Thank you for correcting me. I edited my comment to indicate that it was maga.place.

But for most people, its difficult to even stop eating unhealthy food, and thats not even difficult.

It is if you are poor. Healthy food costs more than junk, in the short-term.

Or hexbear, Lemmygrad.ml, hilariouschaos, and [edit: false stuff removed] maga.place.

Lemmy definitely has its dark corners.

While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.

e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.

Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don’t have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.

Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not “filters”, just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone’s reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.

Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that… but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.

PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.

Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don’t think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.

Must resist temptation to ask wHy NoT bOtH… (for mutually exclusive possibilities)

Perhaps the best ones?

It does incur quite the cost though, if only in initial set-up time, so I can see where some people may have a desire to avoid it, for a time.

Even we quite often use Cloud flare. Those who resisted at first often changed their mind after getting hit with bot scraping DNS attacks. It’s not trivially easy to deploy alternatives.

One money, as requested.

Uses AI to insert small Mexican gril… what could go wrong?

You are missing a ton of what I said.

First, YOU may not have a subreddit local to your town, but that does not mean that NOBODY does?

Agreed that Facebook is far worse, but then all the more reason to use Reddit as the lesser (albeit still) evil?

And again YOU may not read the political communities, unhelpfully named like “memes” or “comics” or “technology”, but that does not mean that NOBODY does.

The Lemmy “random” instance picker chooses lemmy.ml or hexbear.net sth like >80-90% of the time, last I checked, and if you visit Lemmy.ml you will see how the default view for someone without an account is Local (again iirc, last I checked), not All. Someone visiting from Reddit will have that as their first view, and seeing nothing worth sticking around for, and much reason to leave, your average American centrist aka niche content creator will nope right out and never return, often leaving negative feedback behind everywhere else they go (r/Redditalternatives, Bluesky, Xhitter, etc.) about their experiences on what they saw of “Lemmy”.

YOU have curated an extensive blocklist, and if you are anything at all like myself, tend to forget as time passes what the experience is like for a brand-new visitor.

I agree wholeheartedly that the ultimate goal should be to get off Reddit, but I was adding some context that sometimes people cannot do that so readily, and we here on the Threadiverse do not really welcome non-technical normies anyway. It is what it is.

I am not the person you replied to, but I thought I would add a different category of example: something location-based, like a specific city, or maybe an entire community based on your employer, etc. It is undeniable that niche topics are discussed more thoroughly elsewhere than here, where instead of welcoming people this place mostly just discusses how all people in Western society should be killed, which some people find off-putting (I know I do).

Turns out that was a lie - instead they only did it for maximum profits… for themselves, obviously.

I mean… yeah, it requires manufacturing for it to be produced:-P.

Yes, and data centers are specifically depleting the available water (and RAM) supply, thereby generating anxiety about that fact.

That might actually be true… but then you were the one who tried to do so? And now your words will echo on, years from now people can look up this old thread and see your back and forth fighting, and nothing will have changed.

Do whatever you want - I am not a moderator here, I just thought I would offer this perspective that your words might be working counter to what aim you first set out to achieve, before you got frustrated and lost your cool, and thereby your ability to influence people any further here.

Most of us left Reddit several years ago now, but isn’t this still one of the top refrains across the Threadiverse? Besides fuck tankies, cars, and conservatives I mean, there is fuck spez? Very “impactful” then, plus were not his actions the epitome of what you described - to get his while the getting was good, no matter what he might destroy in the process? So, locally great, not so much to ring through the ages, unless someone asks how the threaded forum-style Fediverse got its start.

Isn’t English an awesomely terrible language?

Abso-fucking-lutely so indeed!

Tbf, I don’t mean to suggest that data centers are going to bring about the end of all life on earth as we know it… at least not alone, though they may hasten that end goal rather than stave it off, especially locally for people who increasingly have less agency over their lives, particularly in the sense of securing sufficient water.

