The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

I don’t think that’s possible without creating a privacy nightmare, at least not with an identifier like the email address.

Google can’t track the videos you watched using Piped, all they see is the Piped server fetching it from them to deliver it to you. Also no ads, and you can control things like recommendations to not get sucked into an endless YT loop.

What kind of f*cked up argument is that? I don’t think the climate models were quite as advanced back then.

They had no idea that influencing the global climate was even a possibility, so you can hardly judge the morality of their decision-making by how much CO2 they produced. Or do you want to blame them for not building enough solar panels as well?

The problem with capitalism in this regard is not that it produced a lot of CO2 back in the days, but that it won’t stop even after learning about the destructive effects.

Afaik the bot auto-creation is disabled now, but it used to mirror some Reddit subreddits by automatically creating bot accounts for every Reddit user posting in them, and using that to post the same content in a Lemmy community. That’s how the instance got over a million users, pretty much all of them are bots that do whatever the Reddit user with the same name is doing in one of the mirrored subreddits.

What you are describing is another part of the plan: Allowing the original Reddit users to take over their mirror accounts on Lemmy. Apparently it just creates accounts for them if no bot exists yet.

Bots on alien.top do that afaik. They impersonate real Reddit users after all.

How do they handle bots? Seems to me this statistic could be heavily inflated. Or do they account for that?

Here is their listing of users per instance, looks a bit sus to me (“Benutzer” means “Users”):

It works everywhere except Android tablets, and you can just use Molly for that.

The main story of Baldur’s Gate 3 is pretty bland and mediocre.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a phenomenal game! The companion arcs, acting and overall presentation are still next level, some sidestories are very good, and it’s great how faithfully they adapted the D&D rules. But the main story …

It’s the only logical choice!

Oh come on, we could have lived in a world where the translation layers are called WINE and DINE!

It’s not, those are bots and content copied from reddit. It doesn’t represent any real user engagement.

The mirroring content is targeted at specific communities.

It’s affecting the All feed of federated instances as well, and it affects everyone who might be interested in those topics.

The posts are useful by themselves.

If you can’t empathize with this then please just accept that it’s not just about the content inside the posts. The fact that a human decided to post it somewhere makes a difference, even without any further interactions. You could probably think of it as subtext or metadata, that changes how a post is perceived.

What I said is that if LW continues with the defederation even if it becomes populated with real people, then it will be on LW for keeping isolated.

You decided to create an instance filled with bots and then motivated new users to convert some into real accounts. You created the situation where other instances have to also block those users if they want to get rid of all the bots. This is purely on you! You can’t set a house on fire and then blame others for the water everywhere.

“Sacrificing alien.top” means stopping with the bots and just implement the migration on another instance.

Yea, so everyone who converted their account until then would be left on an instance filled with bots, and blocked for that by at least LW. Great job!

Do you think that the content is only valuable if you can interact with it?

I specifically didn’t say that. Interaction is the obvious part in a human vs bot debate, but to me it also makes a difference if a human decided to post something somewhere, or if a bot is copying it without the human’s consent. And I said that that’s the reason why I come to Lemmy, if I’d just wanted content I’d use an automated news aggregator instead.

Should we just forget about books because it doesn’t have a comment section?

We are talking about social media here, nothing in what I said applies to or takes away from books.

That can only possibly be true […]

Just pointing out that you’re trying to argue away my personal experience. I specifically didn’t say that this is a general rule, I said it’s how I experience it. But judging by other posts and the feedback to my post I’m not alone with this.

This is the same type of gatekeeping […]

This is by definition not gatekeeping, because I’m not trying to keep anybody out. People can come here for whatever reason as far as I’m concerned. What we are talking about here is changing things to try to attract people, because that is what you’re doing. Big difference.

I haven’t been able to implement the solution as fast I’d like […]

That’s why I suggested to you a few weeks ago that you keep it small until you ironed out the kinks, idk if you remember. Experiments like yours are completely fine imo, as long as you make sure they don’t negatively affect the wider Lemmy community. But what you’ve been doing could be described as a full-scale bot attack on the Fediverse, and an excuse like that just doesn’t cut it in that case.

But if you know that the post is from a bot who potentially will become a real user (by migrating through the fediverser portal) and that one of the reasons to make it more compelling to them is by having content here that is not available elsewhere, why not write anyway?

