That was actually why I was initially so active on Lemmy as well. I have been a bit dispirited by pro-Russian trolls arguing in bad faith and ingratiating themselves with frequent article posting, getting a pass from Lemmy admins. So I’ve been a bit disappointed lately. And I expect they will push into federated short form video. I’m not sure what the solution is other than to hope for better admins.

But that said, it’s all in the backdrop, and in the foreground is the fact that the fediverse can be built out over the internet to handle social media and rebalance it away from all-or-nothing death star level control of individual companies. That, to me, is a win. And the only way it wouldn’t be a win is if, I think, companies show they are up to the task of containing trolls, and that a fediverse wild west is exposed to coordinated inauthetic activity in a way that can’t be controlled.

I think this one is especially tricky because it seems to be all about The Algorithm (I hate that “the algorithm” has become a thing people say, but you probably know what I mean when I say it). The secret sauce that makes it work is the algo, which is very data driven, and how that works on a federated platform I’m not sure.

I desperately want something like this to succeed though, it’s exciting seeing major projects taking off. I’ve been on Lemmy since the beginning, and it is quite big now. Mastodon had a surge, probably the surge that federation needed. But I think Loops could potentially prove to be the most significant one yet. I can’t say this model of content consuming is ideal, necessarily, but I think the important thing is showing that it can be federated.

I don’t know who remembers the dog days of friendica and diaspora being our only hopes. Those were dark times, and now things are really taking off.

What’s an AP messenger? (This better not be the setup for a punchline).

Remindme works on lemmy?

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.

Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

What was there to figure out in your case?

I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @[email protected].

I literally just searched “p03locke” from mastodon.social and found them in one step.

I also think the website is exceptionally good, and has a unique distinction of being equally good on desktop and mobile. Feel that the website is so good on mobile that I don’t need to use a mobile app, and I sure as heck can’t say that about Reddit.

Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an “echo chamber”.

The echo chamber argument doesn’t account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They’re actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn’t have echo chambers, it doesn’t have meaningful things to say about cases like this.

And to that commenter’s point I can’t tell which side you’re on, although “authoritarian dick sucking” seems to have prompted you to self-identify.

I don’t think it’s possible, or desirable, to try to create rules around how people use their preference buttons.

I also don’t think it’s possible to actually end mean-spirited disagreement in internet comment sections, but it’s a valuable thing to strive for as a value and emphasize, like you did in this post.

I think the same can be said for group-downvoting and stalking threads to downvote people based on what side they take without engaging with the substance of what is said. Minority viewpoints that add information are probably the most needed thing, and if anything I would say group downvoting is worse here than reddit on certain topics, unfortunately.

I think the attention spans are better here, and many/most things are better here but this is a sore spot.

Maybe propublica? I think there are areas of gray and there are areas that are clear, and we can respect the former and take action on the latter without putting on joker makeup and descending into sophomoric relativism about the fundamental impossibility of ever knowing “the truth.”