• 15 Posts
  • 185 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • I see many problems with it echoing those of mainstream mass media. Especially with the advent of billionaire-owned social media and the increasing viability of automated posting, we see the same inequality present itself - the richest can pay for bigger microphones and astroturf the place. Even just places like Lemmy and connected tools show what a world of difference it makes to be a little further away from the mass bot armies and the profit motive.

    I do believe there are some types of social media which can be constructive, but these are not like the general-audience mass social media we see (facebook/insta/tiktok/youtube/reddit) or even the more direct derivatives, like most of the well-known Lemmy instances. But one must have an idea of why the social media is being made and design it around that purpose. Lemmy is ultimately a reddit alternative. And its most popular communities were/are either bunkers for banned communities or clones of subreddits, hosted on very general instances. There’s no defining vision. It’s an improvement, yes!, but it’s far from what a digital social space can be.




  • Blackness/Whiteness is an interesting concept - it’s remarkably fluid, especially with changes in time and place. Race isn’t the same as ethnicity or genetics, or a direct result of it, although racists often try to claim it is - a stark example of this in Western societies like the US and Australia would be how they categorize Italian and Greek peoples, Slavic peoples, or ethnically-Jewish peoples - the idea of whether or not each of these is White has largely shifted over time, often as a group stops being the current biggest immigration demographic. The USA even had a concept of “Black Irish”, which originally meant a post-Famine Irish refugee. Human races are ultimately just social classes, not a biological concept.

    Another aspect, related to this thread, is hypodescent. In some societies (it’s not a universal thing!), if a child has a Black parent and a White parent, is the child Black or White, or another label entirely? As mentioned in that article, some US states used to legally define someone as Black even if only 1 of their 16 great-great-grandparents were Black.










  • chans

    Plenty of smaller, interests specific ones. Some even ban frogposters on sight or only allow politics in a containment thread. I think /comfy/ board is still alive somewhere. There are also a few larger openly-left ones, like the infamous /leftypol/ (split into leftypol.org and leftychan.net, each with their own pros and cons) and GETchan (famously upload some great music compilations). I was about to suggest lainchan but you already have. Nukechan is probably too slow but has some high-quality threads.

    Erischan and plus4chan are interest-specific and not explicitly left, but have left tendencies.

    The chan format (not merely the minimal aesthetic of English language chans) has a big impact on their culture. I don’t really believe in just putting a Yotsuba B skin over Lemmy. There are federated imageboards (I don’t believe it’s fediverse) but moderation is probably a nightmare, I assume it would just be used be freeze peach naziphiles banned from everywhere less.






  • Perhaps its too late for the largest instances, but the idea of a site like this being a spectator activity, about consumption, rather than creating communities. Some smaller instances, and even some larger ones, have an actual unique atmosphere and have larger projects across the instance. When we suddenly got a flood of reddit users escaping from the third-party API fiasco and the Luigi bans, that was huge enough to dilute some of the communities with large amounts of people used to simply voting and commenting, or having a website premade for them.


  • What’s the actual point of holding someone back from joining your online community if they don’t have enough “points” on their comments or posts?

    It is a legitimate anti-abuse tactic. Like you’ve mentioned, there are obvious flaws, but it does help prevent brigadiers, advertisers and other bad actors from easily spinning up throwaways to harass or manipulate a community.

    Another way to do this could be account age testing, but this can be defeated by pre-registering empty accounts.