Because my reason for being here - as I said in the beginning - is not to help you with your project! I come here to interact with real humans right now. What you are doing is deputize other Lemmy users for your plan, even if that means making their experience here worse. They didn’t sign up for this, apparently many even disagree with it like I do, but you just don’t seem to care or at least accept it as a necessary sacrifice on their part!

It helps if you stop thinking about them as “bots” […]

I’m sorry, but you can’t shit in my mouth and tell me “It helps if you stop thinking about it as shit, instead think of it as chocolate cake”. Idk what fantasy world you managed to argue yourself into, but they are bots right now! As I said, it doesn’t matter that they are impersonating real humans, if anything it makes it even worse. And I don’t share your blind optimism for this project of yours, so that doesn’t change things either.

[…] alien.top has reached top 5 in status count in less than two months.

Because you are faking statistics with bots! Please get this in your head for gods sake! I can create an instance with 100000000 fake users and posts with the push of a button, that doesn’t create any real user engagement or value.

If alien.top ever becomes minimally popular, it will be the people on LW that will be in the minority and they will be the ones missing out on content, not the other way around.

What kind of f*cked up plan is that? You’re fine with becoming as popular as LW and splitting the majority Lemmy community in two? Do you actually read what you write? And if this keeps going I don’t think LW will be the only instance.

I’ve already disabled the bots.

Good!

but if alien.top gets burned because of some stigma associated with them, I can create another fediverser instance

Idk how many people already signed up on this instance, but I take it they are just thrown under the bus in that case?!

I hope that it doesn’t get to that point, but if I have to sacrifice alien.top in order to keep the idea of fediverser and the topic-based instances intact, I will.

You mean just the reddit-lemmy community matching? That actually sounds like a useful service, I don’t think anybody has a problem with that.

Empires by Electric Swing Circus

First Girl on the Moon by Klaas

My opinion on it is pretty simple:

• I’m here to read posts by and talk to humans, and a post made by a human somewhere else and copied over by a bot without said human’s knowledge or consent is not “made by a human” anymore as far as I’m concerned.
• I don’t f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo. There are great posts and discussions here already, so it’s fine if it attracts more people and it’s fine if it doesn’t. The important bit imo is that the people who join do so because they understand and care about the platform’s goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.
• Communities mainly populated by bots feel like grotesque ghost towns. Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived. Your posts being copied to another social network by a bot impersonating you feels cheap and desperate, and like your rights are being seriously violated (which is probably the case)! This all could very well give Lemmy the bad rep of being the “fake bot social network”.
• On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that’s widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?! That’s pretty much the worst entrance to the Fediverse you could have, almost guaranteeing a bad experience from the get go!

So by all means advertise Lemmy outside of the Fediverse, but don’t fill it with bot content just to make it look like one of the big social networks on first glance. Imo it will do much more harm than good, because you alienate the people already here and you give it a bad rep in the outside world.

Most routers are actually small PCs, just optimized for the specific purpose of connecting to the internet over a phone or TV line, providing a separate internal network in your home and bridging the two. But you could do that with any regular PC with the right hardware.

Your ISP could also just provide you with a standard network connection, so you don’t have to use a modem to transmit data over a line that was originally built for a different purpose. This is not very common since most houses still predate the internet, but it might become the norm at some point.

The main benefit of having a separate network is that devices in it are not directly visible and accessible from outside. All others see is your router, and they can only access your devices if you establish the connection first or manually forward ports. You can also structure the local network however you like (e.g. assign IPs and domain names, create subnets), without being restricted by or affecting the outside world.

Freelancer

Transport Tycoon

The Guild (Europa 1400)

Empire Earth

Anno 1602 + 1503

Monkey Island

Heroes of Might and Magic 3+

Pokemon

C&C Generals

Stronghold

Star Wars Jedi Knight

Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat + Vietnam

World of Warcraft

There are some topics where this sorting mechanism is the only one that will give you good comments, like asking for unpopular or controversial opinions. 1000 people will get upvoted because they post things that aren’t unpopular at all, and the few comments that are actually worth discussing get just as many down as up votes.

Twitch will probably be even harder.

Linux is a name, not a description of the parts. It can mean just the kernel, or the entire family of operating systems, depending on the context.

It’s what we settled on, and there is no point in debating the name unless there is a real problem with it.