With apologies to the latter for posting this somewhat clickbait-y post in their community - I tried writing something that could hopefully gain some traction across different platforms. I hope that's alright! :)
That said, I guess people living in countries where the government is prone to censorship might do well to use smaller instances than lemmy.world, as they are more likely to fly under the radar.
Or just switch to a smaller instance if lemmy.world does get blocked, I guess.
All hat and no cattle. Empty threats and empty promises.
America has always been susceptible to bullshit artists and snake oil salesmen. Of course it had to end like this.
FediLab is the app I know of that aims to support the most fediverse services. They claim to support Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, and Pixelfed. You could try to sign in with Sharkey as well, who knows.
I use https://phanpy.social/ with Pixelfed and Mastodon, and it works quite well with the two. I believe other services are also supported, but I have not tested it myself. :)
Where do you see your life going?
Accountability is a bet on a stable routine. You'll go to work, earn money, go home, spend money. A lot of people are happy with this.
Languages could take you many directions, with endless opportunities to climb into various international organizations and take on a broad range of tasks. If you're willing to work hard, learn other skills, and move around, you could have a very interesting life. If you want to stay where you are, options are likely to be more limited.
Physiotherapy offers maybe a middle ground. You won't climb as much, but there's work, and you can move around if you want to, even though work will not require it. You can have a routine in life, but one that is maybe easier to break free from if you want to.
As you like the idea of a stable monotonous office job,maybe accounting is perfect for you. Personally I need something that pushes me around a bit - I'm terrified of staying in one place far too long.