Upon looking to this further I’m not sure if it actually works as I understood it to, due to the way group services are handled currently in Mastodon. Clearly there is some sort of flag in Activitypub on group accounts to indicate to other apps that it is a group account, because e.g. https://lemmy.ml/c/climatejustice@chirp.social works and you can follow it but the same link substituting /c/ for /u/ does not work. And for normal user accounts, the inverse is true.

However, aside from that flag, my understanding is they are essentially just user accounts that boost any posts from followers that mention the account handle, which causes the boosted post to show in the feed for all followers of the account. Since that account isn’t actually posting the posts that it boosts, I guess it makes sense that activity wouldn’t be visible in Lemmy, where boosts don’t exist. Following this logic no posts would be displayed, and that’s what is observed. Initially I thought this was because no one on the instance had followed the group yet, because e.g. https://lemmy.world/c/BlackMastodon@chirp.social does show posts while https://lemmy.ml/c/BlackMastodon@chirp.social does not. The same group on a.gup.pe also shows more posts on https://lemmy.ml/c/BlackMastodon@a.gup.pe.

It’s hard for me to make sense of what’s going on here (especially as I don’t microblog or use Mastodon personally) because clearly the Mastodon content is federating through the lemmy instance, but I’ve only been able to observe a subset of it and I haven’t been able to figure out the parameters that have caused some posts to be visible in Lemmy but not others.

I think “communities” term is used on Mastodon in reference to what are “instances” on Lemmy. I’m talking about communities as they apply to Lemmy - in Mastodon I think they’re generally called a “group” account. You subscribe to them in Lemmy mostly the same as how you’d subscribe to a Lemmy community on a different instance. e.g. go to your.lemmy.instance/c/groupname@their.mastodon.instance and subscribe. Or just search for the Mastodon group on the Lemmy communities page, making sure the filters are set to “All”. To find a Mastodon user page is the same, just /u/ instead of /c/. You just can’t follow or subscribe to the user pages because that’s not currently a feature in Lemmy, but you can for groups/communities

Watch history is an absolutely essential metric for Youtube - I can understand how you’ve been led to believe that turning this option off is opting out from that data collection, but no. What this setting is asking is if you want the data collected to be represented to you as recommendations for other videos to watch. It absolutely doesn’t change what data is collected, just whether the videos you’ve watched should be accounted for when the algorithm is finding new videos to recommend.

My understanding is that isn’t correct - in Lemmy you currently can follow Mastodon communities, but not users (following users on any fediverse platform including Lemmy itself just isn’t a part of Lemmy yet). I believe it’s planned to be implemented, but this is one thing differentiating Lemmy and Kbin - you can currently follow Mastodon users in Kbin, and in that case I think it’s just the same way you’d follow another Kbin user. To find their user page it would just be kbin.social/u/user@their.mastodon.instance instead of kbin.social/u/user, so I assume it would be similar for Lemmy once implemented

I get it, so I installed the extension and browsed with it today. My feedback is that I feel like blocking individual words like Elon or Bezos would be required to make this meaningful at all. I still saw a bunch of stuff about them that the filter didn’t catch because they are so ubiquitous that you don’t need to say their full name to communicate who you’re talking about.

At the same time, while I almost always don’t care and don’t want to hear about a piece of Elon news, it doesn’t mean I’m not interested in Twitter developments, but I think the filter will block most if not all links/info about Twitter since it’s intrinsically linked to Elon’s persona.

At the end of the day I think it’s a cool idea, but I don’t think you can effectively block these guys via this method without blocking any mention of any platform they’re associated with, which isn’t really what I want.

I can’t scrobble my music to last.fm on iOS without some janky workaround. The “almost same level of control” part of what you said relies on an assumption that only the set of use cases explicitly determined by Apple as ones that “matter” are worth supporting. That it’s more important to prevent the user from explicitly allowing a scrobbling app permission to read the music player app’s now playing notification than for the device to be able to perform this simple function.

