How about a Privacy Web-Browser? For example IronFox is a privacy-oriented Firefox fork. By default it does send an user agent string. But you can make it install addons, for example an addon to change the user agent string to something generic (and fake).

To be honest, this is a very specific method, and I don’t know which problem we’re facing. So this might as well be some A-B problem. So what are you trying to achieve?

Sure. I should have phrased it a bit differently. My point was more or less, why is the curl developer’s review of the performance in a hypothetical scenario a decisive factor here… That feels like super random information. Same with the other two people. I’m fairly sure this is true and all… There’s just no context given, nor is there a connection being made between the statements and the rest of the content of the article.

Lmao. Just add a big RELEVANCE? I mean why do they cite 3 random people’s opinion on random aspects of the entire concept? It’s supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a blog post…

Totally agree. First of all with the Linux vs Meme… Yeah, we’re all living in more than one dimension. Guess I more or less wanted to say, most helpful advice I got on what non-spec combinations of RAM and computers work etc… I got from Reddit. I think it’s a bit an amount of users thing.

I’m also for human connection. I’m also here to talk to people. Especially in the comments. Also why I sometimes disagree with people on what the Threadiverse needs more of.

With the pamphlet bombings… Well, the internet changed a lot in my lifetime. We had times we thought it was a bit unethical to do statistics on what software you install, hence what packages in Debian are installed how many times. As a more privacy-oriented person you were told to just put it out there and not worry about collecting that kind of data… Or just write your Blog mainly for yourself and maybe some people will like it as well. I think as of today, that’s very niche way of thinking. Thanks to the advertising industry, we need exact page impressions. And everyone expects social media to come with all these engagement metrics, how many people saw the post… Not only professional “influencers”. I’ve heard random people will also have a look at the numbers. And your local youth organization also wants to know about the propagation of their invitation to the summer party. What the algorithm does to their posts, etc… Just counting how many people showed up isn’t how communication works any more. At least in my experience.

I’ve upheld the opinion, the change in the MAU is probably a rough indicator on our attractiveness. If a place is nice, people will come and want to join the party. But it’s a bit of a diffuse metric and doesn’t tell anything in specific. Plus it’s not the only factor.

If my quickly written down SQL query is right, those are the numbers for the last month from my instance’s perspective (my subscribed communities):

 num_comments | upvotes_on_posts | downvotes_on_posts | num_posts 
--------------+------------------+--------------------+-----------  
       188597 |          1646685 |              46461 |     13928  

So without the boosts, it’d be a total score of 135.

I guess with statistics, you’d always better ask a very specific question. I mean, these are just numbers, I guess? And if you’re fixing an old Linux computer, there is no point in lots of people commenting on meme posts. You want the one person who’s done this before to be part of the network, read your post and then reply… Or if you want to discuss politics, all the people re-posting the news articles on geopolitics don’t really count, you’ve already read the newspaper, now you’d like nuanced opinions in the comments. I’m a bit unsure whether a single abstract number means anything.

For the health of the overall network, I think MAU isn’t even all that bad. There’s probably a strong connection between “health” of a place, and how many people think it’s worth subscribing and then coming back on a regular basis.

Yeah, It’s a weak point anyway. While the graphs aren’t detailed research, there’s also no reason to believe dbzer0’s perspective on the same network includes 8 times as many new users as LW for some reason. Or all the users in their communities have 8x worse karma for some external reasons. So we probably need further research.

It’s the “anarchist” mindset 🫣

I think there’s two concurrent, but different definitions of the word Fediverse. One means, software that can speak the ActivityPub protocol. And the other one means, social media service which is able to interconnect between different websites.

The first one is more useful if you want to use it and know whether it connects you to your friends on Mastodon and the other big ones. The latter is the more technical definition and includes older protocols as well, as well as newer ones and alternative approaches to form a network in a certain way. I guess it’s the more correct one. But it doesn’t tell you a lot as a user. Maybe technically it can exchange your user statuses but nobody uses it so you can’t really do anything with it in reality. Or there’s two approaches and you were talking about a different manifestation than somebody else, and you’re both federated but not part of any compatible ecosystem.

Sure, I’m not debating that. And there’s other ways to destroy or impede (with) something to generate attention towards it. Sorry for getting political here, but other example that comes to my mind is how people supposedly cut cable ties of the German train system to draw attention to the cause of climate politics. It is massively annoying for all commuters, and people who are already on board for a more enviromentally friendly way to get to work. Because now everyone is 2h late, except people with a car. And I always question the validity of it.
But ultimately it’s completely unclear who does it. Could very well be people trying to make climate activists look bad in some false-flag-operation. And in this instance (post deletion) I’m willing to believe it’s genuine.
But the gist of it is the same… Is it going to archieve the long-term goal? Because the short- and mid-term way of working is, you’re being destructive to tear down the remaining good things about something faster, so it eventually is going to have to get replaced… And I’m more on board with, focus on direct constructivism. For example I just left Reddit and went here. And I’m somewhat happy the crowd working towards something is more pronounced than the people immediately trying to destroy it as well. I mean theoretically we probably should - by that reasoning. I’ve seen the AI scrapers hammer my Fediverse instance, too.

