EnglishMobster

You can technically boost it, which works like a retweet on Twitter.

Not much, but it's something! If you have Mastodon users following your Kbin profile, they'll have the post pushed to their feeds as if you said it in the microblog tab (since Kbin can work as a Mastodon replacement).

And this pitch to /r/linux notably leaves out this other, older pitch...

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

Note the line: Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are. I'm pretty left-leaning myself (I draw the line at authoritarianism though), but they're very open about using their platform to push an agenda. The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people - the ".ml" in "lemmy.ml" even stands for "Marxist-Leninist".

I joined Lemmy.ml in 2020 after this pitch to /r/linux... and left shortly afterward when I saw who ran it. Thankfully we have other options now (hello from Kbin!).

Just mods in it for power, mostly. A partial list is here: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2023/06/15/unofficial-subreddit-migration-list-lemmy-kbin-etc.html#scab-subreddits

The way generative AI works is by using things called "tokens". Usually 1 word == 1 token, but compound words would be 2 tokens, punctuation would be a token, things like "-ed" or "-ing" could be tokens, etc.

When you give an AI a prompt, it breaks your response down into tokens. It then finds what tokens were statistically most likely to appear near that content and gives them as a response.

This has been the approach for a while, but the modern breakthroughs have come from layering AIs inside of each other. So in our example, the first AI would give an output. Then a second AI would take that output and apply some different rules to it - this second AI could have a different idea of what a "token" is, for example, or it could apply a different kind of statistical rule. This could be passed to a third AI, etc.

You can "train" these AI by looking at their output and telling it if it was good or bad. The AIs will adjust their internal statistical models accordingly, giving more weight to some things and less weight to others. Over time, they will tend towards giving results that the humans overseeing the AI say are "good". This is very similar to how the human brain learns (and it was inspired by how humans learn).

Eventually, the results of all these AI get combined and given as an output. Depending on what the AIs were trained to do, this could be a sentence/response (ChatGPT) or it could be a collection of color values that humans see as a picture (DALL-E, Midjourney, etc.).

Because there are so many layers of processing, it's hard to say "this word came from this source." Everything the AI did came from a collection of experiences, and generally as long as the training data was sufficiently large you can't really pinpoint "yeah it was inspired by this." It's like how when you think of a dog, you think of all the dogs you've experienced in your lifetime and settle on one idea of "dog" that's a composite of all those dogs.

Interestingly, you can sometimes see some artifacts of this process where the AI learned the "wrong" thing. One example: if you asked an AI what 3 + 4 is, it knows from its experiences that statistically it should say "7". Except people started doing things like asking for what "Geffers + HippoLady" was, and the bot would reply "13", consistently.

It seemed there were these random tokens that the bot kept interpreting as numbers. Usually they were gibberish, but sometimes you could make out individual words being treated as 1 token despite being 2 separate words.

It turned out that if you googled these words, you'd get redirected to a subreddit - specifically /r/counting. The tokens were actually the usernames of people who contributed often to /r/counting. This is one way it was determined that the bot was training on Reddit's data - because these usernames appeared near numbers a lot, the bot assumed they were numbers and treated those tokens accordingly.

We actually don't have much in the way of sugar. Usually high fructose corn syrup is the substitute in the US, since the government subsidizes corn production. High fructose corn syrup (obviously) comes from corn, so it's cheaper than sugar due to those government corn subsidies - meaning that not a lot of American food has sugar in it.

Digg didn't die all at once. It was a very slow, miserable death.

And even now, Digg still exists, with some users even. As long as the Threadiverse gets better and Reddit gets worse, we'll see continued waves of people leaving.

The real question is whether it'll look like Digg -> Reddit (where most everyone left eventually) or Twitter -> Mastodon (where large groups of people were "too confused" and didn't move).

Yes, blocking magazines works. I've blocked quite a few German magazines and the problem went away. (Sorry, Germans!)

BaconReader was my first Reddit app, back when I had a Windows Phone. It was basically the only good way to browse Reddit on Windows Phone.

I haven't used it in many years, but I am sad to see it go.

Yep, places with more people will have a wider range of communities in their "all" feed.

That said, the barrier to making an account isn't too high. My first account was on Lemmy.ml back in 2020, shortly after Lemmy was created (I never stuck around and left pretty quickly).

Last month I realized I don't trust Lemmy.ml, so I joined Beehaw.org.

Then I thought Beehaw.org was a little overzealous at times, so I came here to Kbin.social.

I've largely stuck to Kbin because I really like how it looks and feels, but I did make accounts on Lemmy.world, fedia.io, and sh.itjust.works as backups in case Kbin goes down.

Some have.

You can take a look at which subs have "official" presences elsewhere here.

For example, I moderated /r/Disneyland, and we're now over here at !Disneyland@kbin.social (search https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland if that link doesn't work for you on Lemmy, or @Disneyland on Kbin since Lemmy-style links are currently broken until the next Kbin update).

We do maintain a presence on Reddit. Although I personally avoid the site now, not all the others on the mod team feel the same, and some are still confused by the fediverse. We were closed for about a week before Reddit threatened to replace the mod team. At that point, we were afraid of a couple things:

• An inactive mod messaging the admins, becoming a scab, and removing the rest of the mod team. While most of us were in communication, there were some mods who were radio silent. Other places were seeing these scab mods get the top mod spot and decapitate the protest, forcing out all the remaining mods.

• If that didn't happen, there's another mod team of the WDW subreddit who is on bad terms with basically every other Disney sub. The WDW sub was cooperating with the admins, and there was a fear that Reddit would replace our entire mod team with theirs, where they'd be free to ban users randomly and spread COVID misinfo. Reddit was beginning to replace mod teams with ones from similar subreddits, so it was a real risk.

We considered different ways to protest. My idea was "only allow pictures of members of the Disney family standing on land. Ban any pictures of them in the water or on ladders." But the top mod was spooked when she saw that Reddit was replacing entire mod teams, so she called for a full reopen with normal operations. However, we also linked to our Kbin magazine in the sidebar/announcement sticky and are now maintaining 2 communities in parallel so that if Reddit has another exodus we can have an established community already.

A lot of other mods are in the same boat. I've been in communication with the other mods in the protest, and the main problem is that different subreddits have different needs. The lack of AutoMod on both Lemmy and Kbin is a problem, and Kbin's API is currently read-only so an AutoMod bot can't even be made (but it is theoretically possible on Lemmy I think).

This stuff is fixable, and Reddit is almost certainly going to do something dumb again. Digg didn't die right away either, but there was a moment where there was an obvious sea change - and we're seeing the same thing with Reddit now. Lemmy/Kbin will get better with time, whereas Reddit will only get worse. It's important to get ahead of the curve and be ready for next time.

This is already happening.

Bots are being used to astroturf the protests on Reddit. You can see at the bottom how this so-called "user" responds "as an AI language program..."

"All" shows every community/magazine that at least one person on your instance has subscribed to.

The different sort options sort then differently, of course.