I login to lemmy often enough that I would notice. Lemmy grew a lot overnight the last time reddit pissed off a lot of their userbase with one decision. There’s good and bad to that, it was nice to see this place grow, but it became much less friendly when redditors flocked here. I’d expect more of that.

Gotta wonder, would setting up aluminum carparks for an event or something and then removing it for any cybertrucks that park under count as vandalism?

That’s a nice truck you’ve got there. Would be a real shame if someone left it out in a light rain.

I actually don’t really care about “content manipulation” per se, I’m just trying to avoid astroturfing. Every online community has moderators. I’d prefer that the moderators are people, and people have beliefs and viewpoints that they might want to push.

If Jerry the mod from Minnesota is removing posts that don’t align with his beliefs I don’t give that the same weight as when it’s done by a multibillion dollar corporation whose belief is more profit. If fifty mods are influencing my beliefs in the exact same direction without coordinating with each other, maybe I was actually inclined to believe that in the first place. It’s coordination that makes it dangerous, and there really isn’t a return-on-investment for astroturfing a community of a few thousand users.

You could make an argument that this is a reason to be wary of admins of big instances like .world, but I’m skeptical even that has enough users yet for astroturfing to be worth investing in.

I actually think lemmy took off because the “content manipulation” the devs/admins were engaging in through the early years prevented it from becoming a toxic environment. Almost all the other alternative platforms were focused on minimal moderation and they became awful places as a result.

I found an article here for anyone else looking for a source that’s not just a clickbait image.

This kind of thing has been a long time coming, it’s why I started looking into decentralized social media in the first place. It actually feels less dangerous today than it did before the plague of GPT bots that make everyone wary of whether they’re reading something written by a human or not.

I left facebook for diaspora in the early 2010s because I felt like an algorithm could influence my opinions too easily. If I see a bunch of my friends voicing one opinion, but all of my friends who voice the opposite opinion don’t make it onto my feed, that will influence my own opinions regardless of how mindful I try to be about that. I was kind of addicted and it took strength to delete my account.

I started looking for reddit alternatives a couple years later for similar reasons. I’m really glad lemmy has finally taken off but things had to get a lot worse for that to happen.

One time I got ready to head for grad school just like any other day and I realized I forgot to close my shirt drawer and was like huh, I’ve never forgotten that before. Nine or ten hours later I get back home and Buddy has not come out to greet me, instead I see our other cat Oceanborn, who is quite antisocial. I walk into the bedroom and Oceanborn paces in front of the dresser meowing and my heart sank into my stomach when I realized what I had done. For just a moment I felt so awful but opening that drawer just to see him do an enormous yawn and then a stretch and then jump out all happy, there’s something to be said for moments of terror for someone’s well-being that instantly turn to pure comedy when you realize they’re fine.

Black cat snuggled up in my black shirts. Later that evening I saw him use his paw to open the dresser drawer and hop in again, so it turns out he had just taught himself a new trick without having the decency to inform me about it.