Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it's inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

I think it's sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.

The algorithm doesn't actually care that it's promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people's eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using "not interested" and "block this channel" buttons doesn't make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you're teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!

The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP's mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). "Youtube with no ads!" is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.

Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit

Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don't like "magazine" for a community)

Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin

Their reasons are much more selfish than that. They insist on only having 4 moderators while never scaling up, and they don't like how federation allows users from other instances to post on their instance because it disrupts their rigid ideal community vibe. According to their suggestions on "improving moderation tooling", the ideal federation setup is that their users can post on other instances, but other instances' users can't post on theirs, so they can save time on moderation work. The moderation work of other instance admins for their users doesn't matter, clearly.

Ironic that three people downvoted this. But I agree, a "no downvotes" rule is designed to avoid disagreement and conflict, which is impossible on a public forum without extremely restricted expression. If the point is to be always be nice, why not disable open commenting and make users select their replies from a list of canned positive comments. 100% safety and positivity.

This made me realize that I relied on Reddit a lot to decide on making tech-related purchases. I assumed that the contributors to Reddit's tech subs are enthusiasts who genuinely want to help others improve their systems and avoid scams. Thank you Reddit for being so open about sneaking sponsored content into discussions so that I can stop trusting your site!

Meta's main income stream is data mining and they will take advantage of federation to collect data (not metadata, but human-generated content is still very valuable for AI model training) of users on federated instances. Any content that federates over to this instance will be cached on Meta servers where they can do whatever they like with it. There is no legal data protection framework for content retrieved from federated networks and Meta's lawyers will try to argue that federating with this platform counts as giving consent to the platform's TOS. Meta platforms introduce lots of advertising and bots to the network. Don't just ignore this platform, give them the Gab treatment.

That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.

I don't have a lot of knowledge about the technical details of these frontends and I'm probably using the incorrect terminology, but this is mostly an empty threat because

The only way Youtube could [restrict access to Invidious/Piped for good] is by making a Google account required to watch videos. Logged out users on Youtube’s official services like its website and mobile app currently use the same API endpoints these frontends use, so breaking those endpoints would disable its actual services for users without an account as well. You’ll notice that you cannot perform any logged in actions with a Google account on these frontends, and that’s because the frontends only use endpoints that don’t require authentication like watching videos and reading comments. This is the same reason why Twitter hasn’t shut down Nitter (the read-only privacy frontend for Twitter) yet, even though they would really want to.

Invidious/Piped do not use the official developer API provided by Youtube, so they can argue that they're not bound by its TOS. There is the concern that Google can implement severe rate limiting per IP to disable proxies or they'll try to make their unauthenticated API private, but people will probably reverse engineer it.

Yeah no, this "America Bad and backwards 3rd world country while us Europeans are so enlightened" circlejerk isn't constructive either. The American political system is terrible but a lot of European countries, mine included, are copying their "celebrity drama show" attitude towards politics because of extreme American cultural influence. We shouldn't deny our own problems.

He has American citizenship and lives in America, he's talking about America here. And I promise you that other countries, yes even those in the magical fantasy land of Europe, also have lots of political drama despite having more than two parties in the government (They tend to form alliances based on left/right and split into two blocks anyway).

I remember when Reddit's FAQ had the question "Is there a mobile app for Reddit?" and the answer was "No, we don't have a mobile app and have no intention to develop one, but you can choose from a list of third-party clients". And what do they mean by "not fairly paid", does Reddit not already have a working monetization system with paid awards and profile customizations? Not enough people paying $80 to put a sticker next to a comment?