Interested in astronomy you say? Well mander.xyz describe themselves as a “An instance dedicated to nature and science.”. They have a astronomy community with, some activity - !astronomy@mander.xyz. I’m not on mander so I don’t know how things are there, but I pretty much don’t ever see anyone complaining about it.

feddit.uk is a UK instance. So there might be some interesting things there for you.

lemmy.ee is known for not defederating unless absolutely necessary.

On the topic of defederating, lemmy.world is somewhat disliked due to their defederation happy tendencies. For the most part, though, this whole instance wars thing is mostly due to disagreements on what kind of political discourse should be allowed. Instances like lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net and lemmy.ml are a bit too left-wing for many people from the center-right to handle: the world views are just too different.

I could rant about the dam instance wars, but it is not what you came were for.

AIs don’t summarize, they just shorten text.

AI art being inherently “plagiarising”

Yes it is, simply due to the nature of the “training”/“learning” process, which is learning in name alone. If you know how this mathematical process works you know the machine’s definition of success is how well it’s output matches the data it was trained with. The machine is effectively trying to encrypt it’s data base on it’s nodes. I would recommend you inform yourself on how the “training” process actually works, down to the mathematical level.

AI using as much energy’s crypto , the AI = crypto mindset in general

AI is often push by the same people who pushed NFTs and whatnot, so this is somewhat understandable. And yes, AI consumes a lot of energy and water. Maybe not as much as crypto, but still, not something we can afford to use for mindless entertainment in our current climate catastrophe.

AI art “having no soul”

Yup. AI “art” works by finding pixel patterns that repeat with a given token. Due to it’s nature, it can only repeat patterns which it identified in it’s training data. Now, we have all heard of the saying “An image in worth a thousand words”. This saying is quite the understatement. For one to describe an image down to the last detail, such detail that someone who never saw the image could perfectly replicate it, one how need more than a thousand words, as evidenced by computer image files, since these are basically what was just described. The training data never has enough detail to describe the whole image in such detail and therefore it is incapable of doing anything too specific.

Art is very personal, the more of yourself you put into a piece, the more unique and “soulful” it will be. The more of the work you delegate to the machine, the less of yourself you can put into the piece, and if 100% of the image generation was made by the machine, which is in turn simply calculating an average image that matches the prompt, then nothing of you is in the piece. It is nothing more than the maths that created it.

Simple text descriptions do not give the human meaningful control over the final piece, and that is why pretty much any artist worth their tittle is not using it.

Also, the irony that we are automating the arts, something which people enjoy doing, instead of the soul degrading jobs nobody wants to do, should not be lost on us.

“Peops use AI to do «BAD THING» , therefour AI ISZ THE DEVILLLL ‼‼‼”

It is true that AI is being used in horrible was that will take sometime to adapt, it is simply that the negative usages of AI have more visibility than the positive usages. As a matter of fact, this node network technology was already in use in many fields before the Chat-GPT induced AI hype train.

can’t trust anti AI peops to actually criticise the tech

Correct. It is well known that those who stem to financially benefit from the success of AI are more than willing to lie about it’s true capabilities.

Yup. Its seems like it.

Funny how any mention of it being a paid service is only at the bottom of the page.

Does anyone know of any alternatives?

Yes… we should probably ban Xitter links… but maybe allow other front ends? You know, because screenshots can be forged.

Hummm… Maybe I could find some videos showing some class warfare. Let me see… Found some tangential ones.

The Reason You’re Poor (It’s more than just taxes)

Welfare: For them, but not for you!(How YOU Subsidize Everything)

America’s Unemployment Problem

Landlord arguments suck (Debunking Arguments Landlords Use to Justify Their Existence)

This is what could find in a short period of time. Hope it helps? You should defensively read up on class struggle.

Yup… right what I suspected! The Slippery Slope Fallacy!

Whats gonna happens when politicians realize kids are just gonna click “I’m at least [Age]”?

Many pornography work like that and can, as such, be easily bypassed. But does that mean we should drop the age restriction for access to pornography? Of course not!

Here is another example:

Murder. Murder shouldn’t be legal and it is not. However, despite this restriction, some find ways to get away with murder. Does that mean that laws against murder are useless since we cannot stop murder 100% of the time? I highly doubt it.

