Reddit is a website. Twitter is a website. Bluesky is a wrbsite.

Lemmy and Mastodon are not websites. They are webserver platforms. They’re like WordPress or Joomla. Imagine trying to treat “WordPress” like a singular place on the Internet.

People keep trying to sell technology to people who are looking for a location, and it’s fucking imfuriating.

You need to consider units! 1m ≠1m³

Social Networking Sites: Full of fascists actively trying to recruit people into fascism

Social Media Sites: Full of videos and memes pushing fascism

Governments Around the World: Increasingly giving into or controlled by naked fascists

You: “Have you considered financial literacy?”

What the fuck, dude?

Federation keeps breaking. Supposedly it’s working again in the latest Lemmy release, but most hosts are not up to date yet.

Mine warn me only when it’s purposeful. As you say, if I change output devices, and the sound is too loud, it says nothing. It literally only interferes with me doing something I’m purposefully choosing to do, and failing to protect me from shit I’m doing accidentally.

The federated internet is not an open park where everyone hangs out together. It’s a billion small spaces that link to neighbouring spaces. The idea that defederation is a problem, or that people using different webserver software is an issue, needs to be left at the door.

This isn’t “Reddit but with weirdly more complex subreddit names”, or “Twitter, but everyone’s user name looks like an email address”, but a network of a thousand independent social websites, each doing their own thing.

And that’s a good thing. Expecting it to be centralized, corporate social media, only without the drive towards enshitification will make everything seem uncanny and broken. This isn’t that. This is something new.

And something old.

I think a surprising number of people use the ‘All’ feed, both here, and on Reddit.

Do the volunteers want people to use what they make?

Because, I’ll be honest, based on how people on the fediverse talk about people coming from Twitter or Reddit or wherever, I’m not convinced that they do. Rather, they just want to pat themselves on the back for being high minded developers.

we all get the same content anyways, aside from defederation?

We don’t, though. We get whatever content people on our chosen instance have subscribed to. Even without blanket server bans, there are Lemmy-based websites that your host has never heard of, hosting content you do not have access to. Someone from your server has to introduce those sites, and subscribe to the communities on those sites, for your server to have their content.

The fediverse is subscription based. Shit doesn’t get sent around unless it’s specifically asked for.

You’ve misidentified how a decentralized, federated network of content sharing works. Like many, many people, you seem to have conceptualized it as a hub-and-spoke model, with a centralized data store and remote terminals.

But it’s actually a subscription-based mesh network, where each update is only sent to places that have specifically requested it. Importantly, at the moment at least, things are not forwarded along to other servers due to secondary contact. If someone on my site (A) subscribes to you (B), and someone on a third website © comments on something you posted, if nobody on my website subscribes to C, C does not send that comment to my website, and your website does not forward it along, either.

There’s some buzz about forwarding replies and stuff like that possibly getting worked out. But even then, being on the fediverse means making peace with the idea that there’s no single source of truth for the whole network. You won’t see it all, ever. And it’s likely, and possibly even desirable, that the network splinters into loosely connected islands. But that can’t happen if what people keep demanding is a centralized service with a single benevolent dictator. And the single dictator will stop being benevolent at some point.

They always do.