James R Kirk

It got cloudy

First of all, you are on feddit.nl and cannot speak for"Lemmy". That said- if anything, “Lemmy” users should be supporting independent journalism like 404 Media.

It’s to prevent scraping/harvesting by AI: https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/

They do not ask for a phone number.

Not liking someone is not a good reason to root against decentralized platforms, IMO. The entire point of decentralization is that nobody gets to control the experience and who is/isn’t allowed to participate.

Unless he joins fedia.io you don’t really get a say in what he does… kind of the entire point behind decentralization…

It’s also an avenue for attacks.

There’s no need for hostility, your characterization of what is happening does not reflect reality.

A Fedi instance requires a time commitment, there are some good suggestions in here but I recommend some alternative frontends.

When using the official Mastodon app (as suggested in the “guide”) “instances” are not a factor at all (unless the user specifically goes out of their way). A new user could have never even heard of the term “instance” and the above steps would work fine.

You don’t just download the app, create an account, and go.

Actually with Mastodon this is literally how it works.

EDIT: I should say this is how it works now, it didn’t always used to be this way. The official Mastodon app used to ask the user to pick an instance, but for a number of years now it defaults every new account to mastodon.social unless they opt out. There was a big brouhah about centralization but the Mastodon devs felt it made for easier on boarding.

If an instance has a lot of spam, admins tend to notice and block it. In the future it’s likely admins will have more tools too, but for now the system works pretty well.

That is correct and echoes what I said

The Remote Watch Pass is only needed if neither you nor the server owner have a Plex pass: https://support.plex.tv/articles/requirements-for-remote-playback-of-personal-media/

When using an affected platform to stream personal video content remotely from a Plex Media Server, then one of the following needs to be true:

1. The admin account for the Plex Media Server has an active Plex Pass (which also allows remote playback for any other user streaming from that server)
2. Your account has an active Plex Pass
3. Your account has an active Remote Watch Pass

The remote playback restrictions do not apply to streaming music content to Plexamp or photos to our Plex Photos app.

I agree with your overall sentiment but also literally 100% of BlueSky users are on one instance.

BlueSky is not federated. Also German users have outsized representation on Mastodon but most of the network is outside Germany.

People are talking about privacy but the big reason is that it gives you, the owner, control over everything quickly without ads or other uneeded stuff. We are so used to apps being optomized for revenue and not being interoperable with other services that it’s easy to forget the single biggest advantage of computers which is that programs and apps can work together quickly and quietly and in the background. Companies provide products, self-hosting provides tools.

Yes absolutely, and that’s why I don’t think commercial social media will die. But I do think it will come to more be associated with activities gambling or vaping.

There will always be two types of users: people looking to connect and people looking to be entertained. Fedi is better at the former and commercial better at the latter.

People get so weird about Dansup.

If Mastodon/Fedi was at the scale those platforms are we would see more harassment, absolutely. It remains to be proven but I think federation enables a lot more eyes on content which implies harassing material can be removed more quickly.

Federation/decentralization solves a lot of problems over centralized social media, but ultimatley you can’t engineer human nature.