This is a non-answer.

What matters most is the type of people in charge of the instance, why the decide to do certain things, and the types of decisions they’re likely to make in the future.

Not all instances are the same in that regard.

Problem isn’t so much defederation policy in and of itself, as much as it is just the general level-headedness of the admins

Lemm.ee’s lead admin had exactly the type of philosophy towards managing this platform that I want to see in wherever I go next.

This post alone is what convinced me to create a primary account there. It’s professional, level-headed, nuanced, well spoken, and you can tell they’ve actually thought a lot about the big picture in an unbiased way. Not aggressive, preachy, standoffish, snarky, snobbish, and above all, not reactionary. Seeing the instance as infrastructure is what I want to see more of, but I also just want to see admins with this attitude overall.

Problem is, if it’s visible to mods, it’s effectively public.

This also presumes mods are, by default, inherently non-biased, held to a standard, and never have vendettas of their own.

Of all the many things reddit did poorly, choosing not to let mods see votes was an excellent decision.

Yeah, agreed. The more consolidated a thing becomes, the more entrenched it becomes. When alternatives, exit ramps, and escape routes are needed, they won’t exist or require too much effort to take.

A lesson everyone should have learned 2 years ago.

The latter. It’s basically emerging as the alternative to Lemmy, but it federates with Lemmy instances. You don’t necessarily need to join a piefed instance for this feature when many Lemmy apps will do it, but there’s a lot of movement to piefed for other reasons.

Votes are private as well.

Generally speaking, when you know something like an update is on the Play Store, but it’s not showing up for you in the Play Store on your phone, close the Play Store app, clear out its cache, and restart the phone.

I found also if you search for the app in the Play Store rather than looking for the update on your list of installed apps, the update will appear.

It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.

There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.

People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.

Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You’re just sending something to an address, not CC’ing literally everyone all the time.

Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.

The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.

Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.

We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it’s simple, but it’s really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.

When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you’re seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.

That’s not the case with the fediverse. There’s no simple default. You have to build it yourself.

Find me any charitable, non-profit, or community organization that wouldn’t call the cops if someone was breaking into their networking closet to install data harvesting hardware.

Because he literally broke into a server room and installed hardware to harvest this data.

There’s no world where any organization, for profit or otherwise, would tolerate that. Even your local library would call the damn cops if you tried that.

Can we be honest about this, please?

Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.

He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.

I feel like I’ve been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.

We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site’s growth.

And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don’t have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications, for their own individual reasons.

Which would be fine in a vacuum. But in a federated space, what is done on one instance can have a wide ranging effect on the visibility of content outside of that instance. And as op rightfully points out, because communities are locked to an individual instance, the nature of federation doesn’t help users escape overbearing moderation when the only true sizable communities for a thing happen to be on a specific instance.

Basically, you’re confined to the no-fun welcome channel zone—forever in slow mode—until you prove you can behave yourself, at which point Denuvo will elevate you to “Verified Player” status and let you get into the meme, chat, and dev Q&A channels.

And this, friends, is why so many businesses are closing their forums and other public facing, indexed spaces and using Discord. It’s a black box that they can gatekeep. No complainers allowed to kill the “vibe”, no publicly searchable database that will keep track of what has been deleted, and no visibility for the negativity to the general public doing a Google search on the product.

Teixeira worked for nearly 14 years at Microsoft in areas including developer tools and technologies, before serving as Facebook’s director of program management and design, and Twitter’s vice president of product.

According to the suit, Teixeira joined Mozilla in August 2022 with the understanding that he would ultimately be positioned to succeed Baker as Mozilla CEO.

[…]

Teixeira, 52, was diagnosed in October 2023 with ocular melanoma, a rare but treatable form of cancer. He took an approved 90-day medical leave through early February under the Family Medical Leave Act, the suit says.

Shortly before Teixeira returned, in early February, Baker stepped down as CEO, returning to the role of executive chairman. Chambers, a Mozilla board member, was named to serve as CEO for the remainder of the year.

So he’s basically fine, he just missed his chance to become CEO.

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/mozillas-product-chief-sues-the-firefox-maker-alleging-discrimination-after-cancer-diagnosis/

I have no requests, just reiterating that you’re absolutely killing it.

Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.

Granted part of that is there hasn’t been any real pressure on it, but still.

Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It’s this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.

I tried thunder looking for exactly what you’re saying but it didn’t feel like rif with so many of the customization and settings that rif provided not being present. I don’t just want something that looks like rif, I want something that works like it.

That’s why I ultimately fell onto Summit. It is basically the one app I’ve found after trying them all that genuinely feels like rif, because it’s packed to the brim with customizations and settings, with a very responsive dev, and fits the rif aesthetic (though you can change it to be however you like). It scratched that rif itch and I haven’t touched another app since.

It’s mostly that it’s just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you’re gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.

And as you said, the categories aren’t curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.

Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don’t reflect the current state of the software.

A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.

Downvotes are part of the whole curation aspect of the site, and it’s a valid part of the democratic system. For all the whining about being “censored” because you got downvoted, there’s countless cases where downvotes influence the sorting algorithm positively.

Garbage shouldn’t sit on the same level as fluff comments no one bothered to vote on.