cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/372863
cross-posted from: https://metawire.eu/post/61363
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
It’s a good start but we gotta pump those numbers up.
The rest are bots and Russian troll farms.
remember 80% of instagram is bots according to a study reported by german media.
so X id even say it could be more giving the vast hatred increase and content change over the last years. so basically they lost 90%
As an American I think I have a good way for the fediverse to gain momentum as people flee fascist US tech companies.
achem….
“Europe! Canada! Fucking HELP! We broke everything again!”
Seriously though, while government-run and “official” instances may not be a fit for many of us here, it could make huge strides with mainstream users. Maybe getting a large percentage of people invite onboard in a small country or two could be the seed that gets it to spread.
Might have to also let people know the Fediverse exists?
Small chances for now, but let’s keep growing small communities here. People need to get tired of Instagram and centralized algorithms to switch to fediverse
I’d love it if the fediverse could have its own algoithms as long as theyre open sourced and made ethically, like they shouldn’t mess with peoples mental health or cause social media addictions
Yes. People don’t realize algorithms are one of the main reasons decentralized sited haven’t taken off. Most people don’t want to spend time looking for their content, they just want to log in, laugh at funny memes and look at pretty art
You are the algorithm. It’s like going out decades ago. You didn’t have an app to tell you which restaurant, bar or pub was good. You had to go and see it for yourself. Here is the same. You see people and you decide if it’s good enough to follow them. The same with communities.
I try to convince people to do “+1”. Like, keep X/insta/reddit or whatever, but every time you feel you have something to post, do the same at mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy. Those platforms are nothing without the network effects, and the network effects will diminish the more people do this.
Just a reminder that politico is owned by the Axel Springer group which is a real force of bad for Germany and Europe. Their media campaigns often try to push the public opinion in a right wing conservative direction.
Their biggest shareholder (35%) is KKR (an American global private-equity and investment company) that use the might of the media group to sway the public opinion against climate friendly actions/policies.
Thanks for that, I will be making sure to avoid them.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer piece of shit.
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For most people it’s unfortunately just " is it like Twitter" - both in terms of accessibility and algorithmic content suggestion.
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I think a sad part of this is due to people wanting that vapid dopamagic response the algorithm provides.
Is it bad for us? Yes.
But addicts are going to addict 🫤
I know lots of people who made a fediverse account easy enough, but just end up back on the algorithm platforms as there’s no effort required for discovery.
For the longest time there just wasn’t enough activity so you’d get bored and stop checking back. There’s enough people now that this isn’t an issue anymore.
personally i prefer bluesky just because the interface is more natural to me (and it’s just easier - but also because aew twitter is there and there’s more fandoms over on it) but i wish more people would embrace bridgyfed so that we don’t have to choose.
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Have you tried using elk.zone? It mimics Twitter’s interface and has some great additional features (like zen mode)
oh i do like elk.zone and i do use fediverse, i just find myself more active on bsky just because i follow lots more. i have accounts on both and share on both for different reasons.
Except for the fact that most people dont like jumping through multiple hoops to register an account / need to do research beforehand to do it.
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What is instance? There are two buttons - sign up for mastodon or choose another instance, I just want to register etc etc.
People dont care for decentralization, they want to sign up and share a link.
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Cool. Doesn’t change the fact that for a regular joe, “sign up” is what they want to click and then share a link or follow some guy. Not do research on what platform to join, what instance, what’s an instance, what happens if you join a wrong one. The fediverse is a gimmick that most people don’t need.
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Loves this fact. Fify
People don’t like to read.
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You said multiple, so name three hoops
Europeans don’t like Nazis.
Americans, well…
The Americans inspired them after all.
AfD Is Now Germany’s Most Popular Party For The First Time Ever.
I wish the ‘Europeans don’t like Nazis.’, would be true, but we maybe just lagging behind.
Europeans don’t like Nazis.
I wish this was true.
