• 7 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • zabadoh@lemmy.mlOPtoLemmy@lemmy.mlShould Lemmy buy ads on Reddit?
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    7 months ago

    You’d be surprised.

    I have a RL friend who’s on Reddit all the time, and he didn’t even hear about the shutdown, much less /r/place, or anything like lemmy. I’ve been trying to sell it to him…

    Re: The “We’re elite” becomes “We’re bored talking among the same old people” or “We’re burned out”, leading to users leaving and formerly thriving communities dying.

    I’ve been around long enough to see this happen on multiple forums.






  • It’s part of the ol’ Big Tech playbook:

    If a promising emerging competitor emerges:

    1. Acquire the emerging competitor for cheap when it’s still small
    2. Copy the competitor’s best features to make them irrelevant
    3. Co-opt them with integration so the competitor’s users won’t see any advantage to staying with them
    4. Pollute the competitor’s content to make your own offering look better
    5. Steal the competitor’s best talent


  • I’m not sure how extensive the spam wave was, nor how quickly the user was able to create an account, make the comments.

    I doubt that the quantity in that I came across would be enough to take down a server, but that may be the point: To test lemmy’s collective defenses and response without drawing too much attention.

    A common IP address or address range ban file that’s frequently updated and downloaded by each instance might be another way to boost security.

    If this is actually an org attack, I’m guessing that we’ll see botnet DDOS comment and post attacks next.




  • zabadoh@lemmy.mltoLemmy@lemmy.mlI love Lemmy!
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    8 months ago

    I disagree that people suck.

    I think that enshittification on any SM platform, whether free and open, or built for commerce, happens when companies try to exploit it for commercial gain.

    Take Usenet for example: At the beginning it was great, then spammers found they could post unlimited spam across the newsgroups for free, and it became shit, barring a few groups where mods had to work very hard to weed out the spam to keep them readable, but eventually collapsed, and people moved on to the new platforms.

    Reddit, was built for ads and tracking its users to start with, so the gradual creep of enshittification was no surprise there.

    And now we have nation-state backed disinformation campaigns to deal with in addition to commercial spam.

    I could see Lemmy and the Fediverse in general taking a similar path to Usenet, if the devs, admins, and mods aren’t vigilant about keeping bad actors out.

    I like the Fediverse’s guarantor feature for adding new instances, but we’ll have to see how well it holds up under assault from spammers.








  • zabadoh@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlI had a journey
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    1 year ago

    I disagree somewhat.

    A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.

    And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.

    Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?

    The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.

    Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.




  • Was part of a team that was sent to Boston for a project. While we were there, the company announced they were changing the meal expense policy from reimbursement for submitted bills to a fixed stipend.

    But that policy change was a couple of days away, so the whole team went to this fancy expensive restaurant for dinner, and we ordered expensive food and wines as one last hurrah.

    I don’t even remember where or what I ate or drank.

    I just remember it was a good time.


  • Depends.

    Lemmy and reddit are definitely more media friendly.

    I think reddit managed to capture a certain generation of users for a lot of topics, and I think its recommendation algorithm helps keep the user experience more interesting by throwing exposing the user to new groups they may be interested in. Very similar to how YouTube works.

    But like other social media, the reddit algorithm also creates a very silo-ed, radicalized user base.

    Forum users tend to be older, and I have seen a few specialty forums die off due to attrition and a lack of new users.

    I think one huge benefit of forums is the good ones are tightly moderated, so bots and trolls are quickly dealt with.

    Forums whose topics where age is a lesser factor, or where non-commercialization benefits their userbase, are lasting longer, but generally they’re getting picked off.

    I think Discord is more like a media-friendly IRC, which was never my bag so I’ll let others opine on it.