¬(Yes; libreddit is more than a read-only frontend for Reddit)

Personally, I like “Scaled” and “Hot” the most, but I also check “New” to discover communities that may otherwise get lost (and, to ban spam/bot/troll accounts along the way as well) - and lastly, I also have a look at “Top/Day” at least once a day, to see what’s the “talk of the town”.

It definitely feels like we had some growth in proper, organic activity. Just a few months ago, it definitely felt like “Top/12hrs” was the best one for the amount of content that was being posted. But for a while now, “Hot” and “Scaled” feel much better than that one.

I get it, especially for users that have always been more on the lurking side (and this isn’t judging, that has always been the majority for any platform) - it can be a bit empty. As someone who has been here since 4 years ago (now I’m on a new account on my own instance), the first two years of that basically just visiting every few months out of curiosity, I can slowly see more diverse communities popping up recently, beyond the established strong points of Lemmy (FOSS, Politics, LGBTQ+ memes). And this time, unlike the first Reddit exodus, I have more confidence in them not immediately dying from lack of conviction and activity.

But of course, the sheer gargantuan user count of Reddit comes with many advantages. For many obscure topics, there will still be enough people, that a sufficient amount of “super users” congregate to provide content and moderation, so that lurkers can usually participate and still post sporadically. The latter is of course also a giant advantage, millions of people posting occasionally still provide lots and lots of posts and comments. And of course, it will take a long time and more fuckups for Reddit not simply being “the default” if you want to create a forum for a community around something. (Also, waaay too much of our knowledge is on that platform, we carelessly gave answers to help fellow humans, and now the answers are on Reddit for them to appear in countless internet searches, and for them to do with as they please.)

Where Lemmy currently has its strong suits is enthusiasm of parts of the user base, fewer issues getting noticed at all among the millions of (bot/re)-posts, and where there is activity, I’ve usually seen it panning out being able to handle actual discussions. (Though, lets not kid ourselves, of course the Reddit-like structure also still encourages circle jerks. I don’t even think that is that large of a problem, but it’s a reality.)

If you feel you end up having the energy to keep a community alive through dry spell, sure, be the change you seek, but it’s okay and understandable if you don’t want to invest the energy and work (at the moment). In that case, just stay tuned, check out the communities that pop up in all/scaled or all/new for interesting ones currently getting more traction, the Threadiverse will take a long time before it can replace a giant like reddit, but it has a few good stones for its sling up its sleeve.

Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.

I think that is utlimately valid - although I think the other options are all coming with their own problems. You will then have to instead live with the interests of tech corporations (including nonprofits who ultimately need funding) and advertisers collecting your data, whose interests will ultimately not be much less malignant - or small free software projects of a sometimes quite limited scope. The latter, I think, is also a valid niché, but will leave the overall standards of the internet to corporate interests.

Considering how the CEO here acts for Brave, in my opinion, this is not simply about him being an asshole or being politically questionable. To me - everything about him screams “grifter taking advantage of people’s legitimate concerns” - and he has a material interest in your data as well. Brave always felt to me like trying to sell and market privacy instead of proving to me, in their fundamentals, that they actually have my interests in mind.

Which is why I, personally, do not really understand choosing Brave above LibreWolf (or Tor Browse, occasionally), if privacy is your #1 priority.

Oh, yes, it wasn’t a direct answer, also, I’m not the person you answered to. Ultimately, my comment was more meant as an overall addition to the discussion, building on the idea of what a solution to:

Which I think is one of the big issues with OSS projects - many are based around a very small number of people being motivated to work on something for free. And it dies if that stops.

might be.

But as answers to your two points. #1 - I have no idea where they got that from, myself #2 - I think you answered that one yourself rather well, and I wanted to build on that one.

Sorry if that was confusing, my brain is also good at confusing myself at times, can’t imagine how that is for others at times.

I can somewhat understand the overall criticism, because Librewolf - as far as my understanding goes - would be in trouble without the work being done on the code upstream.

Personally, I know that this does not exist (yet), and to some people that put privacy above everything else with a more libertarian slant, this might sound like the worst option imaginable, but my “dream” way to handle it within the current economic system would be:

Have an open source, FOSS base, web-engine and all, developed with public funds similar to public broadcasting in many countries (Bonus if carried by international organisations instead of just national. Think a UN institution like UNESCO or WHO, but focused on making the internet accessible neutrally and to all). On top of that code, projects that want to put privacy above all else could still feasibly built projects like LibreWolf (an even Brave), relying somewhat comfortably on secure fundamentals.

I know, sounds like a dream, which it is at this point. But every other solution within the current economic status quo I personally thin of, I see no chance of enshittification not always encroaching and creating crises, if not outright taking over.

Oh, just to not accidentally create the wrong impression - that’s not me, I just shared the video and didn’t want to editorialise the title. If you want to give them your message (that I think is important, indeed) - you can follow the link and should be able to comment with many different activitypub account options (PeerTube itself, Mastodon, etc.) - sadly, I don’t think Lemmy is possible yet, because its design isn’t user-centric but content-centric, and it lacks some of those AP-capabilities.

Ah, that makes the context more understandable. Also, good job on providing that service, I think it’s actually great to have that in the ecosystem.

I do not put any limits on the database and even my lowest capacity plans have a very generous soft-limit 100GB media storage.

Actually, wow, yeah, having a quick look at your site, that is a very good and competitive offer for these prices and services provided, all things considered.

