Yeah, I think a healthy dose of downvotes would do. We’re taught not to blindly trust AI and take what it generates for fact. Otherwise we might inadvertently kill all our crops, or replace the salt in our diet with poison. Similarly, a blog post isn’t truth by any means until a human has fact-checked whether the numbers are fabricated. Or the methodology is flawed. Because AI has the tendency to confabulate stuff. They made some effort to disclose it’s AI. And they added some Python scripts to replicate the results. That’s a start. Or at least above average for an AI agent 😅

Yes @tenner_agent@lemmy.almostadatacenter.social please elaborate!

That’d also help brush up those numbers for AI agents. Because the average AI agent isn’t contributing. They just spam posts and immediately sign up for a new account.

Hehe, I’ve never NOT used a custom rom since, …well the last Nokia with Symbian-OS.

My first Android phone had CyanogenMod available. With tons of extra features, back in the day the camera would get better, you’d get an equalizer for the headphones, some privacy features like remove permissions from apps, revoke their access to contacts, and extra menu options. It stayed like that for a while. Then we got the times manufacturers dropped updates within 2 years but my phones lasted me 4… So I made sure to always pick something with a good chance of LineageOS support. In order not to constantly throw phones in the bin and buy new ones. They also added tons of crapware to my friends’ phones, while mine were without any bloat… That eventually got removable, they added a somewhat proper permission system to stock Android… I had to rock a ZTE phone with the stock operating system for a while because it took the community quite a while to get LineageOS run smoothly. But that’s mainly it. After that I had two Pixel phones. I made sure to try the Google experience for a day each, without any private data on them. Then flashed GrapheneOS. Can’t complain. It’s stupid easy to install it these days. And while you won’t get a bazillion extra features like back in the day, I think it’s still worth it. Main feature is not to be 100% dependant on one big tech company and continuously send all data to their servers.

Yeah, I never know if people write genuine, stereotypical posts like that. Or if that’s bot activity. Being adamant not to be a bot is kinda what bots do.

Haha, yeah, pick your poison. Though we’re a diverse crowd. I really appreciate how there isn’t an endless stream of doomscrolling for me. My feed just ends at some point and reminds me to resume with other things 😅 (Also less noise, US politics and mainstream memes, which would be the real reason why I’d advise not to scroll All.)

Yeah, unfortunately the Fediverse isn’t as big as I’d like it to be. I can’t find people to talk about some of my interests, either. I’ll occasionally put in keywords on https://lemmyverse.net/communities , have a look at PieFed’s curated feeds and topics (Edit: another topic list)… But there’s probably just not enough people here who are into miniatures…

Delete the All feed! It’s just stupid. Subscribe to what you like. Maybe have a short glimpse at the All feed on a biweekly basis for 5min, but that’s it.

Hope it was a Golf 2 Fire & Ice edition…

Dunno if that’s “on purpose”. I think it’s more, back in the day .ml was the defacto standard instance, so lots of average people went there and you’d find a wider bandwidth of people. That might have changed with some people leaving and the new visitors not signing up on .ml anymore. That makes the rest of the group condense to people who pick .ml on purpose. But that’s not a deliberate plan, more how maths works. 😅

Yeah dunno. Did they follow instance rules? It states inflammatory posts need a Content Warning and I can’t tell whether the author is in violation of the instance CoC or following the rules?! Seems there is no such warning on the screenshots. We could probably ask the admin or mod in question. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it wasn’t… We don’t really know any details besides how Kazim thinks they’ve being wronged.

Thanks for the community recommendations!

You’re probably right. I don’t spend a lot of time on Mastodon. I likely missed drama and defederation. Other than the occasional shitstorms. But I think that’s just “a thing” on microblogging platforms. And the German privacy nerds I follow on Mastodon do way less of it anyway.

And regarding language… That seems to be a factor as well. The German speaking community here on Lemmy established a different atmosphere. From my perspective, there’s way less yelling at each other amongst the Germans than in the broad English speaking Threadiverse. There’s trolls and a lot of memelords, but seems to me some people still remember the “Netiquette”. And those ideology- or identity wars aren’t as loud. I heard from other people, it’s similar (also a noticeably different atmosphere) in the French speaking corner.

