Btw in case anyone wants to smile, Newgrounds.com is still kicking. Same owner, same purpose, still no ads.

It’s kind of beautiful. I feel the need to protect it in this current internet hellscape. Like some rare specimen of near extinct species, this one must survive

I’ll be real with you:

The ideal of college you believed you would experience is only for the extroverts. If you didn’t make the effort to go out and meet people and do things, it’s likely you’ll just be going to class for 4 years.

A lot of kids think when they go to college, a social life just happens, naturally, by proximity. No, college is an excellent time, maybe the easiest time, to really socialize. But you still have to do get out of your dorm. They’re not coming inside to take you away.

TVTome was my very first. Such a fun site. Basically a proto-wikia from the early 2000s. You managed a page for individual TV shows and filled it with info, and every show had it’s own forum attached, that you moderated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040727075622/http://www.tvtome.com/ (19 years and 3 days ago)

And then, as a sign of things to come over the next 20 years, the onwer of that site sold it off, along with all the community created works, and the community forums that went with them, to some trash company whose name I can’t even remember anymore, and it doesn’t matter because they probably got bought at some point too.

TVTome became TV.com, over the massive protests of its community. And it went to shit immediately.

Now tv.com is…shit, it isn’t even around anymore? Wikipedia and Wikia destroyed that niche, and then Fandom enshitifed Wikia.

“Flagship” in this sense would mean the biggest and most notable, seeing as how the the very nature of Lemmy means there’s no single figurehead or central instance.

Except…it’s being DDOS’d, so no, it isn’t.

If anything this is basically establishing to everyone out there that if you want to kill an instance or encourage people to move to a different one (with different admins who might have different…“styles”), just DDOS it and promote your alternative instance as a refuge.

I’m sticking with .world because the admins there are chill. Don’t feel like rolling the dice on a new instance where some power mods probably set up shop.

I wish people would stop using this advice without some caveats. The instance you choose is also about the admins your choosing to have your account under.

I’ll stay on Lemmy.world because I trust the admin there. Any time you jump to a new instance, you better hope it’s run by levelheaded, fair-minded people.

Are you just going to make one of these every single time?

Ugh

“Ugh” what?

That’s actually likely to cause some issues down the line with people impersonating other users, but for now It’s fine

Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn’t dependent on one instance.

Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.

It’s just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It’s going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.

Also…there’s a non-zero chance it’s getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.

They’re asking about the total score. The better way to explain it is that there is not a total score, there is just the upvote count listed as the score. Downvotes and the calculated score based on upvote/downvotes are ignored.

would rather not use anything google because of privacy reasons.

Amazon is just as bad if not worse.

This is something of a ticking time bomb, I think. I don’t think the majority of people coming to Lemmy right now appreciate that their votes are public, and sooner or later somebody is going to write a bot or addon that uses that data to harass or censor users and it’s going to be a scandal that scares people away.

Making votes public is a really bad idea because it disincentivizes users to vote how they like, for fear of reprisal. This is quintessential to a democratic system, and to a social media platform.

You want this place to grow, and order for it to grow, users have to interact. They are the engine behind the content aggregation, they should never feel hesitation to vote.

Blocking open community creation is a mistake and that will be abused down the line. It’s also taking power away from users to make Lemmy their own.

First off, community creation is not the problem here. Anybody can make a community called the Donald, the problem are the people that will fill it. Those people are coming here regardless of what community they find themselves in. Blocking community creation doesn’t stop them, only actual monitoring of individual users will do it.

There really has to be a line here between combating this kind of toxic hateful bullshit and completely locking down a social media platform so that everything must be pre-scanned and approved before it sees the light of day. Pre-approving content means moderation controls the site directly and obliquely. Before users can even cast a vote, mods can unilaterally and silently strike it down.

I just generally don’t care for the overall notion that Lemmy needs to be carefully curated like a garden right out of the gate. Ban the obvious shit like the Donald but there has to be a fundamental acknowledgment that the users, the people, need to have the ability to make the space their own without some council pre-judging them.