I think this person is either a troll or doesn’t understand the nature of these situations because Leni is, in her own words “a non-transgender woman” and also is not being slandered but has actually engaged in bad faith interactions like Nazi apologia, and literal transphobia herself.

Dragonfucker is a weird and uncomfortable situation because people were and still are misgendering them (including ironically OOP) but dragonfucker was not ejected from many Lemmy instances and communities because of their pronouns but because of misgendering, sealioning, and literal harassment of users of users.

Looking at it more I really don’t think this person is acting in good faith at all, since they chose the worst people to represent in their arguments. I absolutely do think that Lemmy, especially on bigger instances or ones with more agnostic moderation, have problems with transphobia and bigotry as a whole (especially of the thinly veiled variety). But I would never suggest that two of the most prolific trolls on this platform are innocent victims.

I agree. Their comment is probably one of the more useless comments I’ve encountered on the subject.

I think the story of Whatsapp should’ve taught people that capitalist fuckery and living long enough to become the villain are bigger threats than people give credit for, and Signal is just as vulnerable to this as WhatsApp was. They’ve also fought against any ways that it could be mitigated, they fought and are still fighting unofficial clients (moxie himself went around harassing people to stop), they fought any form of decentralization or interoperability with other servers and self-hosting.

All things that could make signal a bit more resistant towards something like what happened with WhatsApp, yet they’ve all been rejected in favor of exclusive control on the app (and for a long time it was GMS tied on the PlayStore) and exclusive control of the the network. Two things that don’t exactly bode well for the future.

Remember kids, if someone makes a centralized app or messaging claiming to be a savior of privacy and security, you should be skeptical of them and their integrity. Really you should be skeptical of anyone making grand promises of privacy and security, especially boastful ones. Though decentralized services are less risky than centralized ones, and that’s why I recommend people use Matrix instead of Signal.

Matrix still has problems but it being decentralized eliminates many of the corruption issues by simply using a server not affiliated with the creators.

Niche is working. Not everything has to be market dominating

I’m sorry but this is one of the more terrible takes I’ve seen people barf out on lemmy an the fediverse as a whole, the idea that “gRoWTh iSN’t iMPoRtaNt bECaUse LEmmY isN’t a cOMpAnY”. The fact is this is a stupid argument because being niche hurts a social media platform’s ability to be a social media, it hinders the amount of interaction you can get, and it stifles more niche communities to the point they can’t even get off the ground at all.

This whole thing about growth not being important is one of those Fediverse talking points that needs to be shot dead right here, right now.

Gatekeeping platforms and trying to keep out the “laugh and upvote” crowd is not helping anyone, it’s hurting this platform, because people not getting interaction on their posts, or their communities being dead in the water because not enough if any people here are interested really kills motivation, and is likely part of the reason we saw a dip in Lemmy activity after the initial Reddit API exodus. Why do you want to gatekeep these people so much anyway? Most of them are only going to laugh, upvote, and consume content here, chances are you won’t directly see most of them. Yet they are one of the more important parts of a social media platform since they give it life and energy and activity, that just wouldn’t be anywhere near the same without them.

This is going to be a big problem because like it or not, it is the large group of “laugh and upvote” people who make platforms successful, the ones who never create content or have strict dedication, yet still influence the platform by way of voting patterns and occasional comments.

Without these people the platform ends up being emptier, and less people will want to create content when they get less attention. So the elitist attitude that “They need to be dedicated to join, fill out the application to determine your worthiness” ends up hurting the Fediverse much more than it helps it.

I don’t think this is very fair towards them, as far as all the instances go they are the best in terms of ease of signup, especially considering many instances out there are manual review with application questions. Compared to that they’re significantly better than most.

I know some people have bitter feelings towards the idea of not gatekeeping instances to hardcore dedicated enthusiasts but if we want the Fediverse to be successful we need to be able to appeal to regular people who just want to enter username, email, password, probably a captcha too, and signup.

