this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
1311 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
60168 readers
1542 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A distributed service is much less vulnerable to being bought up by a single narcissistic billionaire who can ruin the online experience of millions of people at once.
A distributed service like Lemmy is spread out over 600 Instances in countries all over the world. If someone buys the most popular Lemmy Instance and wrecks it, those users can simply move to the same communities on the second or third or fourth most popular Instance and the original Instance will wither and die. This also works for communities with power tripping moderators. You can quickly find out through a search which community is the "real" one by the number of subscribers it has.
But again, what tangible benefit does that have for the average user? They don't give a fuck about billionaire ownership, moderation, or where an "instance" or server is located.
Well, you should care about it because that's how online communities get ruined. Case in point: Twitter has become a propaganda tool for an apartheid-loving fascist since he bought it.
Why should a user care about the health of an online community? To them it should "just work".
(I'm being purposely facetious here, because the average person really doesn't care about this shit. When Twitter no longer serves its purpose to them they just leave and go to the next place)
Why should a person who goes to the park care about the park?
If people are dumping trash everywhere and all the plants and animals are dying, I assume you wouldn't like to spend much time there anymore.
Sure another park might be opened, but constantly changing parks isn't what you want to do long term. If someone buys up the basketball court and turns it into a cesspool of hate, you can unsubscribe from that court and remove it from your park. Adding another one that is nicer, without completely going to a new park.
You have more control over your front-page content. If you don't want to get a particular feed, you unsubscribe from it.