Everything now is rage-bait designed to get more clicks
IMO the greatest strength of the Fediverse is the increased number of mods and admins looking at everything. Don't want rage bait? Join an instance that has rules against it.
Additional PSA to admins not running a "universal free speech" instance- if you see someone someone being obnoxious it's probably annoying your users just as much as is is you. Don't put the onus fully on users to curate their experience. The Fediverse needs our adults in the room!
To be clear- this is just your personal "vibe" and not an actual fact, because the term "third world country" literally means a country that is not aligned with the US or USSR. If you meant "developing nation" that term also has a definition the US does not meet.
Is this just your vibes or do you have a source? Because I just checked the website of the organization this article is referencing and it says no such thing.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it's obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community's purpose.
For example we had a rule that was literally just "be nice". There's no wriggling around that because it's not some legal text. If someone is ""concerned"" about a request to "be nice" or "be honest", they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.
As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it's own preferred method of discussion.
The Fediverse (and FOSS in general) is inherently (radically) political simply by the nature of it's construction and organization. That said I think it's important to stress to new users that one's experience can be curated to the degree that normal social media cannot.
Until someone open-sources TikToks algorithm, the Fediverse cannot compete on entertainment value, what it competes on is quality and intentionality. I think it's important we put that talking point front and center. We don't need to convince the users who just want to scroll memes (even though this post is literall r/memes haha).
I was a mod at the time and Reddit always told us we had an extreme degree of editorial independence (hence the justification for allowing r/jailbait, /greatawakening, r/coontown etc) but that event made me consider for the first time that exposing normies to propaganda might not just be a side-effect, but a core function of the company.
Absolutely, if you're seeing propaganda, it's because it's allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.
This is very cool! Thanks for sharing.