Technical problems will always happen but all things considered they’ve been very good about fixing them.

I agree with what other people are saying, the whole phone number requirement of Signal isn’t great since, for the most part phone numbers are intended to link to your real world identity. That means they are a very big weak link.

Also let us not forget that Signal is a centralized service run by one company. They have been very resistant in the past to the idea of decentralization and interoperability. I’m already very skeptical of people who claim to be a savior or hero of Privacy and security lie this, even more so when it’s a centralized service. You do know that WhatsApp started out like Signal did right? Look where they are now. You cannot trust a centralized service like Signal, especially one that forces you to provide real world identification. Signal can just as easily be sold and backdoored like WhatsApp was, decentralized services are much more resilient to that kind of thing.

Or, you know, obvious astroturfing as an excuse to promote alternatives is against the rules.

The irony of that statement is that it ultimately seems like they are the ones astroturfing here.

Everyone conviently forgets about MAC address spoofing. Some operating systems let you set a Random MAC address on each connection. It’s great.

How is it that there are people still unaware of this?

So do it anyway, not like they could ever know. It’s not a very enforceable thing is it.

And the name is derived from an awful slur too. The history of that is really messed up.

Obligatory Goldberg link since lots of people these days are still unaware that SteamWorks DRM is easily bypassed these days (you don’t even need to patch the files, you can just bypass it).

I have seen instances ask for very long essays before, maybe they stopped doing it or aren’t around anymore but really the idea of interviewing users before signup isn’t conducive to having a social platform with a thriving userbase, it’s conducive to having small private clubs.

Some idiot is probably going to say something about growth not being important but that is blatantly not true, no one wants to use a platform with a small handful of people in it, and normies aren’t going to want to join a platform they have to beg to join. It’s better than invite only like Tildes sure, but not by much.

Email verification and captcha are good, they’re annoying and could be better but they’re still good. I was more thinking along the lines of not having a questionnaire with manual review, to be fair the way lemm.ee does it isn’t that bad but the way other instances do it by asking new users to play 20 questions or share their life story isn’t welcoming and will do more to hinder the migration from Reddit and adoption of the Fediverse.

It’s a shame that there is so much potential friction on sign-up, but at the same time, I don’t see us reducing the friction on lemm.ee any time soon, because this is the lesser evil compared to bot sign-ups etc that we have seen in the past.

Is there any reason why an automoderation system isn’t used to weed out malicious actors, i.e. downvote trolls, spammers, people posting suspicious links. sh.itjust.works already does something like this on their server to deal with trolls, bots, and spammers. They can probably explain it better if you’re interested.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

You can play Minecraft using custom Launchers that don’t check for account premium status, unless you play on big servers which require premium accounts it’ll work basically the same, and if you wish to play online you can find plenty of servers which support playing online without premium status.

Lemmy.ml isn’t blocked on pawb.social unfortunately. Only the other two are, and lemmy.ml is decently problematic even if it isn’t as much as the other two.

I agree, this is a big problem with future Fediverse adoption, and a big reason why servers like lemmy.world are unfortunately so big. Not only does it limit the ability for new people to sign up but it limits the pool of existing users and interaction significantly, especially when the majority of servers do it.

I wish more people would publicly discuss this problem and that efforts would be made to make more servers instant-signup friendly.

I think the signup issues are mostly due to inexperienced admins not knowing how or that they can set up automated moderation for spam, or just not configuring their email server correctly.

Once we have better Anti-spam tooling that is more user-friendly it’ll be easier to get people onboard, and really only specialized niche instances should be using the application process, otherwise it does hinder growth and openness as a community. Already talked about this in my other comment but it is not good for Lemmy or the Fediverse as a whole to treat every instance like a club with applications to sign up, it limits people and makes it harder for normies to join, which needs to happen otherwise communities lack the life and activity they otherwise would and it becomes less useful as a social platform.