You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

The “election” is perpetual. People will vote with their participation.

As it should always be.

I wonder where they went?

I mean, that’s how they want to be, so whatever, they can enjoy it.

But that’s not how *I* want to be - and I resented having it thrust upon me without consent, in the form of being able to make an informed choice. They do not clearly state how they are, yet they are that way, hence the disconnect.

Like any authoritarian regime, they have drunk their own cool-aid and they seem to both not acknowledge it whilst simultaneously also flaunting it proudly - i.e. how they are looks to be by design, not ignorance or whatever.

And ofc the obligatory caveat that not all people on those servers are that way - e.g. you were there, until you weren’t anymore:-P. But it does form a trend. And I for one would rather that people be able to make an informed choice. Like someone go there if they want, but don’t you come here and tell me how to be.

Yes an echo chamber provides value to them in terms of an emotional reinforcement, though it’s dangerous b/c what gets reinforced becomes thereby divorced from logic. i.e., “might makes right”, which works so long as you ignore the alternative that “the pen (Reason) is mightier than the sword (Might)” - i.e. the value is purely local amongst themselves, who choose to refuse to see outside.

Even so, the code for the Fediverse came from the guy who started lemmygrad.ml iirc, and it was freely offered to the world not in spite of but b/c of that belief in communistic philosophical principles. In contrast, Reddit and most other alternatives started here in the USA - like squabbles to name one (looks to now be renamed to squabblr or something?) - did not offer their sourcecode freely, and instead tried to monetize their user base, and this too not in spite of but b/c of their own beliefs in capitalistic principles.

As long as they are honest about it though, I’m fine with them. The problem is that they are not, nor are they respectful to others… so I ban them and move on with my life. I am not kidding: if I could not have banned them, I would have left the Fediverse entirely - they are that annoying. So being able to easily improve my Fediverse experience by 95% with 1-2 instance blocks (lemmygrad.ml is often blocked by default, and many others though seemingly fewer likewise also block hexbear.net) is wonderful!:-)

Is this the new “Honey Badger Don’t Care” meme?

Oh I did not know that. Sometimes the answer to “where would you go, if you were a troll” may just happen to be the same answer as “where would you go, if you were not a troll”:-).

Meh, to be fair, communism gave us all the likes of Mastodon and Lemmy, whereas capitalism gave us all Twitter/X and Reddit so… it’s not like I’m knocking the politics even, so much as the extremely annoying manner in which those thoughts are handled, sometimes.

Imagine a Karen who regardless of actual right vs. wrong, thinks they are right, but more importantly just enjoys slamming it into people’s faces. Like, if you really think that you are correct, why work so hard to convince people of that “fact” - you catch more flies with honey than vinegar - and who exactly are you trying to convince bully even?

Likewise even a factually correct endpoint can be made into part of an incorrect statement if arrived at via a false chain of logical deduction - i.e., even a stopped watch is right twice a day, but that doesn’t mean that you should trust the watch from then on!? A statement that includes a logical fallacy, even if deployed in order to defend a true statement, is still false, even if the underlying fact also happened to be true.

And if there is anything I am learning from the internet, it is that trolling exists, yet not everyone is a troll, and it improves my mental sanity >95% to block such. I used to be proud of never blocking anyone, ever. I grew up though, in seeing how others refuse to grow.:-D

You might try an experiment and make an account somewhere, and see how different some posts and their complement of comments look, in terms of which instances you may choose to block, and also which individuals may have blocked your instance in return…

Well *I* don’t, thus keep in mind that I may be summarizing here the reasons that others do incorrectly &/or unfairly, but from what I understand people are saying:

(1) often when people get extremely argumentative (aka bat shit insane crazy trolling) it is from there. Who wants to talk to someone who is rude, condescending, and doesn’t listen in the slightest to your POV before loudly proclaiming how very wrong you are, even while using logical fallacies (such as strawman) as they do so?:-P Counterpoint: that can happen on any sufficiently large instance e.g. lemmy.world too? Though it does seem to happen more often on lemmy.ml for whatever reason.

(2) it may be relevant (tbh I’m not entirely sure how though?) that it leans fairly hardcore to what many people e.g. in the USA would consider an extreme leftist viewpoint, as in so far to the left that it may even become uncomfortable to someone living in a society that leans more rightwards even if the person in it considers themselves an “extreme leftist” in relation to that center point. Along these lines, are “memes” merely political propaganda that happens to be drawn in a cartoonish form? (Though this is an argument pertaining to merely a community, not an entire instance.)

Thank you so much for the update. Oh wow what a turn-around. I can only guess he was desperate to grow the site and did whatever he thought would help his profits. I really do enjoy the mode of thinking behind the Fediverse so much more!:-)

There are several closed group options or other closed source ones that aim to be just like Reddit in practice but not exactly it in theory. Ironically the Reddit alternatives sub on Reddit is probably the best place to get such a list 😜.