So then… Hitler was a great man? So too is Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and even Steve Huffman (spez from Reddit)? You’ve also heard the name “Pol Pot” before… so by that definition, he is great as well? By that definition, I am forced to agree with you.

Although why are we using that definition again? The large majority of the definition according to https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/great seems to point rather in the opposing direction.

• “remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness”, “great bloodshed”, “caused great damage” - this is the one you seem to be using

• “used as a generalized term of approval” - again, this seems the opposite?

• “chief or preeminent over others”, this might actually apply but then we get into what “over” means, so I’d rather choose a different one instead

• “markedly superior in character or quality” -> HELL NO, unless again you get into the meaning of “superior”, and/or of “quality”

Basically you seem to be using “great” to mean “remarkable”. Yes, such a CEO would be “remarkable”, I agree, but I disagree that they would be considered “great”. Although beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so obviously I do not mean to suggest that nobody will consider them great, just that most people probably would not, for the reason that they got theirs while leaving others to hold the bag. Especially since “others” in this case may doom all mammalian life on earth to if not extinction then “great” curtailment of quality of life (as well as ability to live at all).

You are not helping your cause by emo-venting here. Go back up and re-read the OP title - I’ll wait.

So long as people have anxiety over AI issues, including ethics and water usage, then the people asking questions have a firm foundation for their statements. Why not (gently) invite them in, to know what you do? Curiosity is an amazingly adaptive trait in humanity, and they might be genuinely ready to listen to a well-intentioned answer. But you are turning them away not so much with the content as the tone of your responses, essentially proving them right that pro-AI advocates froth at the mouth at how AI will overtake humans rather than use logical argumentation practices. But why put forth Musk’s words here, on the Threadiverse?

If you can keep your head while the rest of the world loses theirs…

What the pro-AI people always tend to argue back at comments like yours is that:

1. you used the wrong AI - it should be <insert preferred model here> - probably Claude at this point in time, for programming? i.e. the implication being that you are some old man who yells at clouds and does not know what they only learned themselves <6 months ago, as if that knowledge entirely invalidates your own lived experiences even in the last ~4 weeks.

2. you used the wrong parameters / queries. When applied to the equivalent of Google searches this seems a false claim to me because those used to be fairly brainless, whereas sometime soon Gemini is going to start charging $$$ in return for being able to find anything remotely helpful on the internet, but for now they would like it pretty please if you would help them train their model, before they turn around and sell it to you, and others (isn’t it glorious how you are allowed to help share in the work part, without proportionate access to the reward at the end?).

Tbf you probably did use the wrong queries for the programming questions. It seems to me to be like someone who actually lets a “self-driving car” drive by… itself? Like you are supposed to pay money for what is marketed one way but the reality after purchase is quite different, and if you e.g. run over little children then it’s not the fault of those who sold you a “self-driving car”, but rather (legally speaking) yourself who should not have allowed the car to drive by itself - how dare you not know better! (Despite being told precisely such with a nod and a wink)

The AI hype is real, and false, though despite that LLMs are quite a capable tool, if ignoring the hype and used under much more constrained circumstances than the hype would lead us to believe (despite the hype surrounding AI, rather than LLM technology itself, being the literal point of the OP though?).

I stumbled upon this randomly and enjoyed the read: https://www.structural-integrity.eu/is-there-a-need-for-ai-after-capitalism/.

I love the nuanced approach here - neither pessimistic nor optimistic but rather realistic. Then again, I would strongly question the utilityn here or even definition of “great” - except you were just using it in an explanatory sense, so I get what you mean, but like for a corporation to achieve “success”, at the expense of an enormous number of workers let go… is that really “great”, truly?

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and I see such ugliness, even while I also see potential for truly great good as well. It is definitely not the “fault” of the tool, but rather the wielder, although either way I see why people have anxiety, when they consider the ways that the tools are currently and actively being used against their interests.