People coming here to rant about Reddit isn’t activity.

Hmm… Touché.

the TikTok of the fediverse

Gee just what the Fediverse needed…

Je crois que j’ai perdu une heure.

Vous vous trompez. Au passage à l’heure d’hiver, vous gagnez une heure - ou au pire si vous voulez pinailler, vous répétez la même heure deux fois.

Not really. Only shaked my head in disbelief.

Have you ever seen a TikTok video? Why on Earth do we want that on the Fediverse? Not everything that exists deserves to be copied.

Well yeah, I look at All too, to make sure I’m not missing out on something interesting. But I must do that every month or so.

That escalated quickly

That’s too much credit to the poster.

I’d say it went down the sewer quickly, rather.

Ah right okay.

I only look at the ones I subscribed to myself. Different approach I guess.

Forgive me if I’m a bit of a thicky, but why is there a need to block communities? Doesn’t simply ignoring them work?

Do you choose your friends and the folks you hang out with? Of course you do. Why should it be any different in the communities you patronize?

I came here because I was tired of suffering the morons on traditional social media platforms. The Fediverse is not perfect - nothing ever is - and it has its fair share of undesirables too, but it’s much better, and I’m not looking forward to the morons following me here and making things worse. They belong to Facebook and the likes, and they should stay there.

It won’t enshittify in the strict Doctorow sense. But it will become shittier as more people who are currently plaguing Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and making those platforms terrible discover the Fediverse and come splatter their cowpats here. That’s almost inevitable: it’s happened to just about anything that ever became popular.

Incidentally, that’s also a big part of the reason why it’s supremely important to boycott Threads and not let it federate: the Fediverse needs to grow, but it doesn’t need to grow with an influx of low-quality Facebook users.

I know it’s not specific to the Fediverse, but I recommend you watch this video from Fran Blanche: it’s eye-opening and a bit heart-breaking:

When Google calls you a slur

Fran Blanche is a genuinely kind person, a good engineer, and her career has been hobbled by rampant transphobia.

I would take what ChatGPT tells you with a gigantic salt crystal.

Case in point: I made a fairly important purchase in a foreign country recently. The seller’s countract was in the local language, which I speak for ordinary matters but not well enough to understand legalese.

The seller couldn’t find how a crucial piece of the contract was translated into English, so she typed “Say this in English: the buyer has no right to pull out of the deal even in case of force majeure” in her language. ChatGPT translated it as “The buyer has the right to pull out of the deal in case of force majeure” in English. The exact opposite of what was written!

Luckily for me, while I didn’t know the legal terms in the local language, I could see it was a negative sentence. So I managed to catch it and understand that the clause was in fact working against me-the-buyer, not in my favor.

I know why ChatGPT translated it that way: the force majeure clause in most contracts usually states that the deal is off in case of force majeure (force majeure usually being a euphemism for death). But in this instance, the seller turned the clause 180 degrees around, leaving my children on the hook if I snuffed it early and didn’t complete the payment. ChatGPT, being nothing more than a mechanical parrot, simply repeated the most common form of force majeure clause it had been trained on.

The main takeway from this story is: you should never trust what ChatGPT says, and the more important what you ask it to tell you is to you, the more consequences you will suffer for its mistakes.

Captchas were never about keeping bots out: they’ve always been an excuse to turn ordinary internet visitors into mechanical turks to tag photos to train AI systems without paying the workforce.

Think about it: how many hours total did you spend in your life tagging photos for Google and Google never paid you for your work?

Will be good for the quality.

You speak as if there was quality left to lose.

There is something I don’t understand with people who rant about Reddit: if you hate it so much, why do you stay there?

I had a Reddit account myself. I wasted it and moved on. I certainly don’t torture myself with it anymore: the communities here on Lemmy are smaller but they’re a lot nicer to be a part of, so it’s a no-brainer.

Pray tell, what possible benefit can Lemmy communities gain from Facebook users?

You do realize most people who joined the Fediverse did so because Facebook and the likes are a steaming pile of shit, right?

What possible benefit is there to the pile of shit coming to splatter itself here uninvited?

It’s not just a matter of blocking Threads users.

Facebook is coming on here to slurp up data I don’t want them to have, and enriching their own Threads ecosystem with Fediverse content they haven’t lifted a finger to create.

Not to mention, when Threads users are able to fully interact in the Fediverse, do you really want that particular bunch to create noise in your communities? I don’t. There’s a reason why I avoid Facebook in all its forms.

Great.
I joined the Fediverse to escape Facebook’s toxic interpretation of communities, so Facebook is coming to the Fediverse instead.
Just great…