Greetings from Austria, where a far right party is the strongest, although not ruling (yet)
A lot of our biggest communities still have like two mods taking care of everything and are prone to cherry picking. It‘s the same old forum structures where the internet bubble effect is just as strong if not stronger than on larger, already problematic platforms. Some of the things I‘ve seen and experienced lately bring back memories from those internet forum days. Good ones but also the worst ones. And I have to admit it makes me doubt the Fediverse is actually scalable. There‘s just a lack of accountability in the end.
Which is not to say a federalized platform isn‘t an alternative to giant corporations. Those have their own problems and fair share of fuck ups. But I think I‘m already starting to see the limits of the Fediverse. At least in it‘s current stage.
The fediverse is about options. If you don’t like how someone else runs their platform or community you can create your own. It’s awesome because you don’t get locked into one platform. And in the future I think we will see more big companies and organisations running their own stuff. But I agree that at the moment it is not what “normal people” are looking for and it will take quite some time until it develops. But to be fair the same was the case for reddit.
Instance admins have crashed out before and things keep working
I guess there is a hope that if more people join the Fediverse existing instances and communities won‘t just become more bloated but people create their own alternatives. However I have to say that I have no interest in running one myself. I‘m mostly here to discuss things that pique my interest. Running a community just isn‘t what I‘m here for and I‘m afraid too many people are just like me in that regard and we‘ll create an environment that‘s all too similar to Reddit.
I also don‘t think it‘s good for the platform when people leave a community with a grudge to create a competition „with blackjack and hookers“ style. I want people to come and just create communities because they want to. That‘s where I see a future for the Fediverse.
But I also wouldn‘t want to subscribe to 5 communities about the exact same topic because that would just spam my feed with the same threads probably. However I would actually like to hop between them easily so I don‘t stick around the same few people or have to abandon one for another. A lot would have to change about the way we interact with the platform (UI) and how it‘s connected for this to work though. I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something. This is a tough one to figure out. Might not even be possible at all.
I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something.
This sounds like PieFed
Haven’t heard of that and will look into that. Thank you.
More people = more people that can moderate
The fediverse is much more than just lemmy. That being said i also disagree for lemmy. Drama between mods and communities was a regular thing on reddit. Still reddit managed to grow quite big before the bots took over. And companies are in no way more accountable to the users. Look at what happened with twitter under Musk. The only realistic choice you have as a normal user is to leave. And in the fediverse leaving a shitty instance still allows you to connect with all the other content from a different instance.
Could you elaborate on the scalability problems of the fediverse in comparison to corporation owned platforms?
I fear communities are lacking resources and structure to handle the masses. It‘s something corporations already struggle with but they house like 10000 times more active users. One way to go around that was mentioned above and suggested that new users may keep creating new instances and communities so a few places don‘t just explode in size. But from my experience, if a community already covers a topic, there won‘t be much competition and we end up with a power mod environment (Reddit) at best and instances going dark from overload (hug of death) at worst.
But I don‘t want to sound too bleak about all of this. In the end these are challenges that someone might already work on.
I hate X but I also dislike echo chambers
I also hate when people think an echo chamber is something inherently bad. Everything is an echo chamber. Your family, your friends, your local gaming community, your workplace. An echo chamber only becomes a problem when bad actors take control.
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or even Google. They give a shit about your wellbeing, as long as they profit.
Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or even Google. They give a shit about your wellbeing, as long as they profit.
That’s delusional. The try to cater to what will keep you engaged, so that as much of the data you can generate can be milked. That’s like saying that agrobusiness cares about livestock’s wellbeing.
Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.
You’re using a different definition of “echo chamber” than I’ve ever heard of. What you’re describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion. If differing views are being introduced its, by definition, not an echo chamber.
An echo chamber is when only one set of opinions are voiced, and all responses are in support of that opinion, hence the “echo” portion of the term.
If we are throwing around big words, we have to be precise though.
Echo chambers always existed and we are in them all the time. A few hundreds or thousands years ago, we lived in small groups. Those definitely had different opinions, but overall had the same values. Those were echo chambers. Now, where those bad? No, you want people to be in line on foundational topics.
