Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it's inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

I think it's sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.

The algorithm doesn't actually care that it's promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people's eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using "not interested" and "block this channel" buttons doesn't make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you're teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!

The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP's mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). "Youtube with no ads!" is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.

Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit

Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don't like "magazine" for a community)

Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin

This is not a good thing. Part of the problem is third-party apps like Sync and other Fediverse advocates that direct Reddit users to sign up on only one instance, lemmy.world. This is understandable to keep things simple for the Redditors but it hurts lemmy.world (cost and performance-wise) and the Fediverse as a whole (centralization) to have a lot of accounts on one instance. I hope lemmy.world can make an announcement or guide to encourage users to spread out to more instances.

Their reasons are much more selfish than that. They insist on only having 4 moderators while never scaling up, and they don't like how federation allows users from other instances to post on their instance because it disrupts their rigid ideal community vibe. According to their suggestions on "improving moderation tooling", the ideal federation setup is that their users can post on other instances, but other instances' users can't post on theirs, so they can save time on moderation work. The moderation work of other instance admins for their users doesn't matter, clearly.

Ironic that three people downvoted this. But I agree, a "no downvotes" rule is designed to avoid disagreement and conflict, which is impossible on a public forum without extremely restricted expression. If the point is to be always be nice, why not disable open commenting and make users select their replies from a list of canned positive comments. 100% safety and positivity.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

This made me realize that I relied on Reddit a lot to decide on making tech-related purchases. I assumed that the contributors to Reddit's tech subs are enthusiasts who genuinely want to help others improve their systems and avoid scams. Thank you Reddit for being so open about sneaking sponsored content into discussions so that I can stop trusting your site!

Meta's main income stream is data mining and they will take advantage of federation to collect data (not metadata, but human-generated content is still very valuable for AI model training) of users on federated instances. Any content that federates over to this instance will be cached on Meta servers where they can do whatever they like with it. There is no legal data protection framework for content retrieved from federated networks and Meta's lawyers will try to argue that federating with this platform counts as giving consent to the platform's TOS. Meta platforms introduce lots of advertising and bots to the network. Don't just ignore this platform, give them the Gab treatment.

He has American citizenship and lives in America, he's talking about America here. And I promise you that other countries, yes even those in the magical fantasy land of Europe, also have lots of political drama despite having more than two parties in the government (They tend to form alliances based on left/right and split into two blocks anyway).

I remember when Reddit's FAQ had the question "Is there a mobile app for Reddit?" and the answer was "No, we don't have a mobile app and have no intention to develop one, but you can choose from a list of third-party clients". And what do they mean by "not fairly paid", does Reddit not already have a working monetization system with paid awards and profile customizations? Not enough people paying $80 to put a sticker next to a comment?

Good riddance. The karma system on Reddit is worthless. It's supposed to let users flag spam and bot content, but it's used as an agree/disagree button in reality. Users still lose posting privileges from having low karma and have to farm it in "free upvotes" subreddits... which spammers and bots happily abuse.