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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Our data is already public though? The ActivityPub standard specifies that the majority of data we publish on any given instance is public through that instance’s API, and a web scraper could be easily built that would comb through and gather all of it for advertising or machine learning purposes. The only real way to avoid that would be to take the sites themselves private, which would kind of defeat the point of social media, or to just not use social media.





  • Agreed. I’m under no delusions, when I pirate media I’m stealing. I personally don’t believe it’s immoral to steal from super corporations, especially considering how much they steal from us, but some people disagree and with these types of moral arguments there isn’t a clear right answer. Even still, I think the majority of pirates are willing to pay for software or media when the service is priced well and more convenient than piracy.












  • Indeed, which of course communicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how people use Reddit vs. Twitter. On Twitter/Mastodon people primarily follow other users, so Twitter remains dominant due to the large number of celebrities, influencers, and politicians that use it. On Reddit/Lemmy, people follow communities, and as such as long as both are active a given community on Lemmy is just as good as a community on Reddit. This also of course impacts federation. With individual user federation discovery can be challenging and small instances will have relatively barren all feeds, but with community federation even instances with a few dozen users will federate with enough communities to fill the all feed. Reddit was also famous for the multitude of very nice features implemented by third party developers, all of which they just ejected, which means now those nice features will be available to Lemmy users. Apps are capable of abstracting and improving the user experience by suggesting instances to sign up to and presenting a unified feed of all of the instance feeds that the app has connected to, making everything feel far more connected. In a way I’m grateful to u/spez, his awfulness as a CEO pushed people here and made a lot of this possible.