From the user perspective for sure. It’s much easier to join lemmy.world and it has a higher population of fledditors. I was just more acknowledging the role of lemmy.ml as something of a model instance because it is run directly by the developers of Lemmy.
It is the “default” one, though, and its admins are behind the Lemmy platform itself. Along with the Jerboa app, too.
Ordinarily I would disagree, assuming that they must be privvy to data that no one else is and are making carefully calculated decisions.
But with the way that Reddit leadership just continued to make misstep after misstep throughout this whole debacle, when all they had to do was just say/do nothing and wait for everything to blow over, I can only assume their corporate strategy right now is 100% improvised and not calculated.
Almost all subreddits signed up for just a 2-day protests and were going to return to normal after that. It was only because of how Reddit/spez acted in the wake of all this that they’re experiencing the resistance they are now.
you choose of your own free will to contract with this company knowing the risks.
But that’s just the problem with free market/small government, isn’t it? You can’t know the risks because there is no oversight to prove people aren’t cutting corners and selling bullshit.
As long as it is more profitable for people to deceive and cut corners, they’re gonna do it.
But even then, however, what’s to stop an army of bots from just ChatGPTing their way through the application process?
I went to a website to generate a random username, picked the first option of polarbear_gender, and then just stuck that and the application questions for lemmy.ml into ChatGPT to get the following:
I want to join Lemmy.ml because I’m really into having meaningful discussions and connecting with others who have similar interests. Lemmy.ml seems like a great platform that fosters a diverse exchange of ideas in a respectful way, which I like.
When it comes to the communities I’d love to be a part of, I’m all about ones that focus on environmental conservation, wildlife preservation, and sustainability. Those topics really resonate with me, and I’m eager to jump into discussions and learn from fellow passionate folks.
As for my username, I chose it because I’ve got respect for polar bears and how they live with the environmental challenges they face. And throwing in “gender” is just my way of showing support for inclusivity and gender equality. Building a more just and fair society is important to me.
I don’t know the full criteria that people are approved or declined for, but would these answers pass the sniff test?
I’m just worried that placing too much trust in the application process contributes to a false sense of security. A community that is supposedly “protected” from bots can be silently infiltrated by them and cause more damage than in communities where you can either reasonably assume bots are everywhere, or there are more reliable filtering measures in place than a simple statement of purpose.
The Sync community turned toxic when the dev implemented an updated UI a couple years ago. The new UI was beautiful and much more in line with the evolving visual design of Android, but the average user hates change. The dev version spent a while on the new UI while it was being refined, but the free/pro version was not upgraded until I want to say probably a year or more later, the developer having gone radio silent for a while under all the criticism.
It’s almost like they never considered that moderators use the same third party apps as the rest of their users, either.
Though based on the leaked internal memo, it looks like Reddit doesn’t think very much of their users at all.
NSFW subreddits are a black hole in terms of advertising potential. No mainstream company wants their products on display next to porn.
A big subreddit like /r/pics going NSFW, with its absolutely massive userbase, takes out a large chunk of Reddit’s potential advertising appeal.