Sorry for being unclear. What I meant is:

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore [as a presence in the fediverse].

When they run the most and the biggest popular communities on their instances, do most of the development, offer the best tools and services in the fediverse, they have become too big to ignore.

If they then start playing dirty, it is too late to defederate them. They will play dirty. Let’s not make ourselves dependent.

why would I want to keep in contact with the “head in the sand” people

Forget contacts. Imagine Meta has

• poured way more developing hours in their fork than the FOSS community ever could
• the most effective and easy to use mod tools
• the best search tools for finding communities, topics and everything else (by a margin)
• free instance hosting
• every major wish list feature implemented
• a working feed with endless content you actually find interesting
• a vibrant community for every niche interest you might have
• advanced development so much that it feels a couple versions ahead

The more money they throw at this, the more people will feel tempted to join or at least try their service. It offers objective benefits. It would feel like using lemmy 0.09 when others already enjoy 0.18.

Many people still miss their niche topics. Some size is required for certain things to become viable.

There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.

The first step is a UX disaster: https://join-lemmy.org/

Only 2 clicks / pages down the road you can start registering an account, and you don’t see what the experience might be before that. Instead, you’re being presented tech talk about servers.

You might argue it’s not actually lemmy but just the landing page. I argue, it’s so good at being a scarecrow, most people visiting lemmy haven’t seen anything else except for that page.

The inner lemmy is pretty fine, I agree. Some parts are still confusing. For example, most people will not figure out they can search for content from within a specific community by carefully configuring the drop downs in the general search form. Most will look for the search directly attached to the community.

If Meta plays dirty, defederate them then. Now is just too premature.

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore. If you let them gain that much ground, it’s too late to isolate them without doing even more harm to your own network.

Also Meta is not a startup with unknown reputation. Meta plays dirty, that’s a given.

Freedom of the press never extended to the front lines of an active war zone.

Autonomous reporters (even if they only are that, which isn’t safe to assume) wandering around on battlefields can cause all kinds of issues for everyone involved.

The fediverse wiki gives an overview: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_are_Fediverse_projects%3F

I think it makes sense to pour oil in the fire while it lasts, and only leave as you propose, once nothing can be won anymore.

The downside of leaving early is that it skews the picture. The apathetic remain, and their voice to return to BAU becomes disproportionally louder. It’s also what the company counts on, that it ‘will pass’.

But I also spend like 99% of my time here, and only visit the old site for a few minutes every other day. In the end, everyone will do what feels right for them, but arguments can be made either way.

Update:

Dear r/anime_titties community,

As many of you are aware, we recently held a poll to detrimine the future of this sub in light of Reddit asking to reopen. While most of you voted in favor of making this sub for actual anime titties, the original post was not a traditional poll post but instead a restricted post where the vote was decided by two comments, one for literal anime titties and one for returning things back to normal. And since the return to normal comment was hidden due to negligence on my part where I replied to myself instead of making two separate comment threads, it made for a really lopsided vote. I offer my apologies for this. Since the sub was under restricted mode for a bit and I was enjoying the glee of the moment, I didn’t stop to think about whether or not the voting system was fair. You all can get mad at me for this since I deserve it. And now we are going to attempt an actual poll post with the two options and third option of returning to geopolitics and world news but marking it nsfw to reduce avenues for Reddit to get ad money. The poll ends in 48 hours so make sure to vote

View Poll

Interesting to see the interplay between power and civil disobedience.

It was naive to expect reddirt to bow down (which is why many thought the protest was pointless), but still the right thing to continue the protests.

What it does is, it forces the power to show face, and it creates a dilemma. Do they

1. let the protest continue? That’s an option, if the protest can be ignored. If the protest is too much of an obstruction, this is not an option.
2. give in to the demands? Clearly the worst option, else there wouldn’t be any protest
3. use force to remove the protest? A good option if enough people don’t care, the best option if people even condone the use of force.

Maybe you already noticed, I’m talking about something else, something bigger.

(1) Is why regular demonstrations (in themselves) have little effect; they can be ignored. They must be a stepping stone to further escalation, else you get statements like “this one will pass as well”. The people protesting must be committed and follow through.

(2) Must be won in battle. There will be no gifts. It has to be the least painful option for the authorities, and remember it was their most painful option at the beginning.

(3) Very much depends on solidarity. With which side does civil society solidarize itself? Does it favor the force-applying authorities, because they remove an annoying obstruction to business as usual? Are the protesters the good guys, because they are fighting for a just cause and a better future?

Neutrality on this stance indirectly supports the stronger part, usually the authorities (which are in a position to use force). Using force has no real downsides (oversimplified), unless society heavily condemns it. By ‘condemning,’ I mean supporting the protests, ideally through participation.

Maybe after experiencing this with your once-favorite social media provider, you can see the next climate protest / civil disobedience with different eyes.

Once a project is forked away, you no longer have any control at all.

What does that mean in the context of lemmy’s license? As I understand it, everyone is allowed to fork it away, but not allowed to change the license. Which allows everyone to fork it further away or back.

