The existence of publishers for scientific literature is completely unnecessary in the modern era. They exist only to make profits to continue their existence. They don’t actually provide value anymore when research institutions can just conduct peer review and then let researchers self-publish.

They create negative value (a bottleneck) by limiting who can access research for just… aggregating and hosting articles.

H

Yeah it doesn’t matter - don’t listen to drama fiends. .ml is fine. Lots of people decry it as being a tankie instance. The whole point of federation is you aren’t limited to the content on your instance - just by which instances yours is federated with.

If people or your instance bother you, make another account. Otherwise, just ignore the haters

Another point here, Amazon has really thin profit margins on their core business (not counting AWS, etc. Just the online shopping). If it weren’t absolutely gargantuan, it would fail. It’s only profitable because of the logistical efficiency it has achieved, exploitation (of workers, cheap goods from China, etc.), and absolutely massive economies of scale. Similar to Walmart.

Recommended reading: People’s Republic of Walmart. All for nationalizing - would be better for everyone.

Oh yeah, and it makes total sense. The brigading, insofar as it happens, really shouldn’t. But also, as someone who espouses left wing views, I always want to give critical support to left spaces - even if they’re imperfect. And .ml and even hexbear have a lot of valuable discourse - I comment on hexbear threads regularly with less radical points of view than their users often have, and I get good responses and engagement usually because I’m good faith.

As someone on .ml I really don’t think it’s that bad. Definitely left, and generally pro-China, but not too extreme imo. Hexbear is pretty bad. I’m a socialist and I disagree with a lot of the stuff there. But .ml is very much not a true “tankie” instance, in my opinion.

I didn’t realize how cheap the big hdds had gotten. Definitely looking into 2 bays.

You might be right. The Synology products look really good. I didn’t see that they actually have a sub-$400 4-bay NAS… DS423. Not sure if it’ll meet my performance needs. But the $600 4 bay doesn’t look too bad either really.

Still though - like I know it was boosted by the reddit exodus and so the 6mos stats are inflated, but still not too shabby.

That engagement ratio is super high when you look at it this way. 118k-ish posters/commenters and 131k total users? Damn. Good job Lemmy.

How does this compare to AdAway?