But if you start to manipulate these opinions on the ground level, you’re going to divide people.
Global warming? Is it really that bad? Migrants? Aren’t the stealing our jobs? LGBTQ+? Aren’t they just harassing our kids and women? Hitler? Was he really that bad???
Do you get what I mean? Echo chambers aren’t the problem. They always existed. It’s bad influence that turns everything to shit.
What you’re describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion.
The problem is, this is what fashies consider an “echo chamber”. The definition itself is not applied in good faith by certain cohorts. For example, people having good-faith debates are “liberal” echo chambers, because not toeing the alt-right fascist line is never considered to be good faith.
The problem is, this is what fashies consider an “echo chamber”. The definition itself is not applied in good faith by certain cohorts.
Fashies also have vastly different perverted definitions for all kinds of things like “freedom” and “peace”, but I’m not adopting their definitions of those either. I’m not sure where you’re going with this unless you’re saying @tfm@europe.pub is a fascist, but I don’t think you are saying that.
Don’t go to BlueSky !!! They’re not better than X. They obey to the same leaders… MONEY, GREED, AND POWER. A few weeks ago they restricted 72 Turkish protesters the access to their BlueSky accounts on simple request of the Turkish Government. So, BlueSky cannot be trusted they will secure the accounts of their customers. If Trump would ask BlueSky to block all accounts of members who are against him, they’ll do it right away.
BlueSky may not be ideal, but anything is better than X.
X is just a machine for turning billionaire cash into political domination.
bluesky is just early twitter, and it wont stay that way for long. they’ve already removed people from there that the Turkish govt doesn’t like and there is nothing at all stopping some billionaire like musk from swooping in and buying it all up.
So “you don’t have to eat shit. Only drink piss”?
Make mastodon more accessible then.
Which accessibility standards does Mastodon break?
Oh boy, where do I even begin:
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Federation. People have no idea what it is, which means that they have to familiarize themselves with all these technical concepts just to create an account.
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Servers. Most mastodon servers are locked, and you have to petition the admins to let you in, which often implies waiting more than a day. In other sites, you can create an account in 5 seconds, so mastodon is at a disadvantage.
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Lack of an algorithm. This implies people won’t see the content they like, which means they have to go and actively look for content. Most people don’t want to spend time doing that, they just want to log in, laugh at funny memes ans look at pretty pictures.
So, you don’t know what accessibility standards are. You’re just using a term, “accessibility”, to mean “the way that I want it to work”.
and you’re just using the term accessibility to mean a11y… the word accessibility is far broader than simply accessibility standards for people with disabilities
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The same is true for Bsky but people don’t complain about it there. It asks you what server you want when you sign up, etc., which is what people complain about in the Mastodon journey.
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Most people aren’t on locked servers. By which, I mean the majority of mastodon users are on the .social instance which is the default when you sign up on the official app/site and is open to anyone.
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Not an accessibility issue.
Are we sure that the people that complains about “what’s an instance?” don’t have an agenda?
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- So what?
- Damn straight they are locked. Other wise you get Nicole spam on all of them, instead of just a few.
- So what?
This is exactly the dismissive attitude that has shaped Mastodon development, and why it will never have broad appeal to replace any traditional social media.
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3 is a feature to me. The “algorithms” seem to create bubbles, and I want to decide myself.
Some people want to make social media account to browse illustration or photography.
Unfortunately, that’s not doable on fediverse. You follow anyone, and suddenly your feed filled with content that you are not interested in. Example: your favourite artist also post a lot of game screenshoot, but you’re not interested in the games. You just want to see the illustration.
You can follow hashtags and also block them.
Not everything is under hashtag. Most of artist I follow never put hashtag. Hashtag also not useful in multilanguage situation, where a hashtag can mean different think between communities and languages.
and bluesky doesn’t have a default algorithm either, but allows you to subscribe to algorithms created by other people
being able to choose how the information is presented is the way
That seems like a good way, to give the user the option. In your opinion, are these algorithms transparent enough to understand or even verify for regular users?
