I don’t necessarily agree that decentralized is fractured by design, nor that “working as intended” means that it’s the best solution for this/every situation.

I’m saying that as we decentralize, we get both advantages and disadvantages. I’m saying that this is a situation where we can’t both have our cake and eat it too.

For example:
We could decentralize communities themselves, preventing them from fracturing. Instead of having communities hosted on a single instance, communities could be feeds aggregating all posts tagged as belonging to that community. Then if you defederate an instance you simply stop seeing posts from users in that instance.
But then good-faith mods are defanged and can no longer protect vulnerable community members from antagonistic actors.

I think my straw example tradeoff is a bad one, that’s too much decentralization of power.

I actually already discussed that if you go back and read the comment that you’re replying to

But again that fractures the community.

You lose all the community history, and not everyone migrates to the new community. You end up with a bunch of new splinter communities, none of which have critical mass to survive.

I’m talking about systemic solutions for the general problem of bad-actor mods.

Defederating an instance is fracturing the community which difficult for a community to withstand with our current user numbers.

Giving mods less power, such as making communities themselves defederated, makes problems for good-faith mods who are trying to protect vulnerable community members.

It’d be neat if the community itself could vote to migrate to a new instance, but that’d be so fraught with abuse that I can’t see it actually working.

I don’t think there is a solution.
Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization. Avoiding the influence of bad-actor mods needs more decentralization. The two seem fairly mutually exclusive. Or rather, they trade off against each other.

With more users, having a fractured community wouldn’t be a huge problem, because they could all have critical mass. But with the current user base that is generally not feasible, even for really popular topics.

Yeah, I know I shouldn’t expect much from a site like that, but since it’s shared here I felt like I should shine a little light on the deeper issues.

This kind of superficial “journalism” rage-baiting boomers for clicks is really frustrating to me. Shit like this is brain-rot at least as bad as Tiktok is. It has always existed, but the extent to which it has replaced actual analysis and investigation is depressing.

Yes, the parents are partially at fault, of course. But as you indicated, there are significant societal pressures that force families into dynamics like this and it’s not realistic to expect an overwhelming majority to be able to resist it, alone. And since we’re not about to engage in class-based eugenics, it’s up to society to give them a serviceable ladder to climb out of their situation.

So, TLDR; I wanted to shine a light on deeper issues, so that people don’t think that this is solely a moral failing of parents, and that they DO understand that we have a collective responsibility to help families.

I mean, that’s kind of my point - in situations like that, it seems like using Tiktok is small potatoes compared to the more significant issues that’d cause problem behavior. The Tiktok consumption is just another symptom, and if it wasn’t tiktok it’d be some other escape mechanism.

To me, the article seems lazy, complaining about a superficial problem without spending effort to even consider or mention underlying root causes that could give rise to it and must be solved first.

And to be clear I’m not blaming the parents, they’re not the “root cause” I’m talking about. They’re victims too, in large part. They and their kids are stuck in a harmful cycle, and people with the ability to break that cycle are unwilling to do so.

What does “on tiktok” mean?

Unsupervised with their own accounts? I feel like that’s difficult to believe. Watching a few tiktoks before dinner with their parents? That doesn’t really strike me as a problem.

While I don’t entirely disagree with the author, I feel like this is a far too superficial look at what is a larger societal problem: young people have checked out.

He makes the argument that mental health is in decline, and I’m not sure if that’s true or we’ve just removed the stigma from therapy… But of more concern to me is that young people just DGAF, and I think that’s because older generations have left nothing for younger generations to inherit, besides ruin. Kids 5-7 aren’t gonna understand that, but they’re gonna pick up the vibes from their parents.

Language snobs will be snobby.

Meanwhile sublinks will enjoy a much much larger potential developer pool; how many people are actually proficient in Rust? It’s an awesome language and it’s getting more popular, but it’s nowhere near the experience base of java.

Why? Why are humans who use threads so repulsive to you that you leave an entire federated social network just because some people used a particular server?

That’s not how federation and mastodon works, and you know that very well.

Simply don’t follow anyone on threads if you don’t wanna see thread content. But who TF cares where the content comes from?

Free cum extremist?!?! Sounds exhilarating

But like…

Free cum extremist?!? Porn and radical political views in the same place? I’m intrigued!

I’m honestly most curious about wolfgirl because that just sounds like furry shit, but nobody hates furries that much, so what dog whistle am I missing???

Some of these im… Curious about. Presumably the names are dog whistles (when they’re not just openly stating their purpose)… But IDK the whistle so I’m curious af.

Not curious enough to get put on some list by actually checking them out though lol