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.

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.

Votes are private as well.

It’s not happening. The company had to make a statement after the dailymail posted it’s bullshit the other day. Daily Mail had to publish a follow-up about it:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-14742311/Standing-seats-designer-comfort-tested.html

It’s still bull. This has been resurfacing routinely for years.

The Daily Mail had to post a followup to their own bullshit, where the designers states plainly that these are prototypes and not being used anywhere any time soon.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-14742311/Standing-seats-designer-comfort-tested.html

It is not impossible, it’s just difficult. You do not have to keep everyone satisfied, only enough of them. All you’re doing here is making arguments for why they shouldn’t change because they will never get 100% approval rating. That’s just idiotic. No one is expecting perfect, they just expect better.

More importantly, neutrality in moderation is generally seen as more acceptable than swinging fully towards one direction. People will complain that you are allowing x or y, but you get much further by permitting that balance to exist naturally and moderating it at its most extremes, then you do buy stamping out one and promoting the other, which is absolutely what they do on .ml

Whoever said that you had to be a free speech absolutist, either? You can believe in free speech and also not be okay with Nazis on your platform.

It’s really not that hard, many internet forums have been doing this for decades. It’s kind of telling, frankly, how the very notion of it seems to elude some people around here.

All of which ignores the point the top comment made: that they shouldn’t be moderating at all. Let whoever they choose moderate that instance, and separate from it entirely. Focus only on development.

But the fact they’re apparently more concerned about the content on that instance than getting donations to support development of the platform is very telling, too.

Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.

If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.

And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.

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.

The cloud is many things, but most of all, it’s a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don’t control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:

The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can’t be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.

I legitimately want to scream sometimes as I feel the continual death of local computing and actual software, and it depresses me to no end how few businesses or users see it for what it is.

And it’s exactly this: a trap. A trap users people are racing into, and they have no idea, at all, how bad it’s going to get when the doors close behind them.

The rest of us are left with little recourse. Looking at the difference between Outlook and New Outlook is genuinely depressing because that’s the future we’re all being shepherded into against our will. I swear, in like 10 years, Windows will mostly just be a kiosk for Edge.

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/

Yeah, I was gonna say, holding Chrome OS above Windows because its Linux based is bizarre. That’s getting more true about Android, too. For all its faults, I can still say I’m the admin of my Windows OS (for now), and not Google.

I was banned from /r/grindr for suggesting it’s ok for trans people to use it. It’s legitimately one of the most blatantly, unapologetically terrible mods I’ve ever seen, and it’s just him.

Cat drama in particular seems to always hit maximum outrage really fast.

Because what you consider a fact is based on studies that don’t provide as compelling evidence as you want to believe they do.

Generally speaking, it’s probably best to not do it, but calling it outright abuse requires evidence that it is causing actual harm, and the scientific consensus on it is not as solid as you think it is.

Recent academic review of many past studies have found that it’s inconclusive.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9860667/

Basically, we need more studies before we can start deleting shit on accusations of animal abuse.

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.