Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.

I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.

I’m sorry, are you saying you indent the braces? Cause if that’s not unintentional, those are both horrifying!

It’s really hard to get them started though. Especially when I want a discussion on the topic now. I actually did try and start my local city sub and it was me shouting into the void as the only poster. It’s not very fun posting stuff without ever getting replies.

If your employees (even if they work without payment) dont follow your instructions you search for someone who does follow them.

If they work without payment, they’re not your employees. And reddit isn’t a registered charity either.

It is their site so they can technically do what they want, but it makes them assholes and is not “ok” as you put it.

I don’t follow what you’re saying. I love the shit out of many of my smaller communities. Reading TV subs after a new episode dropped was my favourite (and required a lot of active people). I wanted to discuss the Horizon DLC when I beat it the other day, but the Horizon sub here is super tiny. I tried to post on a generic gaming sub instead and did not get the discussion I wanted.

Similarly, Pokemon Go subs on Reddit were super detailed places to discuss the game, including with detailed analysis of any change, data mining for upcoming stuff, etc. Here, there’s two subs that have just the sub creator trying to populate the sub. No actual discussion.

It sucks and I miss those kinda communities.

The whole CSAM issue is why I’d never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. It’s an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.

While I’d like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand “oh, you’re just some small time host, just delete that stuff and you’re good”, my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldn’t trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didn’t handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.

And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.

Of course, that’s understandable. But there’s too many people here that are interested in the reddit drama such that it ends up taking over many subs, drowning out other content.

It’s like how r/worldnews was created, because despite r/news being general, there was so many Americans that US news dominated the sub. We need to do the same with reddit drama IMO.

Eh, it’s still missing a ton of smaller and even medium sized communities. Pick video games and TV shows for example. A bunch don’t have a community or only have a dead one with zero or one posts.

You often don’t get paid or don’t get paid nearly enough. Too many people like paycheque to paycheque to be able to do that.

And in extreme cases, you can get sequestered, where you’re expected to basically put your life on hold for the duration of the trial, which complete bullshit and feels as if you’re being punished.

Strongly agreed. I view this as the biggest issue with LLMs. They will hallucinate a confidently incorrect answer for those cases. It makes them misinformation machines.

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there’s utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they’ll only use one.

Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It’s a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they’ve been removing. It’s well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., “unalived” instead of “killed”).

Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were… Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who’d quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we’re migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.

Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it’s extremely embarrassing that it even passed.

It’s not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.

I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven’t read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.

It’s true. I’ve reported so many to the secret poop police. They’re always laughing at first like it’s not serious, up until they break down the bathroom door. Not so funny in a Montana gulag, is it?

Moderators of large subs are some of the the most addicted people to Reddit.

But that said, I can understand it. We have to remember that where features are concerned, we’re not even close to Reddit. The reason to migrate here is mostly an ideological one (from disagreement with the Reddit admins’ actions) and perhaps some future potential.

Reddit still has far more functionality, including vastly better modding tools (which are extremely lacking here – beehaw defederated from some of the biggest instances because they lacked any other tools for dealing with users), better uptime, vastly better UX (there’s soooo many meta posts every day from people confused by the poor UX), support for videos, larger communities, more developed apps (we only have early stage alphas here), etc. All these things are barriers that will make some users write off Reddit alternatives as simply not good enough (yet).

There’s lots of useful bots besides just summarizers. Reminder bots can be great. Some linkifying bots are also useful (like Marv in r/SCP). Bots can detect malicious spam bots. Subs like AITA use bots to tally up user votes. There’s bots for moderation actions, too.

But we really could use a way to get rid of the absolutely useless bots. We don’t need terrible spelling correcting bots, a bot whose sole purpose is to tell people not to put “the” in front of “Ukraine”, or a bot that lectures people on AMP links.

I suspect it’s similar on kbin? Cause you can follow people on kbin and also see “microblogs” (Mastodon style comments). Though I’m not really sure where exactly it displays and if it is different for boosting a thread vs a comment. It’s not a feature that personally interests me much. I mostly just hit it by accident sometimes lol.

Barriers are relative. Everything that makes it slightly harder will stop a large chunk of bots, since bots aren’t able to easily adapt like humans can. Plenty of very basic bots are in fact stopped by lack of emails.

But yeah, email verification is heavily more so that you can verify they have access to the email, and thus the email is safe to use for things like password resetting. Without it, webmasters can get swamped with complaints about people getting locked out of accounts or the likes because they signed up with the wrong email.

In theory, you can also go further by only allowing email providers that have anti bot mechanisms, but it’s difficult to maintain that and it will always exclude some legitimate users.

I’m very skeptical that mCaptcha would actually work besides perhaps temporarily slowing bots down due to being niche. How expensive can you make it without hurting legitimate users? And how expensive does it need to be to discourage bots? Especially when purposefully designed bots can actually do the kinda math we’re talking about in optimized software and hardware while legitimate users can’t.