I’m with you. Tiktok is about as “healthy” as vaping. There are other just as bad (if not worse) apps out there, and the reasoning is stupid and has some first amendment concerns. But I won’t die on the protecting Tiktok hill.

Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.

This is what I don’t understand, why would anyone choose to host when there is zero advantage? I sort of feel is by design so they can claim “decentralized” while still having full control over the data.

is decentralized

It’s not.

I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky?

They can’t.

in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.

…yep.

My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse.

ActivityPub existed before BlueSky did and they chose to make their own, incompatible thing. So I don’t have high hopes for this.

That doesn’t mean much unfortunately.

This could easily be done with AI. For a week or so, that is.

A “reply guy” (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a “redditor”. Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it’s also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.

Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.

I think it has potential to be better in a way Reddit can never be, but the two biggest instances do so little moderation their userbase might as well be “people banned from too many subredits”.

I assumed the killer feature of Lemmy would be “zero reply guys” but instance owners seem willing to tolerate them in the interests of faux-engagement. But the irony is this sort of “engagement” actually scares new users away.

This is a really interesting chart. A lot of N64 games were $70 and even $80 at launch which is upwards of $150 today. Just crazy.

I was just thinking the same thing. It’s rare that the bullshit from tech companies is so quickly identified packaged and labeled like that (even if we are still calling it “AI”).

I agree! Don’t run your mouth in public then complain when someone asks you how do you know the thing you’re running your mouth about is true. If in 2034 someone who has never seen snow wants more evidence than some idiot on the Internet’s feelings on the topic then asking is totally justified.

I think it’s totally reasonable to ask for a source about a historical claim if something hasn’t been true for over a decade?

EDIT: My source for this opinion is here

The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.

Actually about a third of all users have an adblocker installed. Adblocking has been mainstream for a while, no doubt why Google finally stopped pretending they were OK with it.

What you’ve expressed is not pessimism it’s cynicism.

Dude SAME. I find it extremely hard to believe that Google would astroturf Lemmy but it really does feel like all of a sudden in the past ~month a bunch of vague or minor complaints being repeated over and over in every thread.

The difference is that Lemmy is not centralized. So it can’t really be over-populated. If an instance is poorly modded and doesn’t have that vibe you like you can find one that does. The more people using Lemmy the more options there will be, it’s the opposite of Reddit.

I quit because contributing my labor made me complicit.