I’ve slowly become familiar with lemmy and learned the things like blahajj is an ally of trans but hides downvotes and kbin shows how you vote to others etcetc. i don’t even know what hexbear is but hear it’s ideologically wonky.
Lots of Lemmy instances basically have some decent aspects, but then something about them is a total dealbreaker.
I’ve started looking at moderation histories when coming across content removed by moderators and am now able to distinguish instances where ideologies not aligned with their admins get censored. I first noticed it when checking why certain posts were removed on Lemmy.ml and had to research lemmy.ml to understand they purposely are a socialist communist niche community so they basically remove content they don’t want. I had a run in with a drama on Lemmy.world and curiously checked their mod log to realize that they actually quite often remove comments that don’t match their ideology (along with finding controversial historical actions of .world).
So after all this getting to know instances involved in lemmy, you know which one has no weird dealbreaker attributes that I know of? I just realized tonight which one it is…
sh.itjust.works
So cheers everyone.
Admins and Mods here you are doing great. Community, you are doing great too. grats on being the best instance
thank you, i had a feeling there was some privacy issues with the openness of the network. I always thought reddit would do good to have multiple profiles allowed to a main account, so if you wanted to shitpost, or if you wanted to wankbank it, or discuss Friedman economics you would have profile to do that with. Of course big reddit would admin all that, but it would reduce in theory all the new accounts constantly being made alongside the bot accounts and reduce some of the throw away nature of accounts that accrue to much data over time thru the nature of commenting
Yeah, if they did the multiple profile thing, in the end all of the IP addresses would still link the profiles back to the same user (or household) on Reddit’s end, which we know they sell user data like many companies do. Many sites don’t intentionally grab the data but rather have to have the data for functionality. (Hope I’m not over explaining something you already know, just information in case people aren’t aware.). Essentially every machine while connected to the Internet is tied to an IP address. If I go to a webpage, say Google I am outwardly requesting the data from Google.com (or w.e the address is which also translates to an IP address). The data from that page is sent back from their website to my IP. When that is done it is logged as computers verify the packets are all sent/received for any errors. So say you search for a washer/dryer or pants. It knows what you wanted, and where it was sending that information. Now someone who sells those products wants to know who is looking for those products, so they will pay Google (or other companies) for that information and also want Google to push advertisements for their website who sells pants or home appliances that delivers or is local to your area. They know where you are locally because your IP is tied back to your City/Internet Service Provider. So marketing wise, that’s already a good enough geographical understanding of “they’ve got a Sears near them, send them our adverts” or no they don’t have a Sears near them, don’t waste our advertising budget on them specifically. (Maybe shipping costs are high to your area)
It’s all happening fluidly all the time in the background
on top of that, amazon and google this past week said that their devices would now listen all the time by default and send that data to hq. Now if you are just discussing something it will be added to your advertising profiles. I bet a bunch of cars and other benign objects are doing similar things.
gpt and low cost cameras now give companies the ability to monitor you 365 while on their property if they want to. Discussing something in line at the grocery store, llm note take takes that, time stamps it with your order and ties it to you profile. Doing a drug deal at your local circle K and dont by anything, cameras catch you license plate and suddenly you are getting amazon ads for the types of rubber bands your customers prefer you use on their 8balls