rglullis

Votes are (or were) only meant to work as a signal of what the community thinks to be relevant. This is especially important for niche communities. You are being borderline authoritarian when you are not part of a community and you still think that the whole site needs to have a say in their discussion.

The message is “If you disagree with me, you will be banned”

It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how "agreeable" a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.

This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problem because people were used to browse only the subreddits they subscribed to, so niche subreddits could still have some semblance of "good" community participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst.

In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically "I don't want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it" (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).

So, while "banning everyone who downvotes the post" might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.

Yeah, USD.

Safer in the sense of "less likely to go down or disappear".

If you are willing to have professional support and also support the underlying projects: Communick offers accounts only for paying-members. $29/year gives you an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix, and we pledge to give 20% of the profits to the fediverse projects that we offer.

instance size is not necessarily a strong signal that the instance is safer.

If it's low usage and you don't need a DID, couldn't you simply use Twilio?

XMPP is for private messages, not public discussion.

XMPP is just the transport. You can build a public social network on top of XMPP just fine.

WebSub solved the efficiency issue, no?

Yes, but almost no developer is looking at ActivityPub as a protocol to "add a social layer to their websites and applications". Instead, we are stuck in this "let's replicate the centralized social networks! With blackjack! And hookers! And ActivityPub!" way of thinking.

What a load of FUD. Is p.d owned by Cloudflare? Is p.d advancing some type of agenda that is in the interest of Cloudflare? Can Cloudflare stop the admins from migrating away if they so desired?

The answer is no, to any of that. If anything, I'd be more worried about Google (who owns the .dev TLD) than any threat from Cloudflare.

Let's stop with the needless fragmentation. The Fediverse is already ridiculously small and the last thing we need is sectarian, extremist BS.

By your description, it seems you are on DSL. Is that the case? Likely you will need a DSL modem.