Fediverse can't sustain many niche communities with its level of activity. Even gaming communities on lemmy don't have enough traffic to constitute communities for individual games. I can't do after-episode TV discussions on Lemmy because there wouldn't be enough people commenting to warrant it. If I wanted to search for a D&D game in my local community (a huge US city), I couldn't do it via Lemmy.
I can do all this on reddit, which I intend for Lemmy to replace, but I can't do that yet. So I still crawl reddit for the needs Lemmy can't replace, but I'd rather never have to open reddit in the first place.
Same is true for every alternative platform on Fediverse. I'm still using all the mainstream apps I intend to replace.
Feels like AI would really excel in this. It's personalized argumentation that can basically auto complete for the most statistically likely (ie popular) version of an argument. CMV posts largely aren't unique, there's a lot of prior threads to draw from which got deltas.
Read the article instead of responding to the title. It was a university conducting formal research, which created AI bots that impersonated different identities. "As a black man..." style posts in ChangeMyView.
The subreddit mods issued a formal complaint to the university when they learned of it, but the university is choosing not to block its publishing on the grounds of lack of harm.
Yes morals won't keep you afloat. But FAANG, military defense contractors, and the other most terrible industries waaaay overpay on cost of living, and other industries are also looking to compensate well for expertise (minus some compensation for all the exploitation you wouldn't be contributing to).
What you're describing is the development of a paranoid conservative mindset in response to traumatic global events. This is how my conservative Fox News brainrot parents describe the world, and they are the type to own guns because they're deathly afraid of home intruders even though their city's crime index is among the best in the country.
Ironically, I think Fediverse suffers from a high amount of tech expertise and not enough project managers, lol. Not enough people cracking the whip saying "users said x feels confusing, what can we do about it?" then establishing timelines and check-ins. Maybe instead of Lemmy devs saying, "we accept nearly every pull request," they should say, "we want a project manager to help recruit volunteers on specific issues x, y, and z".
Very big window between participating in society via capitalism vs working directly for, eg. FAANG or a military defense contractor. It's leaping over every less shitty option to get to the end because that's what pays best. How funny that I considered writing a pre-reply for this exact comic in my original comment.
I maintain my old hotmail account, but I also have 3 different gmail accounts. I also have a google account associated with my hotmail account so I can do things like keep a calendar and use Google docs with it. I imagine lots of people don't realize you can make a Google account with an existing email, so they just switch.
There was a lot of energy around strategy when I joined in January (can you guess why? Lol). The limiting factor seems to be chosen participation. Lots of people have opinions, not many people want to organize their thoughts into, eg. an effective advertising campaign, a github pull request, or basically anything other than meaningless musing.
The point is outreach to the other platform. Sending engagement to this video on YouTube will boost it due to YouTube's algorithm. More exposure on YouTube = more potential new PeerTube users. Publishing this on PeerTube is preaching to the choir. As an alternative platform, you always need to maintain a presence on the main platform so you can encourage people looking to leave.
Lemmy is just small enough at this point where mods don't have to rely on automated tools and things like required flairs to effectively manage their community. As it develops, things like required flairs, verified submissions, etc will become more normal.
For example, I'm watching Wheel of Time, and /r/WoT requires you to flair every submission with a spoiler level (books only, show and book, show only, etc). Lemmy can't really sustain good discussion on that yet, but when it does mods will need to start aggressively removing submissions if they're not properly categorized.
Link aggregate sites do perform an actual function outside of the use case of doom scrolling. It's a way that I engage with my niche hobby groups, aggregate news, and troubleshoot niche tech issues. There's a reason why you Google a question then add "reddit" at the end.
Everyone in this post is the annoying IT person who says "why don't you just run Linux?" to people who don't even fully understand what an OS is in the first place.
There are so few open source games, they have just cemented a permanent audience for themselves for the next 10 years by announcing this.