I’d love to volunteer as a scab. Problem is, what’s stopping me from running any given subreddit in a way that destroys the community further, like arbitrarily removing posts or banning users while simultaneously allowing clear spam/bots/scams to persist?

Sorry, I’m mostly bringing over my low quality comments. Sorry guys.

Sex workers, obviously.

I could’ve sworn HD-DVD had more porn studios backing it. But it was also the time when professional commercial porn was dying as a business.

People like Instagram over Facebook because it’s much, much harder to share links to ragebait on Instagram.

Yes. In the mid 90’s, anyone with an AOL or Juno email address was a noob. Many people on the internet had .edu email addresses, because it was pretty hard to get internet access unless you were affiliated with a university. The rise of Hotmail and Yahoo mail ended up removing the association between email address and internet service provider, to the point where people who were using ISP-provided email addresses by the early 2000’s were seen as unsophisticated and usually older.

I don’t think that site would be problematic. After all, we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.

A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).

Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:

• Don’t use the same verified email address
• Don’t reuse usernames, including across platforms
• Try not to use the same instances, such that instance admins can see whether login activity is coming from the same place, unless you absolutely trust that the admins won’t analyze your data OR inadvertently leak their records.
• Be aware of the techniques used to correlate users: analysis of timestamps, linguistic/grammatical quirks, etc.

This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.

Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.

The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:

• Don’t log unnecessary metadata, such as views/visits, clicks, scrolls, time spent on specific posts, etc. Information that is never observed/logged can’t be shared/published.
• Don’t share unnecessary information with other instances. For example, with an update to the protocol, an instance might be able to hide which local users voted for what in local threads, while maintaining the proper count internally of what the vote totals are, who has already voted, etc. Non-local users would have to have their votes publicly known, though.
• Make the public nature of each action obvious. Make votes more obviously public through the interface (perhaps by allowing people to view who upvoted or downvoted). Make people’s comment history and like history easy to view within the native interface, so that people understand that the information isn’t private to begin with.
• Commit to deletion in a public, auditable way. Let instance administrators know that being a good citizen on the fediverse requires adherence to norms about privacy and deletion, and have watchdogs publish stats on how long it takes for an instance to delete a comment or vote or whether it retains edit/delete history.

I would imagine that instances would really compete on channels/communities/magazines and the mods/admins running those. At a certain point, then, the instances would also tend to have some kind of home field advantage on new users who sign up specifically for that instance’s sports communities. Users from other instances can still interact with the most popular communities, but that’s what I imagine when people talk about instances that focus on a particular niche.

for some reason

I joined a bunch of instances (including kbin) with a bunch of different usernames, and have mostly stopped visiting kbin. The default browser interface isn’t as good: no collapsing comments, unintuitive displays of what magazine/community you’re on (thread links weirdly prioritize telling you which instance hosts the community rather than which of that instance’s local communities it is), etc.

This UI/UX stuff matters, I think. After all, a big part of the reddit migration was prompted by users being forced off of their preferred interface.