I love the idea and spirit of Lemmy, I think decentralized and federated networks show a ton of promise…

However my experiences so far trying to engage in intelligent discussion/debate on Lemmy have been far more combative and frankly mean than I can ever recall on even the most “passionate” subreddits I participated in.

I think it’s a cross-section of the kinds of people who are enthusiastic about federated networks, and people who are knowledgeable enough to be early adopters here. But I’ll be honest, it has definitely cooled my interest in participating in discussion on Lemmy instances.

I don’t appreciate being called names or being accused of being a bad faith actor simply because I’m asking questions or challenging a viewpoint, and that seems to be the outcome of nearly every interaction here.

It doesn’t do any favors for changing the perception that Lemmy (and other federated platforms like Mastodon) are populated by terminally online keyboard warriors.

There’s a distinct feeling that if you support or even just use “traditional” (non-federated) platforms, or otherwise are not fully committed to 100% decentralization or open source, you are the enemy here.

I don’t want to go back to Reddit, and I won’t because of the absolutely abhorrent things their leadership has done and continues to do, but Lemmy users in my experience are overwhelmingly hostile and it sucks.

Super shitty response to the question you still haven’t given an answer to, after I reiterated again what my understanding of the “so obvious” point was.

Whatever you want dude, happy to block you.

If it’s so obvious why can’t you state it clearly?

It seems like the insinuation is that Threads is artificially inflating user counts with “shadow accounts” that aren’t real - however it’s been clearly determined that they aren’t.

So, if it’s not that, then, again… what’s the “so obvious” point I’m missing?

Threads only shows users who have signed in to Threads. If you mention an Instagram user in a Threads post that has not signed in to Threads prior, the mention is removed because it’s not a valid handle.

I urge you to read through the link in the original post to the Mastodon user who originally made this claim, where you’ll find plenty of people more eloquent than me explaining why this is inaccurate.

But the point you’re making isn’t clear which is why I asked if you could clarify - what is the point you’re making?

What is Meta doing here? I’m not clear on what the point being made is.

If you’re insinuating that they are doing this to artificially inflate user counts, why wouldn’t they be reporting about how there are 2+ billion threads users in the first week?

They don’t need to manufacture hype - like Meta or not, in the first 96 hours they brought in almost 100 million users. Thats a third of Twitter’s entire active user base, in less than a week.

I too understand where you’re coming from, but I think it’s an important distinction, not semantics.

If Meta was simply creating a duplicitous profile for every Instagram user, that would be pretty predatory and misleading.

However, if that were the case, they would also be bragging about having 2+ billion Threads “users”.

It also implies that users could interact with these “shadow accounts” even if that person never used Threads, which is not the case.

As it currently works, if you try to mention a user who is on Instagram but isn’t on Threads, nothing happens, the mention is stripped because it’s not a valid handle.

It’s not forced on you. If you don’t download Threads and log in, you’re not on threads.

This is akin to saying Google Calendar is “forced” on you if you have a Gmail account. They are separate services that use a common credential, you are under no obligation to use any or all of those services.

It’s probably even more simple than that - a single DB with a flag for threads_enabled = true/false.

They made it super clear in advance this is how it would work, the app is called “Threads, an Instagram app”, but as always people froth at the mouth for any opportunity to say “Zuckerberg bad”.

That’s not some big secret. Everyone knows meta sucks. We don’t need to make stuff up to prove that. They do that on their own.

There’s plenty of things to hate Meta for, but this is inaccurate.

You log into Threads with your Instagram account. There’s no “shadow account”, you’re logging into a second service with the same account and credentials.

ka chow

oh good my weekly bean delivery is here

Embedding videos doesn’t require local storage of videos. When you embed a YouTube video, you’re just linking a container which loads and displays the video from YouTube’s servers.

I truly don’t understand why people keep trying to use Twitter despite open and obvious changes designed to be hostile to users. Not to mention the reliability issues that continue to crop up as a result of axing nearly your entire engineering staff.