Skavau @ Skavau @piefed.social

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43

Joined

4 mo. ago

I doubt it. This is Ofcom you're talking about. "What's a Lemmy"? (Said in the voice of Sandor Clegane)

Feddit is actually (presumably) hosted in the UK, so if Ofcom actually knew what the Fediverse is they could start trying to demand they do age verification.

I very much doubt Ofcom knows what Feddit is, let alone Lemmy.

The OSA bill in the UK has caused a hamster forum to shut down over concerns of not being able to follow it (or the risks associated with non-compliance). It's an unbelievably wordy and excessive bill that is a bureaucratic nightmare for small communities.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/18/hamster-forum-local-residents-websites-shut-down-new-laws/

Look at what Reddit is saying. It's absurd:

For UK users under 18, Reddit said it has to restrict sexually explicit content; content that promotes suicide, deliberate self-injury, and eating disorders; content that incites abuse or hatred against people based upon protected characteristics; bullying content; content that promotes violence or "depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature"; content that promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries; content that encourages people to use harmful substances or substances in harmful quantities; content that shames people based on body type or physical features; and "content that promotes or romanticizes depression, hopelessness and despair."

WTF? How is this supposed to work? A system that auto-blocks all NSFW tagged content itself as a blunt instrument is viable - but half the stuff on here, on Reddit here isn't even necessarily tagged as NSFW when its posted. Are extreme mountain biking or skiing or skateboarding or other similar types videos going to be age-gated because they could be content that "promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries"? How do you verify whether or not content specifically romanticises "hopelessness" or "despair" exactly? Are Giles Corey songs now 18+? What does that even mean? Even the writing of it is Orwellian.

It also adds "depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature" ?????

Are action movie clips now going to be age-gated? Or video game clips? From TV shows and films that are PG-13?

He had changed his position after I wrote that comment I believe.

People need to be the change they want to see. I came here because I wanted to run some communities, but ultimately it was impossible on Reddit. All the names are taken, all the aging mod teams set in stone. You essentially have no meaningful opportunity to build anything new on there. In contrast, and especially with federation, the Fediverse is a completely different system. A fresh start - still after 2 years. And it has way better internal advertisement of communities than Reddit does.

And to be clear, on Reddit you can easily just shout into the wilderness at no-one. Big audience means you can get drowned out.

Apparently, reading the details on there - he might not shut it down.

No idea, but it's not an active instance so idk what happened.

I think the core concept of platforms like Reddit and Lemmy can be very valuable but it's executed very badly. There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it's more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don't even have to look at so many potential flags).

Neither of these things are logistically viable for a community site that wants any level of consistent engagement. How do you "verify" whether or not a ban from a community was objectively justified? What "tests" should there be for whether or not someone should be able to interact in a community in the first place?

Piefed and Lemmy can mostly communicate with each other. In any case, you can't really compel Lemmy to update as fast as Piefed is.

There's two factors to this. Lemmy has been slow on developing new features. Eventually people give up despite all the promises. This sort of competition was inevitable, and two - and this cannot be changed - there's a lot of resentment and resistance to using their software for political reasons.

I don't know the details of all decisions lemmy.world instance admins have made, but it seems to me that the #1 instance will always generate the most animosity because it's far more likely than any other instance to find itself in situations where they're pressed to make decisions by their userbase.

Servers with 20% of the users and 10% of the communities, with only like a dozen 'active' communities will simply hardly ever be in that position and generate no meaningful pushback so they'll always look good by comparison. Additionally, even lemmy.world community mods can generate hostility based on decisions they made despite them having nothing to do with the instance management - and since lemmy.world dominates, you're much more likely to be posting in a lemmy.world community.

I'd object and probably complain and it'd get your instance blacklisted. I'd support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.

But this isn't quite the way that community migration would work here - it's not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I'm not - whereas I'm talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.

If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn't really object to that.

Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.

For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn't be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.

I don't think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they "own" it, to be honest.

Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.

I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

Then we're at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That's the answer.

again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

Because I don't really care or know that much about Mastodon.

First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.

I don't really care about that. If the idea of communities being effectively modular becomes an accepted standard, then no-one will blink an eye at their posts on a prior community being redirected after the fact to another instance.

Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures.

We don't have constant failures though? What are you referring to here? Lemm.ee crashed out due to owner/admins burnout. That's the only major one i can think of.

I don't see near enough people on lemmy, or look at enough profiles to notice this. And I don't agree that most accounts state their location in their biography.

Sorry, I'm thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don't really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.

This is a strawman: I'm saying "We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going", which is not the same as "all instances should be paywalled".

If Piefed (or Lemmy) brings in effective community migration where an entire community can be lifted from one instance to another, then I am not bothered by future lemm.ee scenarios happening. Communities can become nomadic, and that's fine.

Again, it's not just about reddit. Also, it's about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.

That's on people needing to do that. You don't need to convince me of that. I'm doing it with music and TV. People have to be the change they want to see. But there's not really anything anyone can do about that with regards to how the audience here interact, or how much interest they have in things outside of politics.