James R Kirk

There will always be two types of users: people looking to connect and people looking to be entertained. Fedi is better at the former and commercial better at the latter.

100%

The reason behind his weird android haircut is that he thought it looked Caesar-esque.

The American system is far from ideal but I’m convinced 90% of social media posts decrying a “lack of choice” or “monoparty” are cynical actors trying to make pro-democracy voters feel hopeless. I remember in 2019 all of the “The DNC installed Biden” language was all over Reddit.

I’ve never seen someone just blatantly lie about primaries not existing anymore though!

Yeah I have to imagine much of it is bots/artificial views already, this line from the article stood out:

That means this short reel has been viewed more times than every single article 404 Media has ever published, combined and multiplied tens of times.

It doesn’t shock me a single reel has significantly more views than all of 404 media, but “multiplied tens of times”? A recent comment me chuckle:

“Investor fraud is basically the entire business model of well basically everything anymore.”

(implying the ad views are faked to increase the stock price).

I think it’s interesting how “maximizing for engagement” inevitably leads to slop taking over everything. I wonder if real people (with real money) will continue to engage with the slop? Some people surely, but enough to sustain these mega-corps?

I haven’t seen anyone mention lemmy-explorer yet, it’s a good way to find communities too:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Well said. I personally don’t get the opposition to Threads using ActivityPub. I like being able to follow Threads profiles without exposing myself to Meta.

Size has not much to do with it. If a hypothetical instance allowed a “troll farm” to set up shop there, sane admins on other instances would de-federate from the one that allows trolls pretty quickly.

Threads accounts (or any account) won’t federate to your instance unless you (or someone on your instance) specifically requests to follow. It’s a common misunderstanding when people think that federating with Threads.net will “overwhelm” a small instance.

Threads is twitter style (like Mastodon) so it’s not going to have much to do with Lemmy. Threads allows users to opt-into a sort of half-Federation where Mastodon users can follow their content. It’s a unique case and not how Federation normally works.

With Mastodon, content from users on other instances is not “downloaded” unless someone on that instance specifically chooses to follow it. So it’s not like every small Mastodon instance that federates with threads is going to be overwhelmed by all the millions of user feeds on Threads.

Tbh there is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding Threads federation, but in short- there is no technical way for them to “extinguish the fediverse” even if they really, really, wanted to.

“Defederating” just means two instances won’t talk anymore. For example, your instance (lemm.ee) is currently defederated from three others (You can see here). It means you won’t see any posts/comments from users on those instances.

Kiiiinda, Threads users can opt-in to have their content syndicated out via ActivityPub (and be followed be mastodon users). I’m not positive but I believe it’s still only one-way, meaning Mastodon replies won’t show up on Threads. It’s basically an RSS feed.

Great point, absolutely! I don’t subscribe to the “dead internet theory” but my time on the Fediverse has also convinced me that all of the corporate platform’s traffic numbers are almost certainly heavily inflated (probably to justify higher ad prices).

We have an entire instance dedicated to popular 1960s television show Star Trek (don’t go there)

I am pretty convinced these stats are low because I remember the early years of Reddit feeling much less active than the Threadiverse does now and I have to assume Reddit’s MAUs in 2008-9 were at least above 100K.

Regardless, this is nice to see and I recommend everyone check out !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com if they are interested in helping to promote Lemmy instances on Reddit.

…Propaganda? Cnet?

Well said. I think AI “art” is really best considered just a form of entertainment since there is no human perspective put into it. Adam Savage said it best (paraphrasing here) “In order for me to be interested in a work of art it needs to be coming from a point of view. I don’t see anything resembling a point of view with AI.”

those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol

Like what? Which platforms are those Sarah Perez writing for TechCrunch? Can you name more than one?

Not bad for free. Appreciate you checking.