My thesis is basically that new users are not coming from Reddit anymore, but Mastodon users are both searching for group-like features and are likely to be positive influences over here. I'm saying they can be particularly useful in bootstrapping specialized instances (lemmy.film, literature.cafe, etc) and establishing a culture that differs from the wider threadiverse with fairly minimal advertising over on Mastodon. For the most part, if you are not already a Mastodon user or a community/instance mod you do not need to worry about this.
Exploding heads is literally shutting down. So he may have a point.
As cool as the technology is behind nostr the current community is absolutely terrifying. Hopefully it can grow out of that.
Important to note, the fewer people should not significantly restrict your experience. Everything is part of the same network.
My personal pet theory is that a lot of people were doing work that involved getting multiple LLMs in communication. When those conversations were then used in the RL loop we start seeing degradation similar to what's been in the news recently with regards to image generation models.
Quite a few of the popular instances don't even have downvotes.
I know there's already a cult following but I absolutely love found footage horror movies.
Ignoring everything else, they absolutely intend to collect and sell your data regardless of whether you use or interact with anybody from their service:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
It actually looks like they can and will collect and sell data from outside of their server:
"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).
We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."
https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content
The issue is that they can legally monetize users that never signed up to Threads. That's what makes this set of circumstances unique.
As an example. This is the sort of post I'm talking about: https://tech.lgbt/@spaduf/110941439731236455
Already sitting at about 8 boosts and several favorites from some folks with a fairly large follower count. That means potentially thousands of eyes. I went ahead and put together a dedicated user as I think that may be more appropriate than spam posting Lemmy communities/instances on my personal account. Not sure when I'll have time to flesh it out and make it active but I've already got a list of communities/instances and what groups I think would be interested in them. Find it here:
https://mastodon.social/@lemmy_for_mastodon