I love this bit from the article:

To a request for comment, X only sent Ars an auto-response, saying, "Busy now, please check back later." (To be fair, in this case "check back later" is a good summary of what happened.)

"How to be a good human owner"

Here you go:

HELP IM TRAPPED IN A DILDO FACTORY

Hey! I'm keeping this as it's sharing knowledge with new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.

Hey! I'm keeping this as it's sharing knowledge with new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.

Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I'll just lock it for now.

Hey there. This instance currently follows the code of conduct and rules for mastodon.world: https://mastodon.world/about

Discussion and civil criticism of these subjects is allowed, but name calling, ad hominem attacks, and other uncivil behaviour breaks the rules.

Also remember that specific communities here may have additional rules.

It looks like we can't pin comments yet, so apologies if this reply gets buried. For now I'm going to lock this post, as the discussion has degraded and is full of rule-breaking.

This is me and Lemmy right now lol.

Its an important question, and one I'd like to see more discussion on. Something you can do is look at the modlog for the instance and see if there's any actions in there that make you suspicious.

I chose this instance on the strength of that code of conduct, but I'd be happy to abandon this account right now and start fresh on a new instance if I no longer felt comfortable with the policies here. For now though I've chosen to put my trust here, and I guess thats all that can be done for now.

The alternative is to start your own instance, because then you'd have maximum control, but I know thats not realistic for me or many others tight now.

@[email protected] has stated on Mastodon that for now they're funding lemmy.world from the mastodon.world OpenCollective, so I've started donating to that!

I think if he was in the thread trying to answer the hard questions, explaining how some of the apparently more l blatent lies were mistakes and apologising for them, and admitting that they need to go back to the drawing board and listen to the community more, then we'd all have regained a little trust in him and the company. But instead he's ignoring most people and pretending everything is fine.

I think the conventional way this is handled on Reddit is separating memes and fluff into one one community (subreddit) and more discussion based content into another community. It works on Reddit because even if the memes get more engagement in an absolute sense, each subreddit has it's own yard stick for what is doing well, so a discussion that makes it to the front page of its own subreddit will make it through to the front page of users who are subscribed, alongside the memes. I don't yet know enough about how Lemmy ranks posts to know if this will work, but hopefully it will.