RSS is the hero that saved us from Spotify (et at.) walling off podcasts behind their paywall.

Google weirdly gets a lot of credit for killing things that are very much alive and well.

Yes.

For example, if you search for the old fediversenews url, you can subscribe to it: https://venera.social/profile/fediversenews/

Yep, I follow a couple Lemmy communities from Friendica.

Stories, not Reels. Stories are photos that disappear after 24 hours.

Raccoon for Friendica is great if you’re on Android.

For real. Who could ever understand why Dan banned them? It’s a mystery…

Loops was developed years ago as a component of Pixelfed and then shelved before being recently developed as a separate service. It is not 5 years old.

As the person asking people to fact check the claims of weird conspiracy theorists, I’m gonna have to ask for your sources on that one.

Edit: For anyone wondering, MBFC is transparent about their funding sources.

Edit2: an MBFC conspiracy theorist just making shit up??? I’m shocked…

I’m awarding you three demerits for a reply that doesn’t make sense. Govern yourself accordingly.

I think that very few of these arguments are being made in good faith. For some people, any bias monitor is a barrier to sharing propaganda as news. Others just don’t understand how to use the site properly. Or use it in a really stupid way anyway. Like this:

1. Look at the ratings.
2. If something strikes you as odd, run around screaming like your hair’s on fire.

Instead of:

1. Look at the ratings.
2. If something strikes you as odd, read the part of the report that explains the rating.
3. Decide how important those things are to you and whether it’s a deal-breaker.

Others are like, ‘it’s telling me what to think, man!’ who don’t seem to understand that those pages contain a wealth of information that you can include in your decision-making (or not). They’ve convinced themselves that it’s presented as the one and only source of absolute truth, which is really just something they made up to be angry about. No one but them is making that claim.

There also isn’t another free source that has that info in one place. There’s no better place to quickly find news org ownership info, the country they’re operating in (with links to info about press freedom in that country), and their history of factual reporting. But those people don’t care – they’re just viscerally reacting to the ratings, not reading the reports.

EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC.

Here’s another in my “making friends” series of posts.

Commenters DO NOT have valid criticisms of MBFC. They are universally wrong, have no idea how MBFC works, and are too lazy to look it up. The misinfo ghouls among them are happy to repeat lies over and over until people start to accept them.

Some of these people can be pretty convincing but I urge you to actually fact check their arguments. Most of these people are just parroting bullshit they saw someone else say. The “best” of these are basically artisanal, hand-crafted AI hallucinations: high-confidence, syntactically-correct nonsense. Don’t put that glue on your pizza. If someone posts an MBFC link as evidence, click it and read it. Nearly every single time, the link they posted contradicts them and they just haven’t read it.

And ask yourself why no one ever posts peer-reviewed research backing up their claims. It’s a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Every single piece of academic research on MBFC says they’re wrong. The MBFC conspiracy theorists can’t just ignore that body of research because it’s inconvenient – they need a compelling reason why all research to date is wrong. For their claims to be true, it would require a massive conspiracy between academics, journalists, and media bias organizations because they are all in consensus about what makes good and bad news organizations. It’s loopy, tinfoil hat bullshit.

That’s really cool. Looks great too.

The headline is just riffing on the headline of the article it’s replying to.

The original article said that there is no value beyond a false sense of accomplishment in posting to social media. He is saying that there’s some value but also inherent value in creating alternatives to corporate (and in many cases fascist) media spaces.

Both of those people are SO FUCKING THIRSTY for constant approval.

That’s literally what they’re doing:

For starters, Mastodon says it will allow users to control whether their posts can be quoted at all. This would protect people from being the recipient of unwanted attention or hateful replies to some extent. (Though, arguably, people could still screenshot someone’s post to circulate it more broadly if they intended to troll the user.)

In addition, users will be notified if someone quotes them, and they’ll be able to withdraw their post from the quoted context at any time. This latter option could help in the case that someone’s quote post goes viral, and the original poster starts to receive too much attention or even abuse, forcing them to reconsider whether they want their post to be quotable at all.

Mastodon.social has a “spam problem” because they’re the largest target. We’re lucky it’s them because they’re one of the few instances with the resources to take on the problem. They’ve also contributed a ton - in tools and strategies - to help other instances deal with the problem.

The MAU counter at mastodon.social reset. It happened at about the same time they had an issue and had to recover data so I think it was related to that.

Definitely weird on first reading. New names often seem weird or dumb at first so maybe I’ll just get used to it. Anglicizing it might make sense? Fleamarkt?

Agreed. It immediately went from being maybe the best app in the Fediverse to the 3rd best for its own service. I stopped using Pixelfed altogether until Pixelix got good enough to be a replacement.

I honestly don’t understand how getting the new app to feature parity with the old wasn’t maximum priority. It at least seems like it’s going to get there pretty soon.