This point of difference doesnt have any meaningful impact on collection of my data. It just stops the device from being able to do the function I want. So that what, I can sleep easier knowing that Apple designed a slick interface to point out data vectors which were already implied to be collected? It used to feel like a smartphone with training wheels, now they’ve just locked up the handlebars so that it’s easier to go straight.

The main factor to consider in making an ultrathin phone in 2023 has nothing to do with the battery. It’s the requirement for a certain level of build quality to be suitable for end consumers. At some point we just need to develop new materials, because we can’t make it any more ultrathin without it also becoming ultrafragile using the materials available.

It hasn’t really been a focus since we realised back around the iPhone 5 that making these sweeping compromises for thinness was yielding diminishing returns and causing other problems. Today that’s still the thinnest mainline iPhone, only the SE and 12 Mini are thinner. 13 mini is thicker, and there is no 14 mini.

I heard lemm.ee wasn’t vulnerable, so logging users out shouldn’t be necessary. To be vulnerable there would need to be custom emotes defined on the local instance by the admins, so I’m guessing they had none.

I don’t think there’s much keeping users outside that demographic away, more so that the fediverse is a tech solution to the reddit problem, so naturally the people that flock to lemmy are the type of person that looks for tech solutions to the problems they experience in daily life.

My mother just had her illegal IPTV streaming box stop working recently, was her solution to find an alternative? No, she simply stopped watching her shows and did other things instead, and complained about it. And that’s with full denial of service, not just limited/compromised service like reddit users currently experience.

It wasn’t until her tech-savvy nerd son set up another IPTV box for her that she was able to resume consuming the content she wanted to, and similarly lemmy won’t really take off until it reaches a critical mass where enough tech-savvy nerds have shown regular people Lemmy as the tech solution to the problem they’re facing. What’s holding up progress with that at the moment is that the reddit problem for most people isn’t significant enough for a regular person to be in a position to do anything about it, even if they are directly inconvenienced.

I see it in a similar way to how having multiple 3rd-party reddit apps is valid.

If you want to develop a 3rd-party reddit app, the aggregation and structure of the way content is delivered is already determined by reddit. In principle the task is to build a GUI around that.

Fediverse content could be threadiverse-style, or microblogging-style, or both. So to develop an app for this, first you’d need to figure out those aggregation and structure prerequisites. Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon are like different apps for fediverse content which each take a different approach to this. But since it’s FOSS, there is no 1st / 3rd party, they’re all made by one collaborative project.

If I’m not wrong, generally those that prefer threadiverse style will likely end up migrating to Lemmy or Kbin organically, users that prefer microblogging to Kbin or Mastodon, and users that engage in both might use Kbin for a unified presentation. Or, they might prefer discrete presentations which each specialise in the content type, and use both Lemmy and Mastodon. I understand this is a very loose set of overlapping parameters, but the clarity of purpose here is determined by the individual user’s chosen method(s) of interaction with fediverse content. This is definitely a more abstract notion for a user to think about than simply preferring a given visual style like with a reddit app.

Wherever users lie on the spectrum of use cases might not be clear enough to make generalisations like “lemmy is better than kbin for reddit users” accurately, but I think it’s clear to the users individually either a) the type of things they want to post/see or b) the existing forums e.g. reddit, twitter that they want to replace. So while it’s a more individual purpose, I don’t think it’s lacking in clarity to those individuals.

The culture that exists within the communities that use these pieces of software isn’t determined by the software, it’s determined by the instances and the users. But the different approaches to aggregation/structure might lend themselves better to certain kinds of community in a similarly organic way, which would also contribute to shaping which users are on which platform.

Really it’s just drama caused by the platform not maturing yet. Beehaw’s reasons behind defederating from large instances like lemmy.world are valid, but it’s not like other instances made them do it. It’s a choice they made to be able to create the space they want in lieu of proper mod tools. Hope they realise it won’t be an overnight fix, and the longer they stick to their guns the greater the risk of their communities fizzling out, which would be a shame as I agree they are some of the best.