To be fair, the real metric that matters is MAU (and DAU, but it never seems to get published for Lemmy).

To be fair, that’s mostly because Lemmy is pretty small with just 50K MAUs. It feels more like a large forum than a full on social network.

If Lemmy had 1 M MAUs, I think the instance culture would be a lot less noticeable (national instances notwithstanding).

It’s already in use. It’s a commenting system on some blogs/websites:

https://disqus.com/

Lemmy and Mastodon.

You can definitely find solid content outside of tech and politics on Mastodon, although the scope tends to be more limited than what Twitter used to be (no idea what state it is now).

Need to check out BookWyrm.

The US made one is the real issue. 😆

People going through US immigration (I did this maybe ~20 years ago as a student) will just make a temp, low-use account or something similar.

Only read the abstract (Schmidt, the Google oligarch, is clearly unreliable), but this reads like AI doomer propaganda. It’s a propaganda technique to hype the dangers of AI in a bombastic manner in order to keep the grift going.

The Americans are definitely going to cut off StarLink, we don’t have any option even if OneWeb isn’t fully ready.

This is not new. I believe they’ve been doing this as far back as Obama (although it might have been less widespread back then).

For techbro ghouls (remember I mentioned scalability, exit etc.) moderation is “difficult” is because it is a cost centre and it has liability risks (they could in theory have to take responsibility for their actions such a dismissive, callous attitude towards moderation).

When moderation fails, you have situation such as FB contributing to mass killings in Myanmar.

While oligarchs like Zuckerberg feel confident enough on their hold on the system to say things like:

Earlier this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Vox that his company was well aware that critics say the social media platform has been used to spread misinformation and hate speech in Burma, explaining that this has “gotten a lot of focus inside the company.”

But what does this have to do with my original take on Rose and Ohanian?

This use case seems to be more for situations when you do have 2 more relatively active communities (with one being smaller).

Never thought about communities following communities. It actually makes a lot of sense and would solve the fragmentation issue in an elegant and “democratic” way.

I don’t think hope or fear, or someone getting rich or poor is really relevant in this case.

They first say:

Rose and Ohanian have now joined forces to “revive” the platform with a “fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be,”

But then they go on to say:

So why now? It’s a combination of reasons, according to Rose, who says that the existing social media landscape has become toxic, messy, and riddled with misinformation — and AI is well-placed to address that. Just the “out of the box stuff,” is “insane,” Rose observes, noting there are “Google endpoints already where I don’t even have to mess with a model at all, where I can get sub 200 millisecond response times on any comment under about 300 characters and rated across 20 plus different vectors of of sentiment, so violence, toxicity, hate speech — you name it. Like, that just wasn’t possible five years ago.”

More broadly, says, Rose, “We’re at this other inflection point around AI and what it can do. And when you think about these big shifts, they require you to go and step back and revisit first principles and think about how you might change [a business] from the ground up, and that’s what Alexis and I and Justin [Mezzell],” who is a longtime collaborator of Rose and now Digg’s CEO, will be doing, he said.

It’s pretty clear that they are looking to build an AI enhanced social network, so why bring up “the spirit of discovery and genuine community?” That is not their goal, their goal is to leverage AI; without it, they would have never undertaken this initiative. No AI, no social network.

I will point out that I never mentioned anything about the utility of AI. It’s a tool, what comes out of it depends on how it is used.

I also don’t see on what basis one should assume a bunch of vapid techbro ghouls would be interested in building “something good”. Their goals revolve around scalability, unit economics and exit plans. If that’s not the case, surely they must have started a non-profit entity and/or implemented independent governance measures that would include stakeholders beyond themselves and investors.

Am I being unreasonable here?

It’s an AI pump and dump attempt.