aww muffin so sorry you’re still seething western color revolution failed

I imagine that the dynamic here is reminiscent of the western media’s self-censorship. Western journalists learn to conform to certain standards and topics because they understand what kinds of articles are more likely to be published and advance their careers. This is largely influenced by the preferences of media company owners and advertisers, creating a selection pressure for content producers to conform to these expectations.

In contrast, in China, censors strive to identify potentially politically sensitive content and tend to err on the side of more aggressive censorship. This is due to the understanding that being overly cautious in such matters will not result in negative consequences, encouraging a more conservative approach to content regulation.

A distributed knowledge base is indeed an excellent concept since it enhances resilience against potential disruptions or manipulations compared to a centralized database like Wikipedia. By distributing servers across numerous countries and legal jurisdictions, it becomes more challenging for any single entity to censor the content. Furthermore, the replication of data through federation ensures higher durability and reliability in preserving valuable information. Kudos on making it happen!

The fact that the issue exists after 4 years clearly shows that you are in fact blowing it out of proportion. Actual issues that affect large numbers of people running servers end up being addressed by people contributing to the project. Lemmy is an open source project that anybody can contribute to, and fix the issues that are affecting them. The fact that this hasn’t happened shows that this issue is not as high priority as you want to make it out to be.

This doesn’t mean this isn’t a real issue that should be fixed at some point, but it’s simply not the show stopper you paint to be.

So yeah, you are absolutely doing a hack job here.

I’d recommend mirrorless, there’s pretty much no advantage to DSLR at this point. Mirrorless are smaller, lighter, and faster.

that cardinal is not impressed

that seems like a pretty sensible reason, open source working as intended

don’t know what the background story is, just ran across the fork and figured I’d share it

Very much agree with all that. The main reason centralized git providers emerged was due to the fact that they made discoverability and contribution easy. Federation directly addresses these issues, and it’s really encouraging to see that Forgejo is starting to get some serious usage. I think another big aspect federated hosting could address is censorship, if you have servers hosted in different jurisdictions, and mirroring content then it becomes very difficult to remove content from the network.

indeed

It actually does matter for the individual instances because the amount of content and interactions grows regardless which server users join because servers federate with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic from commercial walled gardens where each platform competes for users with every other.

sure, but it’s still an indicator of growth and some percentage of users does stay active

I completely agree, the total number of users isn’t really that important. The three things that count are having enough users to generate interesting content, developers who can develop the ecosystem, and people hosting instances. As long as these three things can be done sustainably then the Fediverse will be around indefinitely, and will likely outlast all the existing commercial platforms.

Too much rapid growth can also be a negative because it can disrupt the existing culture and normalize negative behaviors on mainstream platforms. When the growth is gradual then new people are more likely to adjust to the existing community norms.

Most likely, and this works well because it allows time for server capacity to grow and for wrinkles to get ironed out gradually. Fediverse would have a hard time absorbing millions of people all at once, but a gradual trickle of users allows things to grow organically.

yup

I completely agree. The goal for the Fediverse is to be sustainable. There’s no point worrying that it’s not growing as fast as commercial networks, or that it doesn’t have the same mainstream penetration, or whatever it is people worry about. The only thing that really matters is that there are enough people to develop platforms and enough users to produce interesting content. This is already the case today, and things will only be getting better going forward as the Fediverse grows.

Maybe Bluesky will get more popular than the entire Fediverse and attract a huge number of users, and maybe it won’t. However, I can guarantee that the Fediverse will be around long after everyone forgot what Bluesky was.

oh yeah absolutely

Sophism is generally used to refer to an argument apparently correct in form but actually invalid. The claim that social media is not a valuable medium for effecting change is not a sound argument.

Right, the internet is just a network that more complex things like social networks are built on top of. Hence why the question is with the design of Mastodon and completely unrelated to how the internet works fundamentally.

And I didn’t say Mastodon actively prevents propagation, rather that some design decisions are at odds with viral propagation. It could be possible to build separate tooling on top, or to create forks that are more friendly towards propagation. However, Mastodon is by far the biggest ActivityPub based network right now, and the way it works plays a huge role for how Fediverse can be used at the moment.

Your own argument is a form of sophism. The fact that people are still discovering how to use a new medium to effect change doesn’t reduce the importance of the medium in any way. Ultimately, ideas spread through people communicating with one another, and social media is one of the main means of communication today.