The really criminal thing about this is the for some users it is that critical.
So not only are they vastly overestimating how critical their service is to the average costumer; they are also totally fucking over a minority of users for whom it is critical.
And often the tipping point is invisible. Some small routine or service degrades, but outwardly everything still works fine... there is just more strain on the services and clients that use that service, causing them to slowly degrade over the next few hours, days, or weeks, which in turn puts more strain on the services that call those services... etc etc.
Until one day the system is so degraded major things start breaking. It seems like it came out of nowhere, but the initial failure happened weeks ago and has been cascading since then.
Once a system hits that point it's often not enough to just fix the initial problem because so much of the ecosystem around it has been thrown out of whack.
Federation is a feature. If you want to spin up a network of Lemmy instances between universities and ONLY federate with other universities, you could!
Want to spin up a private instance for you and your friends and not federate with anyone? You can do that too!
To me one of the big selling points of federated services is you don't have to be part of the same giant bucket as every other shithead. If you want, you can pick and choose who you federate with.
Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.
It's still those four people's server though, and it's totally their prerogative in how they run it. We aren't entitled to it's content, and users don't have to stick around if they don't like the way it's being run.
The fedeverse gives you choice. That means there will be some servers whose choices you don't agree with.
My understanding is that other users on the same home instance would still be able to see each other's content.
🎶 they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot 🎶
The thing is that the court only has so much power right now because Congress is so fucking broken. If Congress where in working order it could just legislate all the shit that the court is blocking the executive on.
I had a really bad back injury a couple years ago and still can't be out of bed for more than an hour a day. It sucks hard and you have my sympathy.
You should reach out to your friends if you haven't. It's possible they're also lamenting that no one has reached out to them!
I didn't even consider the fact that the fediverse offers us the ability to start having publicly owned social media and government-run instances for direct communication.
That could be very interesting...
I generally used to believe in that precept, that you should approach every debate with an open mind, and engage with anyone willing to debate you. But as I've grown older, I've realized that, while nice in a vacuum, that code is naive. It presumes that the person across from you is engaging in good faith.
As we navigate this new phenomenon of social media, we as a society are beginning to grapple with a few problems:
It is easier to spread misinformation than it is to combat it.
The Rhetoric of 'reasonable' discussion can be easily co-opted by bad actors to spread misinformation.
When you engage with a bad actor, you amplify their voice.
So when you get people talking about vaccines not working, or black people being inherently more likely to commit crimes, or blah blah blah, engaging with that in good faith runs the risk of just amplifying that message. I'm not really sure what the answer to it is. Like, I don't think the Nazi's would have been stopped by more reasonable discussion, and we are at an inflection point in this country where we are having similar discussions over trans rights.
I don't think "always keep an open mind and engage in good faith" holds up when one side consistently and systematically exploits weaknesses in that philosophy to spread misinformation and bigotry.
Lastly, I hit the downvote button on comments that contain misinformation, not as a bid to punish the commenter, but as a way to push falsehoods lower in the chain so good information can float to the top. If there is a discussion about trans rights and the top comment is "I'm just against kids getting life altering surgery", then that gets a downvote, because kids aren't allowed to get gender reassignment surgery, and the comment gives the false impression that they are, and that's what's being debated. It doesn't really matter if the person is engaging in good faith or not. Bad information is bad information, and it should be pushed to the bottom or removed before it spreads erroneously.
As far as I can tell your comments were downvoted for either:
playing into the "both sides are the same" narrative that there isn't much patience for anymore, especially after Roe being struck down and the decision on Student Loan forgiveness this morning.
coming across as concern trolling for right wing extremists. I'm not accusing you of actually doing that, but a couple of your downvoted comments conforn to retorical devices that white supremesist groups commonly use. Looking at your profile I think it was just genuine ignorance on your part, but that's the reason.
In general, there are so many bad actors online that hide behind "just wanting to have a discussion" that people have lost patience with it. I've been seeing that sort of rhetoric my entire life used as a way to trojan horse advocacy for things like barring gay couples from having the same rights as straight couples, defending racism -- not even just racist policies, but straight up "black people are all thugs" racism -- taking away women's rights to choose their own medical care, allowing trans people to exist at all. The list goes on and on. I've just totally lost patience with it, and I'm not alone.
When 9/10 people who "just want to have a discussion" use that discussion to spread misinformation, gaslight, gishgallop, and make false equivalences, eventually you become wary of anyone who opens up a dialog that way.
Blame Ben Shapiro, that was his bad faith weapon of choice and it caught on.
I don't think it was a testbed for anything. It was just a fun tech project that yielded hilarity. It was created because the results were funny, not as a genuine bid to create realistic conversations.
I think you're dead-on.
In some ways a degraded system is much harder to fix (or even identify as broken) than an outright destroyed one.
If the IAmA mods vandalized the sub, they would get booted and replaced. But if they just stop doing anything but the bare minimum... that sub was such a magnet for traffic, it might slowly degrade traffic to Reddit as a whole.
But just looking at the data, it might be very very hard to figure out that what is driving that is the IAmA moderators starting to restrict their activities only to moderation. It degrades the experience of the site as a whole.