Yeah, I personally wouldn’t choose them, but I think they do fill a niche for non-techie users, who will gladly pay a (sometimes hefty) premium for having less hassle on the setup and maintenance sides, when compared to getting A VPS or dedicated server somewhere (or setting smth up at home).

Their videos are also usually pretty informative, including e.g. the one about managing mastodon storage - since it’s topical here.

im sorry that i sound like trolling i hoped that it doesnt sound like that

The dilemma is: it’s impossible to tell from the outside, which is why I try to give advice while not indulging potential troll interests (e.g. spreading the post and forum as much as possible, creating concern). If you truly are in that situation, I don’t envy you, because of course part of those trolls’ interest is also to make things as hard as possible for people that really are caught up in it.

So, sadly, I don’t have any personal experience concerning giving tips to journalists. Looking up “giving anonymous tips to journalists” on DuckDuckGo gives a few potential links, though most are directed at whistleblowers in administration and corporations:

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/sharing-sensitive-leaks-press/ - this is a guide that seems to go through things to consider pretty well. If you do your own search, you will find links to specific outlets as well, for example Reuters here and the NYT here. If you have reason to believe, that the US altogether is not a good idea, European outlets are also always able to understand English material, of course.

Again, I have my doubts, and sadly there is little to remove them, and I wouldn’t want you to doxx yourself. If you really are in that situation, just know that the downvotes and potential removal are not an indication of judgement of you, personally.

If you want to ask about something like this in the future, best try to hide anything sensitive behind spoiler tags or content warnings where available and not post links to the forum in any way openly - reduct the onion link itself for example, and only keep it available to people you trust to not spread it in malicious ways. And only show the topic list behind a disclaimer, of how this can be disturbing to read - those warnings aren’t there for censorship, but to protect victims/survivors of abuse, which is precisely, why it is a troll tactic to try and spread them without such warnings/disclaimers.

Sadly, it is hard to say if you are serious, or if this post is made by a troll, who wants to spread disturbing material for the sake of hurting people. The latter assumption is also the most likely explanation, why it was removed. Again, if you are serious, this is a catch-22, but do not spread this impulsively, this also goes to anyone reading this wanting to share it randomly out of concern. Firstly, you will have to add Content Warnings, the video you linked and topics discussed alone are enough to cause serious PTSD triggers. This, again, would be another factor why it gets removed (and why a troll wants to spread it).

Again: I am going to treat this like in good faith, even though I am aware that a troll wanting to perversely spread the fucked up shit happening to revel in the power and untouchability is sadly the more likely option. The “billionaire friends” are, for example, a bit sus in how the sentence goes.

In theory: Depending on where you live, the police and such would be the first to go to. If you have reason to assume that this will put you in danger, even an anonymous tip to journalists can help (including the material you posted here, but not in a semi-public forum, where it will reasonably be seen as trolling). I am sadly, no expert on who exactly to contact, but neither you, nor random internet people, should be the people handling this. That is what investigative Journalism flanked by therapists to help them go through shit like that is for.

Speaking of therapists, that would be another first line of people to talk to.

Sadly, speaking from my own experience from watching journalists in Germany investigating forums like that - the police often just let them stay up, partly out of incompetence, partly out of wanting the next success in catching people, instead of preventing forums to exist to begin with.

Now, again, I am here assuming you are serious and in good faith here, maybe against my better judgement, but to the other people coming across this post: Don’t get concerned into spreading this post simply “as is” impulsively. Chances are still higher, this is a troll getting somewhat off from spreading disturbing material.

Not sure what this is about

If I were to give them the biggest empathy I can muster, they may just remove it as silently as possible out of fear of having to moderate the comments of bound-to-be popular post according to reddit’s increasingly stupid rules of discourse.

Still unjustified censorship, very worrysome - but I could on an emotional level understand being fed up with everything at this point and just powertripping because “fuck everything, I don’t want to deal with anything like this, I am not getting paid enough/at all”.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.

I can’t be certain in this case, but the usual suspects are not being connected to as many servers (e.g. not scraping some because of robots.txt settings), delays in scraping the stats, or excluding some servers consciously because their stats are deemed a bit suspicious.

The one shown is from join-lemmy:

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Also of interest for people that love statistics (which I do):

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

EDIT: As you can see, the Fediverse being what it is, it’s basically impossible to get an exact, definitive count, so the numbers will always be a bit fuzzy. But they clearly show trends

Thank you! Seems to be working now!

I was pretty sure I had already tried that, but I probably had something else not configured correctly when I did, so I probably hadn’t tried it yet with the proper combination of values in addition to that! (I am glad I haven’t managed to break it somewhere else while trying stuff)

Now, as much as I genuinely respect what their scientists have achieved with DeepSeek, especially with limited resources and import restrictions on hardware, and how it is Open Source and all - this will most likely end up enshittifying 90% of what it touches, still, just as “AI” like that does anywhere. “Good” to see those dynamics are the same on both sides of the Pacific (and Atlantic, actually), including overvalued stocks from hype.

Also, is archive.ph down? I tried .ph and .is and both timed out for me, when I tried to generate an easy-to-share link to the article.

Yeah, his videos and articles are usually insightful - but his thumbnails are often weirdly bad. In this case, I wonder if he thought the original article and his own stance towards it were somehow mor commonly known with people, or if it was an unfortunate attempt at clickbait.

As far as I know, it is possible on piefed since a recent update - you may want to check it out!

https://join.piefed.social/try/

If you want to get a gist of what it looks like, https://lemmy.world/u/mesamunefire maintains one for PeerTube and other Fediverse videos:

https://piefed.social/f/fediversevideos