As much as “instance drama” can be a bit tiring, I think it might be an inevitable outcome and shouldn’t necessarily be seen as completely bad. My thinking is that instance drama would not occur if all the instances were similar, and that would be bad. As it is, there are actually differences among the instances and that’s good - some disagreements due to those differences is inevitable.

Now, it would be good if we could agree to disagree and still be friends… but that also moves into the paradox of tolerance. But I would say most instances have nothing strongly against each other, despite any differences in moderation or rules or approach. The Pareto principle applies too… probably 20% of the instances are responsible for 80% of the drama. If you don’t like the drama, try avoiding those 20% of instances 😅.

if you transfer resources to them

I get what you’re saying here and mostly agree, but just want to point out that you are transferring a resource - your labour. So it is a bit more nuanced than this.

I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies

But now they should know right? But the response makes it clear they don’t really care. They want to include everyone in the “big tent”, which clearly runs afoul of the paradox of tolerance. I am not a fan of their response.

It sounds like that would require unifying the architecture of all fediverse platforms, which nobody is interested in and very much goes against the point (decentralization). Right now all of these platforms are written independently, with unique architectures and different programming languages.

Suffice to say that, while it’s a nice thought, what you’re proposing is not really realistic, nor is it actually desired.

Matrix is not part of the fediverse, so that’s kind of a special case and doesn’t work the same at all as the rest.

What you describe sounds very simplified, but let me assure you that there is nothing simple about this problem (I say that as a software engineer that has studied ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse).

It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.

They are. It’s called the fediverse.

There’s no reason why any of these software options couldn’t support all the same stuff, as you say. But so far they have chosen not to.

Maybe another option will come along one day that supports more of it at once.

This is like requiring people to read a specific text book before they vote in real life elections. I hope you can see the problem with that.

Wait, you’re going to federate whether a user clicked on a link between instances?

That seems kinda too far. I would not want other instances to know what I have or have not clicked. That’s a level of surveillance I’m not comfortable with and I fear how that data might be abused.

Tbh I wouldn’t even want my own instance to track what I click

How would you know for remote users?

Let’s apply quality control on upvotes, so any post can get only 20 upvotes till it gets a specific amount of comments then the limit could be pumped up to 40 upvotes till it gets more comments, etc…

Ultimately this is just limiting ways that people can vote. Voting is the democratic way to sort posts. I don’t think you can limit without ultimately influencing the system in unintended bad ways, since that will restrict how people can vote. Just let people vote.

The idea is that eventually they would stop scraping you cause the data is bad or huge. But it’s a long term thing, it doesn’t help in the moment.

A low power AI actually seems like a good way to generate a ton of believable - but bad - data that can be used to fight the bad AI’s.

Even “high power” AIs would produce bad data. It’s currently well known that feeding AI data to an AI model decreases model quality and if repeated, it just becomes worse and worse. So yea, this is definitely viable.

On a gaming PC, what arch distro would you use?

So what distro do you use? I definitely am also including gaming in the considerations.

Speaking of debian - anyone here running debian testing as a daily driver? I really enjoy debian as a kind of “default” Linux but the rare updates and the need to upgrade the whole system when a major update hits annoys me, so rolling release feels better, but I’m worried Debian Testing is unstable? But I’ve heard it’s not so bad? Anyone got any opinion on that?

Oh yea absolutely. The point of going elsewhere is not for more privacy. The point is to make the content here neutral and in a sense unsellable. Nobody can buy your data on the fediverse, cause it’s just there, freely given. Anyone can access it, so nobody can sell it.

I don’t think this is a problem. If the communities are similar enough, one will eventually win and be the bigger and main one. If they are different enough, they can continue coexisting.

I personally still feel like this brings the communities too close.

the Lemmy devs are very much against merged comments

For good reason perhaps? It merges distinct communities together, making communities less distinct. Different communities can have different moderation and participation standards and norms. Merging them I feel is a bad idea.

Tbf a substantial amount of voters did see the comment - at the time of writing, 297 upvotes on the comment vs 483 upvotes on the post, or ~61%. So actually most people do dig through the comments, if the upvote count is something to go by at least.

Anyone who doesn’t read comments is unlikely to read reader added context, so you’re probably not getting a large amount of the remaining 39% of people to get the context just because you add some extra UI feature.

Besides, explaining the context is a much longer affair than a title and just wouldn’t fit. It’s not like I would even say that the title of this post is misleading in the first place, it’s actually pretty to-the-point.

There’s also a chance that people will get the wrong idea about posts without the context - i.e. that posts without reader added context are super truthful somehow. I feel that people should rather accept that all titles of a few sentences are missing context. That is after all the point of a title - to summarize and bring only the most important information, which inevitably leads to a loss of context.