But the speed doesn’t really matter, so it shouldn’t be very energy intensive at all. Just gather up some junk, launch it at the sun with an expendable thruster, and be done with it. If it travels at a couple hundred kph, or even less is completely irrelevant. Let it take a couple hundred years to get there, it is supposed to burn up anyway no? And if it collides or is otherwise destroyed en route during that time won’t matter much either.

I just yesterday saw a post how disabling downvotes for an instance that still acts as part of the greater fediverse causes issues and unfair advantages with posts being created there that can achieve a high score very easily, even on accident.

I would expect Lemmy to rework that function to avoid these issues so that up- and downvotes are either mandatory or can only be disabled together. I would not recommend trying to find an instance based on if they practice this most likely not here to stay functionality.

While I agree that certain state sponsored actors and private interest groups are most definitely involved in discourse manipulation on reddit, Lemmy simply isn’t big enough for this yet.

If we go by the numbers stated in the original post, the whole of Lemmy has less than 500k users at this point, whom are overwhelmingly <40 years old tech affine early adopter nerds from the United States and Western Europe.

Too insignificant to spend resources on, and also largely sceptical of corporate interests and authoritarian governments (except the tankies of course); so by default critical of the two top potential manipulators.

As i argued in another comment, there are many useful bots for certain niche communities that I really think have a place here, even though I am generally wary of AI accounts infesting the fediverse as well.

Good examples for good and very useful, yet not mod work related bots are on TCG/CCG subs like magic the gathering and hearthstone to provide context to card names, or convert deck codes into a nicely formatted table of the used cards. Or on the Lego sub, returning any set number as a link to the proper bricklink entry. This kind of bot should be allowed and even encouraged to be used where appropriate.

Then there are the plenty of irrelevant and annoying bots we really can do without, like the alphabetical order bot, haiku bot, the dozens of bots quoting LOTR or Star Wars characters, and so on. Like most reddit jokes they stopped being funny fairly quickly and now add nothing to the conversation, but are being kept around for karma.

And then there are the more insidious bots that are about to become widespread, being harder to detect the more their refinement advances. It is going to be a constant arms race between bot detection and bot deception skills.

I really dislike that term, it makes me cringe to be considered part of a group that uses it unironically. That’s 4chan speech, let’s keep it in that cesspool.

Growth at any cost is the mindset that not only ruins anything good for profit, it is also the exact issue we are facing now in real life with the right gaining traction in many liberal and multicultural democracies.

Because everyone is being let in, without a second thought on if they even should be there, we now have massive social issues with not at all integrated subcultures in Europe that embrace values diametrically opposed to our tolerant and pluralist societies, in turn empowering the right to ruin any progress made in an effort to throw out the brown people again.

The right question to ask is not “can we accept this new member to our society?”, the right question is “should we accept this new member into our society based on their beliefs and values, based on if they can contribute anything to the existing society?”

And to return to the matter at hand, this is what the fediverse is supposed to be. A bunch of communities and little realms, each with their own rules and interests but united in their belief that self determination and democratic structures make for a better and more fair internet. And then we have the meta intruder we are about to welcome with open arms, without any rules or expectations of him to adopt our values and culture, so they bring their own, corporate, centralized culture and use their money to brute force that culture into every place of importance.

It is not racist or intolerant of societies to expect newcomers to assimilate, and ignoring that fact brought us a re emerging right.

And it is not fearmongering or small minded to be extremely sceptical of Facebook trying to establish themselves in the fediverse, they are literally the OG data and privacy violating corporation, they invented echo chambers and connecting extremists. There is zero value to the fediverse in welcoming meta. The only one who wins if that happens is meta.

In wefwef I have the option to browse my home feed (subscriptions), a local feed (what happens on my home instance), and an all feed of all federated instances. Your client most certainly has an option for that as well. Otherwise, try wefwef.app, it’s Apollo for reddit, except it’s in web app form and for lemmy.

For certain tcg/ccgs, some roleplay games with talent trees, even for Lego sets mentioned the bots on reddit subs were great ways to provide relevant context. There is most definitely a place for utility bots in modern social media, the difficult part is figuring out how to define a reasonable limit on that and how to enforce it effectively.

Im on the other end of this. As a recent reddit refugee and general anti capitalist i am strongly opposed to association or integration of tech giants with this fledgling infant of a democratic social network. Time and again corporations have shown that they will inevitably ruin a good thing for their profits. It happens all the time, your food gets more expensive while quality and quantity only decline. Everyday goods are now subscriptions, everything becomes a commodity. Buying a home is a fever dream for the average citizen because commercial entities buy anything and everything even over market rate just to corner the market. And to use some more recent tech examples, look at streaming services. Piracy was a thing, then Netflix came and made it obsolete through convenience and a fair price. Now greed has not only ruined Netflix but also spawned a dozen subpar clones because everyone makes their content exclusive out of greed, devaluing each other. And just these last weeks we can watch what short sighted bullshit happens to social media when billionaires (or spez) feel their fortune is in danger.

Fuck right off with yet another corporation quasi monopolizing internet communities. Any instance that associates with corporations is an immediate quit and block for me.

Would you feel better if they were communists and chose something completely neutral instead, like .io?

That’s such an arbitrary thing to be concerned about