Spammers and other bad actors are typically more likely to make the effort than people who might well add a lot of value.

Why do you think this?

I disagree with that. The larger subreddits have significant moderation problems. Only through extraordinary efforts by the mod teams, such as at /r/askhistorians, are things kept in line. It’s simple math: the more users you have, the more likely you are to have people posting in bad faith. If a subreddit of 1 million users has only 0.05% of its users posting low quality content, that’s still 50,000 people that need to be moderated for.

The more popular a community becomes, the shittier it gets. The easier you make it to join and interact with, the more popular it will become.

In the case of places like Gab, Truth Social, Parlor, and other right wing nut job havens, while the quality of users might not get higher if you raised the barrier to entry, those places certainly wouldn’t have become as popular as they have.

But the barrier to entry isn’t the only reason they’ve congregated there, they have other cultural reasons driving them, primarily the owners or moderators being friendly to that kind of mindset. I don’t think the same crowd would be able to gather here as they’d just get defederated.

Aww but I like the Ivory app :( I was hoping for the same thing others are here—subscribe to a Lemmy community and have posts show up in my Masto feed, then click to see comments.

It’s worth opening a GitHub issue for. Maybe it isn’t that hard to do. Might even look at the code myself to see…

Literally found this post as I was searching for that exact thing. My Masto feed is a MESS if I follow a Lemmy community. I only want the top level links to be displayed, and if I tap on that, then see and interact with all the comments. Seems like there should be a way to do this…

What’s also interesting to observe is that the vast majority of the comments here have been respectful, considerate, helpful, and constructive. Maybe I got too used to the massive user base of children that Reddit had, and no hate for the younger crowd, but I did miss the maturity that early days Reddit had and subsequently lost.

Going out especially is insane. I’m not terribly far off from Hartford, CT, and no matter where we go, if my wife and I go out just for two drinks total, one for each of us, we’re not walking out of there without spending less than $25 or even $30. That’s just fucking wild to me. If we want to have dinner–two mains, one shared app, one drink each–we’re looking at at least $100 to $120, and that’s just to any random place, not a high-end eatery or anything. And every single place will hand you a little Square thing or whatever with tip suggestions that start at 18% and go up to 25%.

It’s not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it’s most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they’re laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can’t afford anything because of the economy. I’ve never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.

It’s the enshittification of Reddit, as described by Cory Doctorow

spy on all the traffic

That’s…not how things work. Everyone has their philosophical opinions so I won’t attempt to argue the point, but if you want to handle scale and distribution, you’re going to have to start thinking differently, otherwise you’re going to fail when load starts to really increase.

You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.

Think about everything you hate about Reddit—the kids, the trolls, the spam—and be thankful Lemmy requires a little more effort.

This is the way Reddit used to be when it first came out.