Big Tech designed their platforms to keep you trapped.
YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses built on capturing your attention and data. Their algorithms, notification systems, and content policies all serve one purpose: keeping you engaged on their terms. And their terms alone. There's no freedom
I hope more active users move to the fediverse. That way we will have a lot of variety in content and can also potentially prevent communities from becoming echo chambers. I suppose moderation will also have to be taken up a notch for these changes to actually have a positive effect.
I suspect this will still become a problem since we can subscribe to whichever communities we like and vice versa.
Also, more active users means more niche communities. I just realized there’s a Severance community that is medium active. One less thing I need Reddit for.
Niche communities are awesome ! Sadly reddit is still the king in this aspect.
Maybe in a few years lemmy will reach that level or even surpass it… One can dream.
It is interesting that forums had less people but felt very active and didn’t need the millions of people that places like modern day social media do.
And I think big part of it is the presentation of material with threads that get bumped up when people comment and can keep going on for years.
In reddit type social media a thread is considered dead after like a day or less, so needing a new one even if it is the same topic to start up conversation again. Even more the case for one off comment type social media like mastodon.
Oh yeah forums are pretty cool. It’s like a massive treasure chest you can sort through. I still enjoy using a few forums like Gamerfaqs and XDA developers.
Why moderation? The old internet didn’t have moderation. Why does everyone feel the need for moderation?
Trolls, bots, and scammers make them necessary at a minimum, and then the subliminal messaging from the cronies of politicians, etc. make them welcome. Bots are easier to make than ever before so you can’t compare the past with the present that easily. kbin.social died last year because of relentless spam bots posting garbage/malware links 100x/sec.
Computer bots always act a certain predictable way. You can filter out most bots easily based on time-based filters or other algorithms. The rest should not be moderated, except for illegal things like selling weapons, drugs, or hiring a hitman.
Moderation is a skippery slope. Everyone wants to moderate something different. Rights want to moderates Lefts, Lefts want to moderate Rights. Moderators have the power to decide which side they are on. If we had clear laws that forbid most moderation, there would not be any discussion about it anymore. Just allow everything and deal with it.
That hasn’t been true for a long time. Filtering bots has increasingly become more difficult, expensive, and sophisticated. Not to mention that there are still plenty of state sponsored bad actors using real people and hybrid approaches.
What’s your solution to that? Not filtering out bots? Or manually moderating? The latter is even more expensive.