In certain parts of the world, you quite literally do not have a choice. For example: I’m in a rural community on an island. No one uses any other website to post anything, from local classified ads to events to important city/community stuff. The choice isn’t to use a better alternative but whether a person here has social contact with anyone locally at all.

No, moving is not a realistic option, especially not moving as far as we’d have to move; even the biggest city in the province doesn’t use anything else.

Honestly, your instance has gotten worse over time in that regard too. Lemmy.ml used to be one of the better instances in that regard but the influx of Reddit users caused quality to crater and weird propaganda-ish pro-America/pro-capitalism stuff (and, not coincidentally, more racist/transphobic stuff) to start flowing from .ml. Probably not anything worthy of any block/defederation because ml still has decent content and a lot of good users but I sometimes am surprised by the stuff that comes out of there.

I didn’t say “defederate them”; I said that I didn’t know why other instances were defederated when that instance is worse. I intentionally didn’t say defederation is bad or good because that’s irrelevant.

Also, different people have different views on defederation and its relation to the Fediverse. In my experience, curating away from content harmful to your users is important to creating healthy communities.

This guy has been spamming garbage everywhere. sh.itjust.works is a terrible instance with no moderation and this quality of post is pretty normal from users there. I don’t know why they haven’t been defederated en masse when other less spammy/disruptive instances that actually contribute to discussions have been.

Android Auto is a proprietary standard that’s basically glorified spyware - if one thing isn’t being fed to it 24/7 exactly as Google wants it so they can sell it, it breaks. It’s basically just that there are a lot of dependencies that it would need that are fundamentally incompatible with privacy.

I think that would be useful! I also think that anyone putting that much work in should look into hosting their own server, because they’ve already done the hardest part of hosting a server in the fediverse. A big part of the issue is that a lot of ActivityPub apps don’t really have granular enough customization baked in to support that sort of thing just yet; you can get some apps that do that on the user side, but anything on the server/community side is usually just “block all” or nothing. The admin of my Mastodon instance is always complaining that he can’t just hide certain instances from the “all” tab without blocking then entirely, and he just wants to hide them so they don’t overwhelm the server, not block them from showing up for people who choose to interact with them.

Honestly, I’ve seen the Fediblock thing on Mastodon, and it’s…pretty terrible. A whole lot of minority groups get targeted disproportionately by that stuff, especially by misinformation about their instances. The answer is really to leave instances if you disagree with moderation policies and the admins won’t listen, and to join instances that are philosophically aligned with you, because unlike in a centralized/capitalist model, this actually works at cultivating a community that you can engage with in a healthy manner. If not, and you go with something like Fediblock/the one big blocklist site, you’re just gonna end up with most instances that serve 2SLGBTQIA+ people getting blocked or having more harmful misinformation spread about them. Hell, if a lot of Lemmy had its way, anything but being capitalist and pro-USA would be banned.

But also, a lot of clients can subscribe to feeds already. ActivityPub is pretty great at cross compatibility with Mastodon and the like. You just subscribe to someone who uses a microblogging platform based on ActivityPub and it’ll show up in your feed.

It’s exactly why I don’t participate in most communities for autistic people and instead look for those that brand themselves as neurodivergent-focused. There’s a lot of “I had it bad so everyone else should have it bad too” as well as conditioned acceptance of societal issues in communities that label themselves as autism communities in my experience.

It’s the cost of federation with instances that try to be giant general-purpose instances (.world and .ee, mostly): just constant shitty takes that overwhelm participants in the conversation. Federation works far better with lots of small purpose-driven instances instead of gigantic ones; my small (<1000 users) specific community-focused Mastodon instance sees absolutely nothing like this and is full of people who intentionally engage in good-faith conversation with the rest of the community while every large instance I’ve seen has the same issues as centralized social media in that regard.

Is there another alternative? Bandcamp is the only similar website that a lot of artists I enjoy use.