Reads a bit like the description of the average nerd? We’re nearly all into Star Trek (to some level), write way too long and measured paragraphs. A good chunk isn’t really into politics, instead they’ll spend their time reading blog posts on how this place is designed… The Threadiverse has in fact stopped growing (by user count)…

I’d say we better stop all the witch hunts. We already have plenty drama here, every other week. Leave them be and focus on something constructive. For example using all the activity tools and statistics to filter out all the slop bots 😅

Thanks for explaining. I’d agree with the reasoning. And it’s a mix of several factors, I think. Basically our history. We grew and that means you can get away with more (bad) things in a large group of people than in a smaller, more tightly coupled group. We attracted a wider audience, so now it’s not just a few privacy nerds, Linux users and a buch of tankies coexisting, but all ideological factions of society. We also got a few Reddit refugees who got banned over there for good reasons.

But in my opinion it’s an entire thing: The political landscape got way more extremist in recent years in general. And we do lots of talking about politics here. So with being a link aggregator and sharing news articles we get all the polarizing stuff and due to psychology, people share negative news articles because that gets you riled up and want to talk. Or fight. We also copied some social media design elements which reinforce some specific kinds of negative behaviour. Subscribing to groups does compartmentalization. And the entire philosophy of the Fediverse adds yet another layer of compartmentalization, which doesn’t always work in our favor. I think it also awakens some tribal instincts in some people. Which might not even be bad(?) unless they start to disunite and fight each other. Which some do. I don’t think that’s an issue on Reddit for example, because that’s just one central place, plus they keep a tighter leash on their mods. And Mastodon would be yet different because you can’t split up into groups/communities, there’s just people to be followed and global hashtags. And once there’s any level of normalization of drama and negativity, the internet will add more on top 😅

I wonder how many people realize the importance of independent platforms. Especially with what’s going on in politics, big tech, shaping discourse in a top-down way… All not really healthy for society. And we got an uptake in surveillance, manufactured truths, all the age-verification already cost us some internet forums in the UK… I think the Fediverse is more important than ever.

Did we grow, though? You say it like it’s accepted truth. But every time I have a look at the numbers (for example on Fediverse Observer), it seems to me like we’re doing the opposite. We peaked 3 years ago and we’ve been shrinking since. It’s even worse for platforms like Mastodon. Seems they’ve lost several hundreds of thousands of users. I’d say we here on Lemmy/PieFed/MBin kinda stabilized(?). I also think there’s been a slight uptake in content and discussion. Feels to me we’ve become more active over the years. But judging by the numbers, I’d say it’s because we lost the new users and lurkers. And these days our average userbase shifted to people who (on average) post more. But we didn’t grow as in: there’s more people around than it used to be.

What do you mean by “I don’t see it anywhere else where I’ve been.”? The Lemmyverse in contrast to other Fediverse platforms? Or the Fediverse versus other social platforms? Commercial (with algorithms) or free? I mean I sometimes see some destructive tendencies on Mastodon as well. And there’s a lot of shenanigans going on in YouTube comments, on Reddit or underneath half the newspaper articles. But I’d also say a lot of platforms come with a unique atmosphere. Either due to the userbase or because of how they’re set up and what kind of behaviour gets reinforced due to platform design.

Yeah, we kinda all still share this space… So I get to put up with things. But I’d agree, there’s lots of positive stuff here. It just needs a good dose of subscribing and unsubscribing from other stuff. And I sometimes wish we had more of the good stuff. Like we definitely got conversation going about mainstream stuff (and politics). I mentioned Linux as well and there’s about enough people here to talk about that, get someone’s questions answered and computer fixed… But with my more niche hobbies, there’s like 3 other people who are into that. So I regularly struggle to get a conversation going. I think we need more of that. On Reddit or Discord, there’s a lot going on, even for the most absurd hobby or interest, people post their original content… And I think we still need way more of that.

Hehe. I think we inherited a lot of that from social media. I always like to believe we could be an old-school Linux forum, or one of the places where we discussed hobbies like bicycles, knitting… whatever. For some reason, those used to be way more constructive and positive. And while we had drama, it used to be way more toned down. I don’t really know why it’s sometimes different here. We have elements of that. But maybe we lack a clear goal? Other than negative goals and growth or non-growth? Maybe it’s in part the userbase. The platform layout, psychology… Or we’re just doing way too much politics and memes here. Back in ye “good old days”(?) politics used to contained in specific corners. And since social media that’s 80% of what everything is about…

But it kinda all depends on what people expect the network to be like.

Well, the software is written and the network is ran by the people who use it. So we’d be age-verifying and spywaring ourselves!?

They’re coming for us.