I’m pretty sure Mastodon is made of algorithms, mate
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Fedi is doing fine whether or not Nazi platforms crumble.
Biggest problem with twitter/X is so many companies mess you around until you call them out on it, then things tend to get resolved how they should have been.
I truthfully have always seen that as Twitter/X’s only use
Europe doesnt want federated services, they want censorship.
Saying that oil production lowers emissions by displacing coal will be called climate misinformation, saying immigration needs to be lower due to a housing crisis will be called hate speech, using Bitcoin instead of the digital euro will be called terrorist financing. They’re already arresting people who do something as benign as retweet things, its a slippery slope.
Arresting people for retweeting? Really? Can you provide a source?
“No, you have free speech as well, but it is also has its limits.”
Which is true. A lot of Europe learnt from World War II that certain types of speech should not be tolerated. In the rest of the article there are examples given - neo-Nazis for one. I am not particularly keen on tolerating the freedom of speech of Nazis or others that call for genocide and killing.
The article cites a case of online harassment from right wingers towards an immigration friendly politician that was ultimately shot. Are you seriously using this in defense of “but muh free speech?!”
Oh boy…
Christ, this is such a stupid take. You’d think that someone who was around on the fediverse would have an inkling about just how many instances are based in the EU and Germany in particular.
Just because a country or userbase wants a degree of moderation and accountability, and doesn’t tolerate hate speech, doesn’t mean that views are censored. Basic Popperism stuff right there.
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Spain is part of the EU and nobody is “violently beat up”, arrested or having a visit from the cops for going to an anti-genocide protest.
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I know the problem with foam bullets.
Still not happened to me yet, and that is in the UK which has the far more authoritarian Policing Bill looming over us. That doesn’t make as interesting a soundbite though.
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Yeah, Israel is shit, but unless you have a video for each of these protests being shut down in this way, that just isn’t the norm. Plenty of pro-Palestine protests and meetings here; outside Barclays, protesting specific businesses, sharing information in our most popular streets for tourism and shopping, musical protests at art galleries. Plenty going on, never even seen a police presence at these.
Not to say it isn’t happening, but trying to paint Europe as some pro-Zionist totality is weird.
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Not sure how talking about local and country-wide support for Palestine, and against the zionist genocide enacted by Israel, makes me supportive of Israel but everyone is entitled to their opinion.
As a Dutchman, I agree we have great infrastructure and “walking” cities. But you’ve only seen Amsterdam. Outside of the cities, The Netherlands is more dependent on cars than you might think. I live on the border of the country and public transport is basically non existent and cycling is not viable due to travel distances, every adult has a car in my area. A family of 4 adults (children over 18 living at home) have 4 cars parked in front of their house here. We’re not as car dependent as the US, but we don’t live in a fairytale either.
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Meanwhile, in reality, the EU funds lemmy’s development.
Too true. EC’s constant attacks on encryption is worrying to say the least. I hope nothing goes thru.
saying immigration needs to be lower due to a housing crisis will be called hate speech
Yeah, that’s kinda hateful. True, it really would make things easier for EU citizens if less people were using the limited housing. But it would make things harder for the immigrants. Putting citizens over immigrants is… xenophobia.
Why waste the government’s time solving the problem at poor people’s expense, when the government could instead tax rich people more to pay for housing?
Putting citizens over non-citizens is called being a government.
Xenophobia is the irrational fear of foreign. And fear in this context usually shows up in the form of hate.
Putting citizens first does not mean hating the rest. Being a citizen of a country means that your government should represent you and your interests. It’s only natural that it develops into benefits for citizens.
Xenophobia on a person level is when you see a person that you think is not part of your same origin, do you cross the street, or attack him or whatever. Of course this is not even close to being an exhaustive list.
Xenophobia on a country level is when you punish foreigners irrationally. Not letting foreigners into your country because you have a housing crisis is not irrational, it is a valid reason.
