I’d say, let’s have everyone brainstorm the best way to go about this, and let a thousand flowers bloom!

It is time for the mainland to come back into the fold.

I agree the mainland should be allowed to maintain some amount of self rule during the transition.

Is that even an actual lemming? Where is the green hair?

“I’m not X but <position statement that clearly requires them to be X” and “I don’t want to Y but <proceeds to do exactly Y>” are used by people that mistakenly believe a disclaimer provides instant absolution.

On the other hand, I’ve never had anybody threaten to yuck my yum in exactly those terms, and I’m slightly intrigued by the prospect.

deleted by creator

It could be anything that makes it worth paying money for the accounts in the first place.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside, it’s difficult to tell if an account has been bought, hacked, or if the original owner just decided to become a scumbag out of nowhere.

For example, have a look at https://www.reddit.com/user/fakerht, a 4 years old account that, just 30 minutes ago, decided to promote a scam site that attempts to steal crypto by luring them with the promise of an airdrop.

deleted by creator

That mirrors the tension many reddit mods struggled with recently… It’s difficult to push back against Reddit without also punishing its active users in some real way.

The folks using Reddit are still real human beings. But I get that not everybody is going to draw the line in the same spot.

To push back on that a bit, many Reddit “aged accounts” are used to push scams to the great unwashed masses.

I’m not sure it’s morally okay to turn a blind eye from who’s buying those accounts or why.

Several times now, I’ve sent people I knew links to articles that looked perfectly fine to me, but turned out to be unusable ad-ridden garbage to them.

Since then, I try to remember to disable uBlock Origin to check what they’ll actually see before I share any links.

I agree, but there’s a non-zero chance I don’t have a full picture of things yet, and maybe things aren’t that bad. Or won’t be that bad.

On the surface, inconsistencies like this seem like they might encourage users to group themselves on a few massive servers that have a lot of local content guaranteed to be consistent rather than spreading themselves across many small instances (power law graph goes here.)

But maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe the system naturally converges toward clusters of interests where each instance is primarily focused on a few things, and while the federation mechanism exists and is mostly useful, it is a secondary feature behind a primary use-case where folks preferentially engage with their local communities.

Overall, I wonder how much of all this is colored by expectations we’ve developed while using Reddit.
All this fediverse stuff is built on very different foundations than things like twitter or reddit, and while it’s easy to gloss over it because the UIs look superficially similar, they’ve made some fundamentally different trade-offs.

But maybe the consistency stuff could get better over time too. Maybe there’ll be a smoother experience to better flag when and why things are inconsistent (“instance X hasn’t sent us activity updates since T”, “instance X has partially defederated from us”, etc.), and maybe even offer targeted palliative measures rather than a generic disclaimer.
All this stuff is under fairly active development still, so there’s hope.

Welp, I’m new too, but I think this is more or less working as intended.

The federation mechanism is a “best effort” thing, so there’s literally no guarantee that you’ll get the same view for the same thing loaded through two different instances.

I started writing a userscript to “normalize” URLs so clicking on a link to kbin.social on a different instance would transform the link URL to keep you on your original instance, but with the distinct possibility of missing content because of it, I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea.

The auto-refresh-and-btw-lemme-close-the-image-you-were-looking-at behavior isn’t happening on every instance, but it definitely happens on lemmy.world. Maybe this is an artifact of the websocket approach, and that’ll go away in 0.18? No idea.

At this point, the usage pattern I’m leaning toward is to find good communities/magazines, subscribe to them, and stick to the “subscribed” view. The most consistent results will always be with subs that are local to the current instance, so if most of your subscriptions are on instance X, you probably don’t really want to have your account on instance Y.

There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.

In the desktop web site, if I click on your user id, there’s a “Send Message” button on the top right area of your profile page.

I just tried sending you something with it.

No idea about clients tho.