Uh. I hate the power deleters. It mainly makes conversation worse for the remaining humans on Reddit.

I found some info here: https://ageverification.dev/

But that’s difficult to read, very technical. And mostly written from the user perspective. It looks to me like they’re (for once) trying to come up with a proper solution. Everyone can be an Attestation Provider, Relying Party or repurpose the white-label App. At least in theory. It’s all specified and in the open. And then the European Union contributes some list of trustworthy Attestation Providers (governments, banks, mobile network providers…)

I think due to the project structure, it’ll be more like the Covid-Certificate App, which could be customized by every member state and it’s theoretically possible to use it as one uniform solution.

So unless there’s some certification for “Relying Parties” which I missed while skimming the documentation, I’d say in theory it’d be possible to use it on a technical level. Of course it’s still a preview so the EU has lots of opportunity left to mess it up.

Does the App allow random platforms to do verification? Or do we need to be some registered business, do contracts, likely pay for the service…? For the App to speak to our instances?

Good point. Thanks. I’m gonna self-delete this and take it as an invitiation to reflect on ableism.

deleted by creator

To be fair, you accumulated most of the downvotes (I see) in a single post and the attached comments. You got two things at the same time: the unpopularopinions community tends to be harsh. From my experience I’d say you get way more downvotes there, than in other communities. And secondly, you picked one of the two super controversial topics. Brace for downvotes if you post about AI. Or Israel. Dunno if the latter toned down a bit, or if I’ve unsubscribed from enough communities since.

It’ll be better with almost all other topics.

Not sure if I’d go straight for “silencing”. I mean the post and most comments are still there. So it’s just that you got a lot of backlash. But I can still read what you wrote. And you got quite some engagement. But I get what you mean.

And down-votes are a bit weird. We never agree if they mean bury the content somewhere at the bottom. Or if it means " I disagree with what you wrote". That just gets lumped together. And some people use them sparingly, some hand out a lot of downvotes. Which I guess could be fine if they’re used to for the frontpage ranking to sort the posts. But the way we use them doesn’t really give them the right weight.

And by the way, I’m not sure if I like up-votes either. You’ll get 300 of them for re-posting a meme. And 3 upvotes for coming up with really good advice to someone’s question.

Yeah, me too. For some hobbies there just isn’t a lot of activity.

We have some regular pc gaming communities:

• !pcgaming@lemmy.ca
• !linux_gaming@lemmy.world
• !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world
• !factorio@lemmy.world
• !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
• !zocken@feddit.org

And some about tabletop games:

• !tabletop@beehaw.org
• !dnd@lemmy.world
• !scifi@ttrpg.network

Not sure if there’s more, that’s about the ones I’m aware of. Lemmyverse.net has a few more: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=gam

Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they’re gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.

But I guess it’s still a single point of failure. If they don’t properly ensure there’s several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there’s legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of all of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance. And due to the delicate nature of NSFW content, they probably can’t afford to be 100% transparent with us, so I wouldn’t know whether they’re in a healthy place or not.

I mean there’s nothing wrong with FediNSFW’s existence. I just think it’s massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the “Fediverse”, a decentral platform…

I think so as well. Porn is available in abundance. We don’t really need it here. What I think could be nice is people who like to write erotic fiction as a hobby and post their original content. Or people discuss erotic computer games. Or like relationship advice and NSFW questions in case some country abolishes sex ed. Maybe talking about piracy, mental issues, loss… all the things that are deemed “not advertiser friendly” on commercial platforms. That’d be something positive. But it’s not easy. And it often all gets lumped together under some big NSFW umbrella and 95% of people want to share pron clips anyway. Mostly with zero care for copyright or the creators’ consent.

Hehe. Yeah, I don’t think we need more content. There’s already some out there. And everyone can add more, all they need is 20sec of time and a redgifs link. What we really need is more admins run servers to host that stuff. And a bigger admin team for the already existing instance so it doesn’t just randomly go away along with all the content, as well. Maybe one or two lawyers, or someone with expertise in bullet-proof hosting, to set it up properly. (And we likely need moderators as well. Half of the communities on the old server used to be a desert. Claimed en masse by some nominal members who left a long time ago.) But original content is certainly welcome 😆