I find it hard to find examples of country-level xenophobia. Even if the act itself may seem xenophobic, the government may want to gain popular support of their xenophobic population, which would be a reason and thus non-xenophonic.
Of course, not being xenophobic does not mean it is good. For example Israel genociding Palestinians is horrible. But their reason is that having a neighbor that claims the same land as you do is problematic, and they figured if they just kill everyone the world will forget in 100-200 years (or less) while the land will be theirs for longer than that with no revels, since they genocided them. Of course, having a reason does not mean that it’s not many other bad things (in this case, genocidal, which is worse than xenophobic).
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No I wouldn’t. Just like arguing a murder is not illegal grafitti, doesn’t make you pro-murder. Arguing that a specific genocide is not xenophobia does not make me pro-genocide. I absolutely hate what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and I believe that someone should assassinate Netanyahu and all of his pro-genocide people on power of the Israeli government. Or imprison them for life.
But you can miss my point all you want.
The housing crisis is not because there are immigrants. It’s because the vulture funds are buying everything they can to profit from it.
Being a citizen of a country means that your government should represent you and your interests.
I’m interested in everyone’s wellbeing. Also, the government should represent its citizens’ moral interests. It should teach them kindness by being an example.
Not letting foreigners into your country because you have a housing crisis is not irrational, it is a valid reason.
Not valid. It’s discrimination.
The results of an action being done for a reason being discriminatory does not make the reason invalid.
Almost any policy is discriminatory.
Taxing the rich more is discriminatory against the rich. Helping women out is discriminatory against the men. Ending segregation is discriminatory against people that don’t want be near people different to them. The list is endless.
I assume you agree with all 3 of those policies. Yet they are discriminatory. Those 3 policies are done because of very valid reasons.
There are very few policies that I’d say are not desceiminatory. Like universal basic income or universal healthcare. And even then, by your definition of discriminatory, those would be discriminatory. Since they would still discriminate against non-citizens.
There is no world where a person born in X country that has never left X country to receive income from a UBI policy of Y country. Unless X and Y countries have some sort of deal where that happens.
I don’t think that’s why we’re having this conversation. Seems like you’re talking about technicalities and I’m talking about values. I don’t think we can have a conversation like this.
This specific technicality is important for your point though.
I’m gonna explain my reasoning so you can choose whatever you want have a conversation about.
Your claim was that putting citizens above non-citizens is xenophobic.
My point is that putting citizens above non-citizens is a natural consequence of a state. And furthermore, that it is a good thing.
Xenophobia is widely regarded to be a bad thing and that we should avoid it.
If both of our statements are true. The natural conclusion is that we should have a stateless society. I don’t think that a stateless society is a good thing. Therefore I’m trying to find a flaw in the argument. I think that the flaw is that you are wrong. So I have to have a conversation with you about why I think you are wrong.
If you are wrong, it must mean one of these statements are wrong:
- Putting citizens above non-citizens is xenophobic.
- Putting citizens above non-citizens is a natural consequence of the state.
- Xenophobia is widely regarded to be a bad thing and we should avoid it.
Since 2/3 statements are made by me, of course I think they are true. So I’m going to argue about why the first one is wrong.
The only way to proof your statement to be wrong is by first defining what xenophobia is. Which you might call a technicality, but I don’t think it’s possible to have a conversation if we don’t first agree what the meaning of the words we use is.
After defining what xenophobia is, we have to figure out if the “equation” is true: “putting citizens above non-citizens” = “xenophobia”.
I’m a communist and I think we should have a stateless society.
If you had a zoo would you continue bringing in animals if they had no space left to live comfortably?
Likely you would call that inhumane, you wouldnt say they were being intolerant of the new animals if they did not.
People aren’t zoo animals.
So cram them into substandard housing because they deserve less rights than animals?
You’re not offering a tangible answer here.
And you think telling immigrants they’re not allowed to enter the country gives them more rights?