It is impossible for any law enforcement to prevent 100% of all crimes, but that is not justification for those law to not exist.

Either you have a toothless law, or you live in a country with Great Firewall of China.

False dilemma fallacy.

Again, I’ll refer to pornography. Many pornography work on the trust system. By your logic, that means we should drop all laws restricting access to it. However, that is absurd.

The point isn’t to stop 100% of all usage. It is simply there to reduce the usage. You are forgetting that we are talking about human beings. Beings which have a natural tendency to conform to social norms as to not be cast out of their tribe (since humans cannot survive in the wild without each other, such would be a death sentence).

This law would set the societal precedent that people need to be of a certain age to access these social media apps (as shown by scientific data, which revealed that social media usage can have many negative effects on a developing mind). This societal precedent will, hopefully, make it taboo for people bellow 16 to access social media, which will, in turn, reduce, but not outright 100% stop, underage social media usage.

???

How is restricting access behind an age requirement the same as the “Great Firewall”. Right now, as we speak, you cannot use social media until you are 13. They are just increasing that requirement to 16.

There are many many many other things that are already lock behind an age restriction and I don’t see you freaking out. Here are a few examples of things locked behind an age restriction:

• alcohol

• gambling

• cigarettes

• pornography

Media has age restrictions. Books have age restrictions, movies have age restrictions, games have age restrictions. Media has had age restrictions for a very long time and it’s high time the same standards are applied to social media.

Just because it isn’t perfect it doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Just because there is no way to stop 100% of all crime it doesn’t mean taking measures to reduce crime is futile.

There is a lot more to this than just blocking the site. It will also change social norms. Right now, if a 14 year old as social media, nobody bats an eye; but with the 16 year requirement, through all the sudden, parents aren’t too comfortable with letting their 14 year old have social media. So not only will they need to find some free VPN totally not spyware to use (and even know that that exists and how to use), they will also have to hide it from their parents, as it is no longer socially acceptable for 14 year olds to have social media.

And before you say “Kids can easily get a free VPN and hide it.” Never underestimate tech illiteracy.

They are an actually crypto-fascist instance judging by the events the preceded our defederation with them

Crypto-fascists?! The hell did I miss?

Even a big centralized fediverse server is better than yet another walled garden they can’t easily migrate off of.

No it’s not. If a single server holds a critical amount of the fediverse’s content, they can enshitify.

The reason why the fediverse is resilient to enshitification is due to the fact that it makes migration less painful: If you want to abandon Xitter, which is centralized, you will be unable to access Xitter’s content, which is why it took so long for people to abandon it; but if you want to abandon… let’s say… mastodon.world, you can just make an account on another instance and still access the same content. For enshitification to occur, user’s must be locked in, the federation stops that.

However, this system has one major vulnerability which can completely subvert the fediverse’s ability to resist enshitification: centralization of content. If one instance holds a critical amount of content, they can pull up the drawbridge, that is, de-federate from all other instances. You might think this would upset the users, but it wouldn’t. Most wouldn’t know what federation is, all of mainstream is on the default instance, only the computer nerds are on other instances, so if suddenly, the default instance de-federated from everyone else, and thus becomeing a walled garden just like Xitter, few would notice and fewer would care. And now the default instance is centralized just like Xitter and the enshitification cycle repeats.

If you want an example of this look no further than Gmail. More or less 95% all emails are Gmail. If Gmail de-federates from your instance, you are removed; that means Google can basically dictate what other instances are and aren’t allowed to do. If you do something Gmail doesn’t like, they can de-federate and you instance is now basically useless, since you can’t email 95% of people. Gmail could easily kill Proton Mail by de-federating.

just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.

Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.

You need the plurality of site content

I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.

Not a solution. Defeats the point of decentralisation, putting most (like 90%+) users in one instance. Big instance is sold to Venture Capital Firm because a bunch of amateur moderators call moderate the whole of twitter… and just like that enshitification shall commence.

Perhaps… But how exactly?

Wait, Trump is doing what? Can you link some sources?

BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.

a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.

They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.

It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.

the focus should be on figuring out how to explain it to people in a sensible way.

