That’s not livestock, it’s just the genetically engineered intelligent cow species we made for fun. It’s wearing an earring.

Kind of weird but suit themselves I guess

How come?

but it doesn’t stop them from existing on the fediverse.

Well of course, nobody has absolute power over the fediverse like that. Anyone can start an instance and create millions of bot accounts if that’s what they wanted. But “the fediverse” is only what it looks like from the point of view of your instance. If stuff is blocked or defederated, it may as well not exist.

The point isn’t to eliminate all bad behavior on the fediverse (that’s not possible, by design of the system, and that’s good). The point is to allow users to seek towards those instances that keep bad behavior out.

You only need to stop it on your own instance. You can’t do anything else anyway. Users will go to the instances that aren’t flooded with bots.

Warcraft 3 custom maps still drag me back sometimes.

There’s nothing that can be done to stop it

That’s not true at all. You can definitely do something:

• Make a sign up process that filters out most low effort bots (e.g. applications, invite trees)
• Get more moderators to catch the bots earlier. In a similar vein, encourage users to report bots.
• Defederate from instances that don’t have similar measures, i.e. that don’t take bot prevention seriously.

It definitely does. You just defederate from the instances that don’t do something to avoid bots.

I feel like it is just a matter of time before either:

1. The fragmented communities develop more and become distinct, so that they are more unique and shouldn’t merge.
2. One of the communities becomes the more popular “default” option, and the other becomes less active as people gather in the more popular one.

Even if that doesn’t happen, redundancy isn’t bad. We’ve seen how hard it is to migrate when there’s only 1 real option and that option disappears or goes bad for some reason (i.e. reddit). If there was another fairly active community with the same focus, that would make it easier to keep going. That’s part of why decentralization is good.

This is a non issue. Different communities and instances have different rules, norms, cultures etc. There’s no need to smash everyone together in a monoculture.

Exactly. This is a non issue and actually a feature.

There are now, fortunately, plenty of low carb, low glycemic products that are a lifesaver when you have cravings.

What products are you thinking about?

I mean, just set the limit to a ridiculously high number then? I’m not aware that Lemmy has any in-built limits, but I could be wrong.

I believe that Mastodon instances with limits only link to external posts that exceed the limit, they don’t display the whole post.

Of course you can always run into network limits if you get huge posts, but that applies to everything and doesn’t have anything in particular to do with Mastodon.

Isn’t character limits an instance setting?

That feels relatively young for something like that, I would’ve thought maybe that would’ve been a little further back.

In some ways it does go further back, because each village basically had its own time. So there were lots and lots of time zones, if you think about it that way.

No, that’s what I wrote as well. The identity service would not know what sites were visited or ideally not even how many sites were visited.

I’m not sure that is feasible, because in order to trust the answer, I feel the asker must know and trust the one providing the answer. It sounds like you’re imagining a system with many different ID providers? What prevents me from creating my own provider that just answers “Yes”, even for people under 18? If the site asking does not know it is my fake ID service providing the answer, I’m not sure they can trust any answer.

But I won’t pretend to be an expert on this topic, so perhaps it is feasible somehow.

In principle it should be possible to do a zero-knowledge proof.

This means that the website asking for age verification asks a yes/no question like “Is this user 18+?” and the age verification service (like a digital ID provided by the government or whatever) answers “yes” or “no” accordingly, but without telling anything else about the user. Also, the verification service should ideally not know who asked for the age verification.

So the site you want to visit only knows the thing they need to know: Whether you are 18+ or not. Nothing else. And the age verification service only knows somebody asked for age verification and provided the answer, but do not know which site you visited.

This is all possible, but I don’t have high hopes this is the intended implementation of any government seeking age verification, so don’t get your hopes up.

I mean this isn’t realistic at all.

Don’t disagree, but you won’t get rid of cars entirely and they’ll still be a major part of transportation. I’m just saying they should at least be safer.