I don’t really think social media actually makes people more social in real life and federated platforms are pretty much the same. I also remember reading once that many tech execs don’t let their kids use social media or phones.

Also here’s a few interesting related things I’ve seen:

• The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What? | Kurzgesagt
• Lemmy is making me depressed

I wouldn’t recommend Lemmy to anyone I know. Lemmy feels like a meme aggregator more than a forum or a link aggregator. It probably has it’s own niche of people who like what they can find in it but the people I know seem interested in other things, like local news and sports.

Atheism 1.45K users / month, Religion 9 users / month, religion isn’t gonna fly on Lemmy. You may be as christian as you like but how many times have you been able to talk religion here. And the same goes for any topics that goes against the current group think.

I still use Reddit for niche and polarizing topics. Lemmy feels like groupthink to me, especially about politics — it’s always “Ukraine good, Russia bad” and “Palestine good, Israel bad.” I like hearing both sides, but divergent opinions get smothered here. Imagine an average Christian joining the Fediverse: they’d have to leave many of their beliefs at the door and adapt to the herd, or risk being unwelcome, having posts downvoted to oblivion, and being told to leave. It’s already happened to me a few times with opinions that aren’t welcomed here. It’s a far cry from what Lemmy’s decentralization promised.

That sounds like spam. I’ll report just in case.

AI-made aliens of all kinds and sizes. I wouldn’t mind recreating the cantina scene from the original Star Wars trilogy by walking into a bar and, in real-time, using deepfake technology to transform everyone into a random alien species from Star Wars.

You must have made that up, there’s not even a definition on Urban Dictionary.

Also, is this a hobby or a kink, because it reminds me of kinks like chastity, plapping and such.

The locations, free falling and such.

Extreme Ironing

Wow, I bet they don’t even bother warning their sexual partners about it. I wish I had never learned that.

This is only the second time I’ve heard about it. The first time, someone was talking about worm composting (vermicomposting), which uses worms to convert organic waste into nutrient-rich compost.

You are right, but gooning is a kink rather than a hobby as well and you didn’t mention it to the poster of the most voted comment.

pick up artistry, penis enhancement, prejac training

Yeah, some people share their entire drives, so the people who share system files are likely to have their private files there as well.

That’s just a modern term for jerking off, I don’t think it’s niche or weird, I just don’t get why it’s gotten so popular calling it that way.

I stalk random people on the Internet

I like watching people on the internet. 15y ago, I was using Shareaza, Kazaa, Emule as my music sources. For those who aren’t familiar with those software: it’s p2p file download. You install Shareaza on your computer, and give access to specific folder to the Shareaza network. Anyone using Shareaza can then download the files located on your shared folder. But, in the mid 00’, even more than today, people weren’t that tech savy and what happened, way too often, was that a user would give access to the “My Documents” folder or even worse, their whole computer. I was looking for those thoses and I was reading their MSN messenger history, looking at their pictures, their resume, their schoolwork… I was really enjoying learning everything about their life through their My Documents folder.

Fast forward to 2018. All those p2p software disappeared. But I found an alternative: 4shared. 4shared allows you to upload pictures and share them (like img). When you download the app, you can setup the app to automatically upload all your pictures (from your phone). But a lot of users don’t know that, and they end up with all they smartphone pictures on the net, with a public settings. I enjoy going to 4shared, looking for those non savy users, and learn everything about their lifes.

And I don’t even need that. I have hobbies, friends, I don’t have issues meeting women or people, but I like stalking on those strangers on 4shared.

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There must be some reason why private messaging on this platform is unencrypted. Maybe it’s required by law in some countries, or it’s too difficult to implement.

this was something I loved about slashdot moderation. When voting, people had to specify the reason for the vote. +1 funny, +1 insightful, +1 informative, -1 troll, -1 misleading, etc.

That way you can, for example, set in your user preferences to ignore positive votes for comedy, and put extra value on informative votes.

Then, to keep people from spamming up/down votes and to encourage them to think about their choices, they only gave out a limited number of moderation points to readers. So you’d have to choose which comments to spend your 5 points on.

Then finally, they had ‘meta moderation’ where you’d be shown a comment, and asked “would a vote of insightful be appropriate for this comment” to catch people who down-voted out of disagreement or personal vandetta. Any users who regularly mis-voted would stop receiving the ability to vote.

I don’t think this is directly applicable to a federated system, but I do think it’s one of the best-thought-out voting systems ever created for a discussion board.

edit: a couple other points i liked about it:

Comments were capped at (iirc) +5 and -1. Further votes wouldn’t change the comment’s score.

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For me, it would mainly be a blend between Tumblr and booru-style image boards, allowing users to follow people and tags, with filtering by tags and collaborative tagging. A trust-based moderation system akin to Discourse. I’d also want the ability to block tags and a Reddit-style tree-like comment system for better discussions. A nuanced voting system similar to Slashdot’s could help finding quality discussions by differentiating between types of content and allowing sorting by these different types.

How is the fediverse software innovating? Lemmy feels just like Reddit and Mastodon seems like Twitter but it doesn’t have algorithms so in practice it feels more like a chat.