When technology allows us to do something that we could not before - like cross an ocean or fly through the sky a distance that would previously have taken years and many people dying during the journey, or save lives - then it unquestionably offers a benefit.

But when it simply eases some task, like using a car rather than horse to travel, and requires discipline to integrate into our lives in a balanced manner, then it becomes a source of potential danger that we would allow ourselves to misuse it.

Even agriculture, which allows those to eat who put forth no effort into making the food grow, or even in preparing it for consumption.

This is what CEOs are pushing on us, because for one number must go up, but also genuinely many believe they want what it has to offer, not quite having thought through what it would mean if they got it (or more to the point others did, empathy not being their strongest attribute).

Everyone who uses AI is slowly committing suicide, check ✅

I hope OP is okay…

So should I like… downvote this one then? 🤪

@mighty_orbot@retro.pizza

What I mean is, the link in a Lemmy community when viewed from a Lemmy instance works just fine. So it’s not broken at that level.

I can’t speak to how it comes across to Mastodon, or your particular method of access to that, as you showed in your screenshot. In general, instances running the Mbin software seem to work better to access both Lemmy and Mastodon, but overall communication between Mastodon and Lemmy seems not perfect, as you said.

I’m not sure if you’ll get this reply @mighty_orbot@retro.pizza, but here’s the link visible from Lemmy itself: https://tuta.com/blog/digital-fingerprinting-worse-than-cookies.

Your method of accessing this Lemmy community seems not to be working on your side somehow. You might try a different app - I’ve never used Mastodon so I don’t know what might work.

I see your… whatever that is, and raise you a honey badger don’t care.

Ikr, like OP couldn’t have waited a couple days!? 🤪

Bc it’s so far past that it has become its own thing. Like there’s “mental illness”, and then there’s “Florida”!:-P

I would say that this is perfection, if it weren’t for the simple fact that most states are in far more danger of Ohio than this shows… :-D

fr fr

Believe it or not, but I was lazy myself in writing my comment. It would have been better to have a question mark at the end. ❓

AI slop

This works for every nation I can think of… that would offer this product on their shelves.

Let us know your progress, m’kay? :-P (inquiring tastebugs demand to know! and no I’ve decided not to change that spelling!)

If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).

And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google’s.

As an example, if you search for the keyword “Lemmy”, DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World’s 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml’s top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.

i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are “ruined” as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and “real” ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).

My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both “usable” (even if less so than the past) and also “degraded” at the same time.

That depends strongly on which “public” we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don’t even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added “reddit” to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it’s less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.

Both Mbin and PieFed have “categories”, so that you don’t need to search for and find communities at all - you can simply join like “memes”, underneath “Chillin”, and it’ll show all of them. You can fine-tune further, but hunting through All can be a thing of the past. So… it’s happening, not in Lemmy per se (yet) but in the wider Fediverse it’s already here. See it yourself in action at e.g. https://piefed.social/ (3 horizontal bars -> Topics).

For real, there are people who will volunteer to do that, to help a community get off the ground. See !fedigrow@lemm.ee.

On PieFed, although I’m not sure what I think about it, posts with more than one user-defined threshold will get auto-collapsed, and then a second such threshold allows it to be hidden entirely.

So two people with opposing preferences could browse the same community but see it differently. The one wanting to see everything being allowed to do so - rather than that being the arbitrary decision of a mod (team), and the content hidden away in a mod log somewhere else, mostly inaccessible. Whereas the one who didn’t want to “waste” their time, and rather trusting the feedback of the community, could have those collapsed or hidden if they so choose.

This allows democratization of the modding process: every voter is equally a mod as the next. Or maybe some trusted members more so than others? (But if so, it can’t be TOO much higher than the others, or it could become overwhelming)

The major pitfall I see is if votes are allowed outside of the community, then it’s vulnerable to being brigaded easily by a larger outside force.

Still, it’s fascinating to see these experiments actually happen in that software that is available right now! e.g. on PieFed.social.