I enjoyed Squabbles for a bit - it was described at the time as toxically non-toxic as in very much anti-hate speech, though I don’t know how it’s fared recently. At the end of the day though it’s just one guy’s project, and while he’s no Huffman, still the entire thing turns around him, very unlike the Fediverse that can become anything we want it to be.

If you do remain on Lemmy, learn which things to block bc that will improve your experience substantially. Just blocking lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net improved mine 95%, and ironically some people (not me) also block Lemmy.ml. You will come to find what works for you, I am just saying that the experience varies enormously depending on that one factor!

Exactly, yeah like I’m not trying to remove myself entirely from “society” - the physical law of entropy means that people need to put in EFFORT to make things happen, and that deserves to be recognized, plus the dev should have a proper means of support to be able to buy food, shelter, etc.

I even tip at restaurants wherever I go. I don’t know if I’ll be okay in the future - I don’t own a home or know my retirement plans, but I don’t think a few dollars will make the difference, but it can boost someone else’s day and that’s really something:-).

I really like Netflix’s player, their CC options, and the quality of their streaming service. It’s just too bad about the content going all over the place, and THAT part is actually not their fault.

Though I just could not do that for Google Music, when they pay the original artists so extremely little:-(.

They are a company - their obligations to their customers begin and end with extraction of funds to disburse to their shareholders:-(.

Back in the early days when they were trying to ingratiate themselves to the public, they put on a good face - “don’t be evil” and all, but the mask is off now. Even now, they still really truly are more ethical (or at least might be, maybe?) than some others, e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/11951288? (but that is not saying very much at all, to compare an evil corporation like Google to a full-on fairly criminal-like corporation that steals artists & other people’s content against their will; and I only say “criminal-like” b/c the aging geriatrics in various governments around the world barely use computers much less understand its terminology such as “mobile device”, so the existing legal structures remain mired half a century behind what is going on in today’s actual world).

Also, I am weird - I will do things like pay for Netflix even though I haven’t watched it in months, preferring the high seas that has more content that is no longer there:-P, b/c I want to support continued development of new content (though TV & movies are becoming a dated art form nowadays). That said, YouTube is a VERY different situation, b/c while they do have server costs and what-not, they also are one of the lowest (not THE lowest, but among them… iirc?) contributors back to the artists who actually make the stuff. So a better way would be to find artists that you like, and send them money directly where they would get 100% of the revenue.

Anyway, I like your post that shows that there is more than one reason to support such apps - not just b/c of the content but also more than that too.

“Can’t compete” => won’t, ftfy :-P

Google got their money, so they are simply “done”, unlike software made by people who genuinely care about stuff, and donate their time for free to improve it.

Lol, well *I* thought it was funny:-P. You might get fewer fake internet point reductions if you threw in a /s.

I would consider going to https://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show when Jon Stewart returns (that man has such grace and class, nobody since comes close), if they offer full-episode videos within a week of airing whereas YouTube does not. My point here is that there needs to be a REASON to go somewhere. YouTube combined both the “video hosting” and also “content aggregation” components, so even if we replace the former - and yes, some of us really WOULD choose to go to 8 different websites, for 8 different pieces of content that are worthwhile - it would get that much harder for someone to even know that the videos on the other places exist.

On top of that, when you just happen to be on YouTube, it suggests something that you might want to watch - a related video, e.g. George Carlin perhaps - and you can enjoy watching that. Whereas 8 different websites are going to have at most 1/8th of the content, and probably several orders of magnitude less than that realistically. So as long as the ads are not TOO burdensome - let’s say limited to 5s each and at most 2 of them - they will “win”.

Also, I really do want Jon Stewart to get credit for my having watched one of his videos, yet watching the identical video from like Vanced or Piped or something deprives him of those tracking metrics, which are worth a lot more than mere money (which at this point he’d likely just donate to charity or some such).

YouTube wormed their way into our hearts, like an abusive spouse, and now just dares us to divorce them - they push the edge as far as they possibly can, knowing that we hate them now yet not caring one bit, unless enough of us will ACTUALLY go. At which point they’ll lawyer or buy out the other place that we would go to, in an effort to drag us back in, kicking and screaming. It’s a horribly abusive model for a “relationship”, where our consent really doesn’t matter at all, only what they can get away with, by any means necessary. And the sad fact is that many of us have greatly reduced the amount that we watch such videos entirely, but that makes next to no impact on them at all. So long as they can sell US as the product to advertising companies by being “THE” place to put their ads, they will continue their parasitic chokehold on our society.

I like Lemmy too - it is not even trying to replicate other social media sites (well, it is but it cannot succeed, so we accept that about it), and while it has enormous technical hurdles, e.g. every single time I visit my instance in via a browser, whether desktop or mobile, I have to re-login again, and sometimes (rarely) even while browsing internally. That’s… not ideal, though it’s still a million times better than the toxic filth crowd that is Reddit (having more to do with culture than technology ofc, and yet the two are not entirely unconnected). Whereas other places, such as Mastodon, just seem doomed internally b/c by their very nature “everyone else” has to go there too or it just won’t work. Otherwise, you still need like a Xitter account to follow them, and a Facebook account to follow them, and so on (I actually do not have either, but I understand that some people will feel the need to).

