There’s also no way to really tell what the “cost” of generative AI is on creative fields, or any way to determine who gets what money. There aren’t going to be enough grants to cover every small, independent artist whose work is buried beneath mountains of AI slop

And like, the obvious issue is who is going to enforce this? Pretty much every government has been cozying up with the billionaire tech bros that run AI companies and will fight tooth and nail against any legislation like this proposal

In addition to what others have said, SmartTube has options to remove them on Android TV devices

Seems like a normal, sane and totally not-biased source

If anything this is an overly optimistic representation of consumerism given that they limit work to 8 hours and encourage 8 hours of play

1. One moderator from fosstodon is not 100% aligned to the prevailing ideology on Fedi.

For clarity’s sake, the views the mod expressed were:

• Calling criticism of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and transfer to Louisiana “yellow journalism” for using the phrase “disappeared”
• Defending the striking down of a school privacy policy that requires teachers get consent from LGBTQ+ kids before outing them to their parents
• Removing posts about surveillance of LGBTQ+ people in r/privacy for contradictory or unexplained reasons

3. The mob went on to presume that someone that is not 100% aligned to their prevailing ideology is unfit to be considered human - let alone a moderator - so they went after the admins.

Is all criticism now a “mob” just because they don’t want people with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views to have the power to censor others?

4. The admins claimed to have reviewed said mod actions, didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but still got rid of them.

From what I saw, the admins actually said that they were fine with keeping him on the moderation team and the mod deleted their own accounts

6. Less-principled users of fosstodon are now just leaving the instance, for fear of being associated with them.

Are they? The most I saw was that people were considering leaving because other instances were going to start blocking Fosstodon

What is with the concealing and downplaying of the mod’s views and then exaggerating the “outrage” of the “mob”? Yes the Fediverse can be drama-prone but most of the fanning of the flames seems to be coming from the people complaining about Fedi users genuine criticisms of the mods/admins on Fosstodon

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to remove mod privileges for these kinds of views if you’re trying to run an inclusive space. There’s supported suspicion that they’ve used their mod powers to censor information on minorities already, just because they haven’t done it yet on this platform doesn’t mean you let them lie in wait to do it. Makes me worry that Fosstodon admins don’t see any issues keeping someone like that around

Would this get the same kind of backlash had the mod been kicked out for tankie views?

It’s ridiculous they were asking for $30m to do something that ActivityPub already does. Wasted money that could have gone anywhere else

I think there’s a few other issues with server selection

1. Longevity. How do you know that the server you are on will be there in 1, 5 or even 10 years? For larger servers like Mastodon.social you have a general idea that it will last as long as Masto itself, but others have very little guarantees on if you’ll log in and find your entire feed gone. It only takes

2. That brings me to my next point: migration is currently inadequate. Migrating accounts only redirects your following/followers lists and some account settings. All of the posts, reposts and content uploaded are left on the old server and potentially wiped out if it’s shut down. Professionals or anyone who wants a lasting online profile need to stick to big instances because they risk losing everything if their server can’t continue. I also feel like there should also be an emergency “export all” button the admins can press, so the server will email all users a copy of their data in case of shutdown. That way users who can’t export their data manually before the end date will have a copy of it. And this still doesn’t solve the issue of small servers shutting down out of nowhere and wiping out every user’s profile on there. If that happens to an average user they’re probably just going quit Masto outright

3. Defederation is a good idea to keep bad servers isolated from the community and let servers dictate how open they want to be. But there’s not a lot of indication of what servers have blocked/restricted the one you’re signing up for, other than going to another server and seeing if the admins have manually typed up a list of that they blocked/restricted. There’s also not a great way to see if the server you’re looking at is read-only and any posts you make aren’t being seen by users on the other server. Or that you’re looking at a server that has since defederated and will no longer update posts. Also (afaik, there’s not a ton of good explanations) but if you’re newly connecting to a server it will only federate new posts going forward and not previous posts. Which again messes things up for people who want to use it as a consistent timeline. Dropping users into random small/medium servers risks preventing them from seeing their friends posts or cutting them off from their friends entirely