I don’t understand what control means in this context. Isn’t it a thing people can just modify and use, now and for all future?

I don’t think lemmy as a whole can be sold out to Facebook since it’s open source, right?

Yes, but lemmy is even more resilient. It is licensed as AGPL-3.0.

That is a copyleft license which requires anyone using the code publicly (e.g. to run a proprietary server) to make their code public and permit free usage of it. And they must not change the license.

I don’t see the point of buying something which is already freely available to everybody, especially since you are not allowed to hide it, even partially, or modify the free nature of it.

What could more reasonably be sold is data, visibility and userbase (big, active instances).

It would be possible to do this study without contamination by using completely unknown and newly-released songs

When writing songs, I always wondered if that genius idea is actually just something I heard 10 years ago, but don’t remember consciously. Similarly, I wonder if I like a catchy tune because it is catchy in itself, or because it reminds me of something which I cannot recall consciously right now.

Sometimes, I had these moments later when the dots connect, sometimes not. With what confidence could I conclude something is new and original?

I guess that’s just another task for future AI.

Great article with much more detail than what I quote: https://lifehacker.com/the-reddit-blackout-is-over-but-the-protest-isn-t-1850539204

Critics of the blackout wondered how a two-day protest is going to solve anything. My friends, let me speak to you for a moment from my perspective as a person who has more than a little familiarity with taking collective action to get out-of-touch CEOs to do the right thing.

While a strike or a blackout may be the most visible action in a campaign, it’s never the only one. Leading up to both our 2022 strike, and our 2019 seemingly uneventful signing of a fair contract, we lived and breathed by something called an escalation chart (same idea as the one illustrated here). You start with small actions, and build on them, with a clear plan for how you’ll continue if your demands are not met. A strike is almost always preceded by dozens of smaller actions.

Fixed-length walkouts and strikes are one possible step on the chart. The idea is to send a message: This many of us are this committed. After that, you don’t stop. You keep escalating. Even on an open-ended strike, the idea is to become more and more of a problem to the company over time. You get more and more media attention; the company suffers more and more from lost business. Collective actions are effective because they are part of a larger escalation.

The article also mentions some successes the protest already achieved:

• “accessibility-focused apps” will be exempted from the new policy
• several advertisers chose to spend their advertising budgets elsewhere
• exempt certain tools used by “verified moderators” from the new API policy

A (quite impressively long) list of concessions and agreements can be found in /r/ModCoord

And as others mentioned in this thread, it spurred a migration and more people than ever (me included) finally engage with the fediverse.

My summary is: The protest had a huge impact. Sure, we did not (fully) get what we want, and reddit remains committed to becoming evil. But we won some battles, and the war isn’t over yet.

It also brought people to things they might never have done before; to engage in protests and to discuss forms and strategies of resistance. Many joined the fediverse in the process, here to stay. I feel the importance of this exercise in self-efficacy and self-empowerment cannot be understated.

Another path for content to resurface: If you had things in subs which were inaccessible to you at the time of deletion (by still being in blackout), it will show up once they open again.

The good thing about redundancies is, they make the system more resilient.

If everybody flocks to one singular community/magazine for a topic, and the instance hosting that c/m decides to defederate your home instance (or vice versa), you’re cut off.

When that’s just one of many c/ms, it’s less of a loss.

if they ever add lists they could work like a “multireddit” to corral all the same type of community into one feed at least on the user-end.

There is issue #818: Support for grouping communities / multi-communities

Quoting from this statement of the devs:

we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.

• Some of the biggest communities like r/pics, r/aww, and r/GIF decided to post John Oliver pictures and GIFs. In a tweet, Oliver approved this move.
• In the case of r/aww, the community is also allowed to post pictures of Chiijohn.
• r/iPhone decided to post pictures celebrating “dashing” Tim Cook.
• r/Shitposting banned posts with the letter k.
• r/Wellthatsucks is now a subreddit about vacuum cleaners.
• r/Nofans is now a passive PC cooler subreddit.
• r/Interestingasfuck removed a lot of all rules apart from asking members to not break site-wide rules.
• r/Memes is allowing only Medieval / Landed Gentry memes. This is in response to Huffman’s “Landed Gentry” comment about protesting subreddits.
• r/PokemonGo is now allowing pictures of John Oliver, Pikachu, or Spark.
• r/Horny is now a “Christian Minecraft server.”
• r/Steam members are posting about actual steam.
• r/HarryPotter is now referring to Huffman as Voldemort.
• Some subreddits such as r/Showerthoughts are determining close days for the community.

Glorious.

I started using Visual Studio (not Code, wtf were they thinking when they named these things) around 15 years ago.

Back then, it helped me a lot learning C# through excellent (= mostly very fast) code completion/suggestion and lookup tools (peek definitions etc).

I still use it (mostly for Unity), but maybe there are now better IDEs of which I am not aware of.

Currently, I still love the code completion and lookup features, but it became pretty overloaded with features and takes very long to load on my old laptop. Once up and running, it’s fine.

You’ll love what r/steam did.

I do! LOL! Thanks for letting us know.