And that’s within your right too. It goes both ways.

There’s peer pressure going on right now encouraging Mastodon instance owners not to federate with Meta’s Threads. How is that not gatekeeping?

But that choice should be up to instance owners and people shouldn’t pressure them either way. It’s their instance, after all, not yours.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say that there’s a lot of gatekeeping and shaming going on, especially against the Mastodon owners who are thinking about federating with Meta’s instance.

Federating with Meta’s servers should be a choice. If people want the ability to interact with celebrities and normies, that would be a huge boost to ActivityPub and Mastodon in general, especially for the servers that do end up federating with Meta. Their users would be able to interact and follow all of the mainstream people who are not on Mastodon.

It should be always be a choice. And for those servers that don’t federate, things will remain the same. Don’t try to gatekeep or spread FUD, it just makes you look paranoid and insular.

I’m blocking you.

Perhaps they changed that rule. But I’ve seen it before. Just too lazy to link the post the mods over there ended up locking.

And also no need to judge people from their post history. Thought people were nice here? Guess I was wrong, this is the Internet after all.

Isn’t it called BitTorrent?

The developers behind Lemmy are known tankies too. But they are not super vocal about it.

Lol people have had debates about that on Mastodon for ages. The consensus is that most people are unwilling to donate anything or see ads on the instances they use. They expect hosts to keep the instance up out of the goodness of their own hearts, and many instances have shut down over the years because hosting was no longer economically sustainable for their owners even as those owners begged for donations.

Most users (especially those who just consume free software/fediverse services and contribute little else) want something to be both free and good. That means subsidized by the owner because they believe in the cause and good because of the lack of monetization.

Umm… and most of the Lemmy instances are nearly as open? For example, Lemmy.ml bans:

1. Criticism of China or Russia
2. Discussion of the war in Ukraine

I’ve seen the mods over there lay a heavy hand at anyone who tries to talk about or discuss these topics.

Also, for good reasons, most of the mainstream Lemmy instances do not have any of the “rauchy” communities that Reddit has.

Thanks. Somehow people are basking in the glow of potentially having found a solution to centralized social media. But here’s the thing: someone has to pay for it, and someone has to moderate it.

Many Mastodon instances couldn’t handle the increased load of sign-ups when Twitter crashed or malfunctioned. I see a lot of smaller Lemmy instances begging for money already even though those places aren’t host to as much content as Lemmy.world does.

We need to be aware of the limitations of the fediverse too. No, it will not solve hate on the Internet because the people who self-select to be here are somehow virtuous and above the “average Redditor”. You still need money and good moderation.

Also, I want to add something: Beware of people fetishizing the fediverse as a cure-all to all or most of Big Tech and social media’s problems. Remember, the technology is rarely ever the problem, the humans are. So long as humans remain really clever apes, you are not going to solve hate speech, spam, or outrage.

In fact, it seems like outrage about Reddit is currently driving the majority of engagement on Lemmy so far, even though it’s been three weeks since the API protests. Just look at all of the most upvoted posts here. Discussions about how bad Reddit is currently and how Lemmy/fediverse will save everything and make everything good. On social media, moderation is still extremely important, and from the snark and trolling I’ve seen here and there, I hope the mod team doesn’t fall behind and I hope that the Lemmy developers create better mod tools, because if Lemmy does blow up, expect bots to show up. Expect propaganda. Expect automated trolling. All this shit hit Reddit as it got more popular.

Yeah I agree. Lemmy is rapidly mirroring Reddit from its early days. And without good mod tools, it’s going to be tough to police such behavior as time goes on. Platforms are rarely the problem, it’s the people posting.

How do you think that Lemmy won’t be any different as it scales and grows? I’ve already seen plenty of trolling and snark around here.

Centralization reduces friction. Normies who sign up on Mastodon are going to want to be able to talk to all of the other Twitter refugees too. By making mastodon.social the default, it encourages centralization of the mainstream portion of Mastodon’s userbase, such as journalists, official company accounts, public figures, etc.

But most of them are probably going to use BlueSky. I heard journalists have been mostly gravitating towards that option.

It’s because normies want that “centralized” experience. They don’t want to figure out which servers are federated with which server - but they always know that they will have the least issues with the server that has the most active users.

Yeah but then you run into the risk of federation/defederation politics. We’ve already have had a major instance defederate.

I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven’t seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I’m wrong).

I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.