Bernhardt tweeted in January 2025: “The dead internet theory is coming to fruition.” And he’s doing his part.
.... we live in a farce
Bernhardt tweeted in January 2025: “The dead internet theory is coming to fruition.” And he’s doing his part.
.... we live in a farce
Yeah, federation really is the killer feature for this compared to all of these centralized private services.
Sadly, I expect federation won't be foolproof/enough on its own. The fascists control more and more of the USA government. If/when they come after the fediverse it will be through whichever mechanism suffices to neuter it, including:
and all they'll have to say is "China/Russia/Europe/Iran/etc is infiltrating our glorious social media and making it unpatriotic" to justify it.
They don't really need to truly "kill" the fediverse, they just need to make using it enough of a pain in the ass and/or dangerous that not enough people use it for it to matter.
Anyways, the point of my comment is to encourage everyone who cares about this to try spending a little thought towards fail-safes for when federation won't be enough, and/or things we could be doing now to further protect our capacity to form these independent online communities.
If they do crack down on Reddit, it'll be one of the few opportunities we will have to "get ahead" on public sentiment and help people get accustomed to federated social media. Each additional person that is participating in the fediverse raises its resilience - from instance operating to moderation to sharing and cross posting.
Ideally we would see x new instances crop up for every y new participants. With a more reactive approach of spinning up instances as existing ones get taken down, I fear we would set ourselves up for a slow fragmentation into obscurity.
The last thing I want to do is to make some flippant remark, but holy hell. I saw his release picture before fully parsing the title, and thought he was a Holocaust / concentration camp survivor.
Artificial Intelligence Image
For some reason it's hilarious to me that the person who made this flyer felt the need to specify that the ClipArt-level illustration, placed next to 3-4 pictures of the kid the flyer is complaining about, is not, in fact, an actual image of the kid.
Thank you both (@NinjaFox@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org) for taking the time to make this post not just more accessible but somewhat more bit-/link-rot-resilient by duplicating the image's info as a text comment.
We don't talk about it as much as authoritarian censorship, ip & copyright related takedowns, and their ilk, but image macros/memes often have regrettably small lifetimes as publicly accessible data in my experience. It might be for any number of reasons, including:
or (more probably) a combination of all three and more.
In any case as silly as image memes are, they're also an important vector for keeping culture and communities alive (at least here on the fediverse). In 5-10 years, this transcription has a much higher chance of still hanging around in some instance's backups than the image it is transcribing.
P.S.: sure, knowyourmeme is a thing, but they're still only 1 website and ~~I'm not sure if~~ there's not much recent fediverse stuff there ~~yet~~. The mastodon page last updated in 2017 and conflates the software project with the mastodon.social instance (likely through a poor reading of it's first source, a The Verge article that's decent but was written in 2017).
P.P.S.: ideally, OP (@cantankerous_cashew@lemmy.world) could add this transcription directly to the post's alt text, but I don't know if they use a client that makes that easy for them...
It's a bit sad, but not that surprising, that if this is true then Microsoft is clearly not tasking their most experienced engineers on the control panel (you know, that part of the OS who's function is to allow you to tweak all the rest of the OS?).
I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I'm misunderstanding, what you're proposing amounts to "if you want to downvote in a community you'll need to make an account on it's instance". This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.
In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that's potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren't the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same "-40", which I agree isn't great when it can lead to deletion - but I'd argue that's also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I'm now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.
I'm not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won't just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that's more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.
Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn't prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.
From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it's implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they're getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.
So much thought has been put into "how do we convey the different instances' character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn't a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way" in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.
I'll acknowledge up-front that the "just" in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I'm suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They're written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they're called votes: there's a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).
On top of this, I don't know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I'm currently unaware of). I wouldn't expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I'm ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they're run for lemmy, for example).
I can't foretell if this would "solve" opinion downvotes on it's own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of "subscribed"/"local"/"all" + the different vote rankings.
From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I'm hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren't as clean as I had hoped.
"possibilité de finaliser votre accès au portail sécurisé" alors que les places sont limitées ?! Doit bien avoir un contexte qui rend ça pas étonnant, mais non ça me terrifie quand même de lire ça et imaginer le service d'administration cantonale des impôts être géré de fond en comble de la sorte...