Buying in brick-and-morter is facilitated by having a car, even in a city, otherwise it gets really rough trying to go without that, especially for even the smallest furniture items like a chair that you’d basically have to pay for delivery. It can be done, but does get difficult.

Back to YouTube though, yeah you go where you can find the goods. I haven’t used torrents for almost a decade, ever since getting a letter from my ISP about usage of those tracked ports. Fortunately streaming - yes I literally have a Netflix account, plus the occasional whatever - covers so very much ground, if not all, and for the tiniest fraction of the amount of effort involved in keeping up with things e.g. setting up and paying for a proxy. It’s literally as easy as searching for 1-2-3!:-P

Do you know any replacements for these btw?

Like Lemmy somewhat replaces “social media”, except I also used Facebook as a bit of a LinkedIn (b/c the latter was never good, it was instead always predatory), but people in general simply aren’t going to make an account on Lemmy, no matter how much you might wish that.

And Amazon, I basically don’t buy stuff anymore except from brick-and-morter stores these days - it’s like I’ve gone backwards two decades b/c you can’t trust anything online anymore! (maybe the online equivalent of the brick-and-morter I suppose)

For Google I use DuckDuckGo. Ironically AI is poised to somewhat clean up search results by putting those up top, except soon enough those will start to become monetized too, like you can have the “free” search results but if you want the AI-enhanced ones then you gotta poney up the dough, in a manner analogous to YouTube these days.

As for how all this happened, the story that I heard was that companies exploited legal loopholes wherein if they reinvested their profits into creating new ventures, they could effectively avoid paying a great deal of their taxes. Thus, like mushrooms beneath a forest, they grew and grew and grew and grew and now you cannot take one step without them lying underneath. Like how virtually the only competitor to iOS these days is Android, which at one point was an open-source project!!! They lay in wait, pretending to be a friend - maybe even thinking themselves that they were - until it was time to monetize, and then they pounced. Before YouTube, there were several other video hosting sites. But. Not. Anymore. They under-cut the competition, “donating” their profits from other enterprises into making them awesome, and now they own us, instead of the other way around. And now today, as you say, there are all these 10, 11, 12 minute videos (b/c there’s an incentivization to hit that “10” mark), out of something that would have worked far better as a 1-5 sentence text paragraph, so now you have to watch 10 minutes of unsearchable video to find the same information that 30 seconds of reading would have told you far better. Don’t get me wrong, SOME videos are freaking AMAZING! But most are total crap.

And… I do not know of a replacement for YouTube. Yes, I know of some other video hosting sites, some even grab YouTube videos directly, but nothing else comes even remotely close to allow a realistic comparion. e.g. Kursegat is AMAZING, and they put their videos onto YouTube, for their own monetization. I can bypass YouTube, but to watch what, not just go where?

And TV too as you said - there’s very little worth watching, see e.g. Stranger Things. Oh well, we all need to work our butts off anyway, to save up for the impending apocolypse or whatever.

At one point I literally walked away from a cushy job to try and help people (thankfully I got it back when that did not pan out), and do you know what I learned? That you cannot help people who refuse to be helped. Ignorance is trivially easy to cure (by comparison) - all it takes is knowledge. Whereas obstinancy… I do not know that there is a cure. MAYBE motivation, through personal pain unlocking a willingness to consider new possibilities that comfort previously made unnecessary? If so, then there is “hope” for us after all… b/c we are all about to suffer great pain as the internet, and in the wider view the enshittification of MANY areas of life, continue to get MUCH worse.

No matter who wins the next USA election. Though not equally.

I did not make it but I presume it is old yes, bc e.g. Amazon at one point used to have trustable reviews, but it’s been a minute since then!? I assume intent means production effort e.g. making things shared on Facebook takes seconds, whereas to shoot a porno takes at least minutes to hours. An alternate explanation could be to have intent be a surrogate for Web Traffic - although in that case, wouldn’t Facebook be much higher? Unless this is once again bc it is so old, prior to when it started taking over people’s lives e.g. games that stay-at-home mothers could play all throughout the day. Similarly, YouTube at one point looked poised to take over television itself back when the videos made were more of less simply using YouTube as another delivery vehicle, but they were funny as hell, or perhaps informative like a college class, etc. Now… I don’t know what happened, but TV sucks and YouTube sucks and we all merely look at memes, apparently.:-P

Anyway I liked how it shoved porn into only a single corner, as in it is high in one dimension but not all such, but for the rest of the details yeah it is too old to have any further relevance to modern society:-).

That is only one corner of it.

moonleay is already fairly cool - maybe use that!?:-P