• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • If I’m not happy with how /r/knives is run on Reddit, I can make /r/knife to compete with it.

    This doesn’t work too well in practice though, as we saw on reddit. If a new user looks for a subreddit about knives, 9 times out of 10 they will find r/knives and if it’s decently active they’ll never learn about r/knife. The name squatters have a massive advantage over the alternatives based on that alone.

    Granted, the instance based community system has a similar problem where the communities on the biggest instances will have an advantage in attracting new users. But it’s a lot easier to overturn because you don’t have to use a janky alternative name, and you can easily publicize poor moderation and dissent on other servers.

    Without the alternative server component, holding control over certain community names is way too powerful, and over time results in a significant degradation of the usability of the site, as it becomes harder and harder to find the actual well-moderated communities. Using alternative names doesn’t solve the problem, it just provides a temporary workaround. Federation actually solves the problem in the long term.

    There is definitely room for improvement on the modlog. But also moderators and admins can view the full removed comment and media, so it’s not like that’s impossible. It’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, that’s for sure.





  • It’s another type of content aggregator like Lemmy and Mbin. Totally unique software, not just an app.

    https://piefed.social/

    It’s not as well known because it only started development a little over a year ago, well after the APIcalypse when most of the Lemmy userbase came over from reddit. But it’s been improving rapidly and already has a lot of innovative features that Lemmy lacks. I believe that one of those features is better compatibility with Mastodon, but I’m not entirely sure. It’s also written in Python which makes it easy for a variety of developers to contribute if they so wish.