It’s cool to watch Twitter dying. Specially as its death is so tied to how it works - once the key actors of a blogging platform leave, the others simply follow fashion.

Does anyone want some popcorn?

Urban Dictionary never ceases to amuse me!

This reminds me 4chan /int/'s weird synonyms for country, from analysing the word as “cunt tree”. Stuff like “vagina bush” and similar. Oddly enough everyone understood it, even when translated.

I’m probably creating a group to deface the largest government/country flag on the canvas, regardless of: which government it’s associated with, screechers trying to boss us* against it, “ackshyually you all* should stop and define whut is a cuntry flag” sea lions, liars claiming that this is harassment or prejudice, muppets saying that I’m “welcome” to contribute to their used toilet paper on a pole “monument”, so goes on.

Additionally, I’ll use an alt account to draw some stuff that I can’t disclose here, because I kind of predict that pissed nationalists will ruin it as some petty revenge. It has zero to do with countries.

*“we” = anyone who joins the group. Potentially just me.

EDIT: ah, I’ll also be helping out with some drawings here and there, like I did last time.

Yes, it is a problem - depending on your tastes “subscribed” won’t be enough. But going “subscribed” and then “all” is bound to show less political posts than going straight for “all”.

Browse by “subscribed”, and subscribe to a lot of communities. Only do it by “all” when you can’t find good stuff in the subscribed view.

I do this and, while I do see a few intrusive US politics posts, it’s far less than when browsing by “all”.

Agreed - it’s more like diversification, or “not putting all egg-users in the same basket-platform”.

I am not sure, but I believe that this political abuse is further reinforced by something not mentioned in the text:

• Twitter is mostly short texts, lacking situational info, subtlety, signs of doubt, etc. Those require a lot of contextual info to accurately understand, but as a piece of content is retweeted most of that context is gone.
• plenty people are not honest; they’re assumptive as a brick. They make removed up = assume = bullremoved as it goes, never acknowledging “hey, I don’t actually know this, it’s just a shower thought, it might be wrong”.
• people holding minority views are more often dogpiled, and by bigger dogpiles, than people holding majority views. Kind of like the Petrie Modifier, but with worldviews instead of sex.

If I’m right this is breeding grounds for witch hunting: people don’t get why someone said something, they’re dishonest so they assume why, they bring on the pitchforks because they found a witch. And that’s bound to affect anyone voicing anything slightly off the echo chamber.

And I think that this has been going on for years; cue to “the Twitter MC of the day”. It would predate Musk, but after Musk took over he actually encouraged the witch hunts for his own political goals.

I’m almost sure.

Your typical instance only defeds another as a last case scenario, due to deep divergences or because of blatantly removedty admin or user behaviour. But, past that, they’re still willing to let some removed to go through - because if you defederate too many other instances, with no good reason, you’re only hurting yourself.

That’s simply not enough to create those “corners”. Specially when all this “nerds vs. normies*” thing is all about depth - for example the normie wants some privacy, but the nerd goes all in, but they still care about the same resources.

*I hate this word but it’s convenient here.

I get what you say, and I agree; but when it comes to the average user I wonder if they’ll even get it. They don’t think on the grounds of a “protocol” or a “platform”, it used to be “site” and now “app”. They do it even with email, of all things, even if it’s one of the oldest cross-platform protocols out there!

They tolerate each other enough to get each into a corner and not interact much.

And yet that is not what we see in the Fediverse. Those “corners” don’t exist here.

The people here and their attitude towards people who don’t agree with them are the problem.

And that’s a structural problem. The ActivityPub was supposed to allow both the “average person” and the “nerd” to coexist in the same platform, without one getting too much in the way of the other; it doesn’t.

I’m not sure on a good solution for that.

It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploits that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.

When it comes to how people feel about AI translation, there is a definite distinction between utility and craft. Few object to using AI in the same way as a dictionary, to discern meaning. But translators, of course, do much more than that. As Dawson puts it: “These writers are artists in their own right.”

That’s basically my experience.

LLMs are useful for translation in three situations:

• declension/conjugation table - faster than checking a dictionary
• listing potential translations for a word or expression
• a second row of spell/grammar-proofing, just to catch issues that you didn’t

Past that, LLM-based translations are a sea of slop: they screw up with the tone and style, add stuff not present in the original, repeat sentences, remove critical bits, pick unsuitable synonyms, so goes on. All the bloody time.

And if you’re handling dialogue, they will removed it up even in shorter excerpts, by making all characters sound the same.

My concerns about the “immigration leftover” is not their opposing views, but their behaviour. I don’t want to deal with the “waaah the world revolves around my belly, why are you too stupid to understand that?” crowds and their incessant whining.

The drop is slowing down considerably:

And given that March was a peak, I’m tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it’ll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won’t increase or decrease.

That’s why I say that it’s stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.

That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts?

They wouldn’t be counted but I don’t think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.

The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.

I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don’t even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you’re trying to grow.

However I feel like those points help to explain why the “lol lmao” crowds hate this place.

Besides other factors mentioned in this thread, there’s also

• selection bias: people with a positive view of Lemmy already migrated, so the leftover is bound to have more negative views
• older userbase: older people use language in a different way, talk about different topics, and dig into those topics in a different way. That often makes younger people throw a tantrum.
• group identity: for those “AS A SNOO” we’re basically apostates.
• edit: personal drama between higher ups is more visible here than in Reddit.

The userbase is small but stable.

Yup, I got that you don’t mean that everyone is a bot there. I just don’t think that there aren’t so many of them as you’re saying; it’s certainly not as much as half the users, or even the activity (bots tend to be more active than actual users).

They’re still wrecking damage on the place though. Eventually they’ll reach a plateau in proportion, but their numbers will go down, alongside the actual users.

Bots are parasites: they only thrive if the host population is large enough to maintain them. Once the hosts are gone, the parasites are gone too.

In other words: botters only bot a platform when they expect human beings to see and interact with the output of their bots. As such they can never become the majority: once they do, botting there becomes pointless.

That applies even to repost bots - you could have other bots upvoting the repost, but you won’t do it unless you can sell the account to an advertiser, and the advertiser will only buy it if they can “reach” an “audience” (i.e. spam humans).