Dude I was away on vacation chill. :-)
Aye great read and very illuminating. We gotta protect the fediverse from corporate insidious destruction. This quote stood out to me:
And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).
But as more than one arrogant CEO has discovered, when you kick your users in the teeth, the effects can be rather longer-lasting than you might have hoped. Huffman has not only done this, but done the same to moderators and third-party app developers, both of whom have played a significant role in driving Reddit’s popularity.
Aye, these journalists aren’t pulling their punches!
Maybe it’s a bad community but not a whole bad instance?
I think it does matter, actually, as some instances get blocked and unfederated. But, there would still be so much access elsewhere it may not matter much. Generally, I would take a best guess at a first instance, see how it goes, and be open to making different account elsewhere as needed.
Who cares what they do? Care what we do.
Ok now I'm embarrassed about how strongly I pitched myself to get on lemmy.ml. I was like overcaffeinated on the first five minutes of a blind date!
When I first got to Lemmy I was deep in a thread with these guys spouting incredibly hyperbolic whataboutism in support of Russia against Ukraine, death to liberals and worse. It wasn’t any “different viewpoints” being discussed rationally, it was straight up shocking vitriolic nonsense and dangerous stuff. You want it? You can definitely go get it, most instances probably didn’t block them.
About transparency, these instances are home run by hobbyists, not corporates who start out with a week dedicated to policy and procedures establishment.
Truly, you can start your own instance and do it your own way, I and many others have.
Depriving the libs of a favored platform via making it conservative and unruly, and weakening its democratic potential against authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia, is the theory.
Oh my, if they were really brave they would un-ban all the supposed liberals that ever slightly ruffled their feathers.
As someone who lives in China, I’ll tell you your perspective on that isn’t wrong. People abroad too easily conflate what the Chinese govt. dues with Chinese people and “China”. Their concerns are all valid, but people grossly overestimate how much impact regular Chinese folks can have on their own govt.
How happy are people in the US with their govt and how much control they have over it? Not enough right, well the Chinese have even less. They’re even less engaged, though, oddly, but because the stakes for caring and speaking up are so high. People abroad probably rightly wish the average citizen constrained their own govt more, but the reality is they don’t have a way to do it, so they just focus on daily life. Also, they are in a misinformation bubble like crazy.
Yay Lemmy.world, you kicked yourself in the dick, congrats.