4. You mention data privacy as a risk of large servers, but how is it any better on small servers? You have no idea if the user you’re handing your data over to is trustworthy or reliable or that the server they manage is secured. And how do you know that a large company won’t come in and offer them money to sell the server, and suddenly all your data is in the hands of spammers? And direct posts are not private. Plenty of people on Twt used their real names/emails/pictures. It’s not going to be viable to have every user create a burner email and never reveal any info, even in private messages without them deciding it’s not worth it. Alternatively, they have to verify the trustworthiness of every admin on a potential server, despite them likely only having a username and posts to work off of

I think there are bigger issues than “just choose a server, they’re all like email” that causes people to gravitate towards larger platforms. It’s not just connectivity and uptime, there are logistical issues that will impact users if Masto gains more mainstream adoption. I haven’t even touched on the threat of bad actors and spam which I don’t feel like the network is ready for yet

1. The official Pixelfed app just has a nicer looking UI
2. There’s not really a competing app for people leaving Insta like there is Bluesky vs Mastodon
3. Pixelfed’s content is mostly visual so it’s easily digestible to casual users and you don’t have to scroll past dry Fedi arguments
4. Better discover features so users don’t have to do a bunch of legwork to find who to follow

Just my guesses though, but like any social media it really depends on if big creators will switch and if users stick with it over time

Better UI and a better discover page mainly. Plus it’s gotten a lot of organic advertising just from luck and people talking about it, and no obvious competitor like Bluesky

Posted in the fandom thread but MTGZone.com is around if you enjoy Magic the Gathering

!MTG@mtgzone.com - main community

!Spoilers@mtgzone.com - new card reveals

!art@mtgzone.com - MTG artwork

There are also format specific communities for Standard, Modern, Pauper, Commander, etc… but they don’t see as much use

Man, what a mess. This site was doomed to fail

MTGZone.com for all things Magic the Gathering

!MTG@mtgzone.com is the main one but !Spoilers@mtgzone.com is hopping with Duskmourn reveals right now

Edit: also !art@mtgzone.com if you just want to see some pretty pictures

I can only assume that the issue is that they’re trying to reduce the number of calls to the original instance. If you’re just scrolling by, you only see the post that’s cached on your own server, and it doesn’t communicate with the original instance until you open the post. Making it so that every time some scrolls by a post it contacts the original instance sounds like it massively increases the amount of traffic to the original instance which goes against the idea of software that supports smaller, self or community hosted servers.

For Microblogging so far I’ve used Mastodon because it seems to have the most feature complete apps from what I’ve seen (Megalodon and Tusky are both good). For the most part they interface together, I follow people on Misskey.

While it’s got a good amount of activity I don’t use it as much as Lemmy since the advantage here is that things are sorted into communities so it’s easier to find good content. You can follow tags on Mastodon, but because it has no real algorithm and the “toots” are less substantial than Lemmy submissions I find that you get a lot of banal status updates. It also has to compete with Bluesky which has more name recognition being made by ex-Twitterites that also draws more users away from it. If you can find good people to follow it’s good but I think we’re still waiting on a critical mass of people to move from the former site.

I’m convinced that tech reviewers live on a different planet than us. They’re always fretting over trivial things that would be nice to have but far from dealbreakers for the average person and then ignore or barely mention the stuff a regular user would need

Megalodon, though I do like Tusky as well

Hashtags dump a bunch of stuff into my feed that I just don’t care about. I just want a good way to sort search results by something other than chronological order so it’s easier to find people to follow, a chronological timeline is fine as long as I can choose what shows up there

Yup, clean efficient design and still works as well as the day I bought it

I don’t doubt they know things the devs of Mastodon don’t, and from the ways the winds are blowing they seem like the next big bet. But their priorities with Bluesky seem like they’re in the wrong place. The fact that virtually everything is public (including things like blocklists) makes me worry about the future of privacy on the platform. Though I have the same issues with Threads given that it’s run by Meta with its eternal quest to doxx all their users.