Yeah, this video is meant to answer the absence of the feature on the desktop site and the official client, explaining the history and the fact that the feature is on the way.

I think this mentality is far too narrow and can lead to problems down the road. And it’s a dangerously common one among leftists. The bigger threat right now isn’t some sort of shadowy cabal of elites, it’s market-based logic, which can manifest through the little guy just as much as the big guy.

For example, I’m already seeing discussions of “ethical advertising” or “paying influencers” but this only raises more questions. How will we keep funding this model? What happens when we’re outcompeted by other sites like Twitter for ad revenue? After all why wouldn’t an advertiser pick the method which is more effective. Natural selection and administrative costs will slowly chip away at what distinguishes us.

The foundations you lay now play a role in determining your future. By refusing any form of commercialization, it forces us to innovate to cut costs. This could be cutting technological overhead as with PeerTube’s WebTorrent, it could be setting a foundation for promoting/getting content on the Fediverse which isn’t dependent on constantly having to pay people to switch over.

The blockchain-based and "free speech"platforms do exactly this and it’s why they all die so quickly. They may be little guys but they lack the patience/imagination to approach the issue in an organic fashion, end up trying to ape the big players, and never build a foundation strong enough to last. The market doesn’t think in moralistic terms, it doesn’t care how big or little you are, the only way out isn’t to compete on revenue-based grounds.

This is why I think it’s important that in these early discussions we continue to oppose all forms of monetization/strategies reliant on large and continuous spending. It sets up a vicious cycle that’s impossible to escape.

Fantastic idea! I actually never thought about this, this could probably be done fediverse-wide.

I disagree just due to the aforementioned network effect. Numbers with social media have a snowball effect, where people make their decision on whether or not to participate based on existing levels of activity. What sets Lemmy apart from stuff like Lobste.rs and HackerNews IMO is that it’s integration of federation gives it potential to break out as a serious alternative to the platforms rather than catering a specific niche, so I’d say the snowballing is important also since it has the potential to help bring up the rest of the Fediverse.

Given Lemmy’s reputation as being a platform run by communists, the fact that such a hardcoded filter even existed to begin with, and also per-instance blocking/slur filtering, I’d think that should be enough to keep them away and stop them from polluting the communities associated with the flagship instances, then again I’m not an admin so I can’t say for sure. It’d also help the issue you mentioned regarding ambiguity of what slurs to include, since each community can decide that for themselves.

Isn’t instance-blocking alone sufficient for being able to prevent the environment from being overrun? I understand the hesitancy to platform reactionaries, but as it stands the network effect is easily the biggest hurdle the Fediverse is going to face. Right-libertarians and actual reactionaries might be a net negative on the main instance, but as far as the software itself goes, numbers are numbers, and could end up making a world of difference.

Let them form their own circlejerks away from everyone else and have slur-blocking be on a per-instance basis, after all that’s why the federated design works so well.