And that is the thing I have been struggling with and if the major instances looked visually distinct it would make it easier to not confuse them. But yeah, the fediverse has a marketing problem. We need to get people with marketing skills involved.

For example, I don’t use Gmail and I run my own personal Mastodon instance using masto.host, this doesn’t stop me communicating with people on Gmail or major Mastodon instances like mastodon.social.

I mentioned Gmail because, when a single instances holds something like 95% of the users, that gives them a lot of power. If Gmail decided to de-federate from you… you are kinda screwed. That’s my concern. Although, as you said, that is still better than a fully centralized platform.

Sorry for the long, poorly organized response. I just had a bunch of thoughts on this that I wanted to get of my head

The thing I have noticed is that the fediverse does not have an elevator pitch. It is really hard to explain things in simple terms.

Usually, when just simply trying to make an account, people expect to simply go to a website, create account and done, you are in.

While in the fediverse it is like:

• First select an instance!

And the user is like:

• What is “instance”…?

And them they get lectured for 10+ minutes over some tech concepts that look alien to them.

• This raises the question: “Why is [fediverse platform] like this? Why so complicated? Why can’t it just be like every other platform? Go to site, log in. Simple. What’s that all “Federation” for?”

And now they will have to receive another 10+ minute long lecture on the flaws of the centralized social media.

20+ minutes worth of lecture, just so they can use a social media platform. If they hear they whole lecture, and understand it, they will probably give the fediverse a try, but if they don’t because they got overwhelmed with information from your lectures they won’t even try.

And all of this and I still haven’t explained a single feature of the platform itself.

We need to come up with an elevator pitch that gives people some clue of what federation is.

I know what some might be thinking: “Why do they need to know what federation is?” Well yes, I could just say, go to [big Mastodon instance here] and create an account. Cool, they are using Mastodon.

But inevitably, this will happen: Someone will send them a link to a Mastodon post. They click it, but the link they were send was on another instance as such they are logged out. Thing is, they don’t know what federation is and most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. “Strange”, they think, “I could have sworn I was logged in”. Then they try to log in on the other instance… can’t and get confused and maybe even panic. “Did I just lose my account?”. And now they come to me for tech support (because I was the one who introduced them to mastodon), and I end up having to explain federation anyways.

Now, with that being said, Email is still an example of a federated platform with mass adoption, and we should use it as an example when explaining the fediverse. But I would like to stress the following point: most instances have nearly indistinguishably UI, as thus the user doesn’t notice they are on a completely different site. Go different Email instances and they look distinct. Go to gmail.com and outlook.com and they look distinct enough so that people can intuitively understand that, although they are both email services, their Gmail account is not going to let them log into Outlook.

Mastodon instances on the other hand? They just brand themselves as “Mastodon” and that’s about it. They look identical! Just LOOK:

No wonder people get confused. The big instances NEED to look distinct for this to work. Otherwise, the federation thing will be confusing.

Now that I’m writing this I’m realizing that this seems to be an UI problem: The instances look to similar to be immediately recognizable as distinct and that’s confusing. Therefore we should work towards ensuring that instance, or at least the big ones, have a distinct appearance, their own “brand”, so they can be seen as distinct so that the example scenario I showed earlier doesn’t happen.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating things… Maybe it’s as easy as: “It kinda works like email. On email, you can go to a number of different sites, like gmail and outlook and send mail to anyone. Mastodon is also like that, there are many websites, each one with their own rules and mod teams. You can join any of them and see post from people from the other sites.”

But even this explanation has a problem: It does not explain de-federation. If they end up trying to follow someone who is on an instance their main instance as de-federated, they won’t be able to find them and they won’t know why. Most are not familiar with email de-federation as most only ever need to interact with the big instances which all federate with each other.

I guess my problem is that, by simplifying things so that non-tech people can understand, they will end up running into the intricacies of federation and not know what to do.

Also, if people don’t understand federation, we will end up with a Gmail situation: Everybody is on the same one instance. Understanding the need for this separation of Mastodon into different instances can be hard. If we simply tell people to go to the big instance, that’s what they will do. And then we end up with Gmail.

Federation and separation into smaller communities is a good thing, but it can hard to explain how and why.