Not to worry, the ~~government~~ party will bail them out will taxpayer money if push comes to shove.
Seems like a perfectly good case of capitalism. If anything, we should praise the lord for giving us the opportunity to suck Zuck's pee pee. Not sure what people are complaining about - everything that's happening is perfectly reasonable and if you disagree then you're obviously a pedo Marxist.
bailing will commence, in... 3...2..1...
An appropriately sized fine for a corporation?! Well we certainly can't let that happen.
Once things go down it'll be a reduced slap-on-the-wrist to the tune of some millions, and Meta will pay it and continue business as usual.
Yeah, it’ll get fixed to 1.4 million instead and everyone will get .02 each.
There's a "giving them my two cents" joke in here, but hell if I can think of it.
A meta Meta joke. I like it.
I don't think that's enough.
Good. Die.
Oh NO! Won't someone PLEASE think of the ~~CHILDREN!~~ Shareholders!
Best we can do is require ID to get on the Internet and embed full tracking of all data in your OS by law. Now, smile for the Government mandated facial recognition camera in your car and on your PC.
It's for the the children. Have you thought of them?
Good. Burn it all down
Goodbye Cuck you won't be missed is what i'd like to say but someone will bail this piece of shit out at the last second so he can continue his psyops.
He's like a turd you can't flush.
Liquidate your company and invest it in the kids then
You know, I agree that the world would be a better place without Meta and its platforms.
But if governments can do things like this to Meta, they can do it to anyone else too, even to fediverse instances; will admins of instances here be sued next because minors liked to use them too much and they/parents/schools/governments claim those instances are "addictive"? Not looking forward to that world.
Fortunately, there's a big difference between Lemmy and Meta social media: no algorithms. Similarly to how reddit worked years ago, you have a page you cater to your needs that displays content based on numeric popularity, not because an algorithm deemed the content to be worth showing. I doubt there'd be much to argue with in court based on that premise alone.
How does Lemmy decide what to display on my front page? I'm not too familiar with that.
its literally open source....
Yeah good question, also it would be nice to have like a disinterested button so I could hide items instead of being shown them over and over again. I do tend to go to my all or local page and sort by top for the last 12 hours to get a better mix
Most apps let you automatically hide posts you've looked at previously. I'm not sure if you just need to scroll by or if you need to actively engage with it, but it's there if you want that
Lemmy on Voyager has an option to ride read posts but by "read" you either have to click on it or up/downvote.
Edit: HIDE read posts.
Oh so I gotta click on or upvoter downvote to get rid of em. Thx
Boost has an option to mark posts as read when scrolled past.
I would suggest that judicious use of the block function is more effective, though. It's the same handful of users who consistently are the proverbial firehoses spraying all that shit-tier content into the fediverse.
Block them one by one and in no time at all your feed will clean up. More quality per scroll in the long run.
Agreed. I block people who spam the same articles in tons of questionably related instances.
I'd imagine it's upvotes and time based, which to me sounds like an algorithm. I recognize it as a better and more fair algorithm but idk how it would be argued in court as being different. But I would love to learn with you.
That sounds like exactly the same thing Reddit does
I don't think reddit does that anymore.
I think they still do for r/all but you can't even access it on mobile, it has to be your personalized feed tooled for maximum engagement.
There are always algorithms. You literally can't make software without them. As far as algorithms for choosing which content is displayed, Lemmy still has to have one of those to weight votes vs. age. Is a post that's +50/-0 from five minutes ago the best to show you, or the one that's +400/-100 from an hour ago, or the one that's +1000/-100 from last year?
I'm going to hazard a guess that most of us here know what an algorithm literally is. Words can take on new meanings, so the term has become a common shorthand for big-tech's approach to user experience. Not just to curation of feeds, either, but to the myriad contrived, fucked up methods they've concocted for the sole purpose of leading their users into vast bland-scapes full of personalized echo chambers, teeming with bots -- which just so happen to be perfect environments in which to effectively milk users of their attention by cycling their emotions and getting them to engage in frequent, lengthy scroll sessions. Just sat there looking at mountains of slop and occasionally clicking on something, all so that people who already have too much can make a few more bucks.
Your example of which vote-sorting algorithm to use is a logistical challenge of deciding which content to deliver, without regard to what that content is. The question is simply: how do we most efficiently deliver and rank the content the community is telling us it values? Basically, how do we democratise the decision of what to boost?
That is in stark fundamental opposition to "The Algorithm" of Facebook, Reddit, et al. who seek to suppress certain content, boost other content, and group users into perfect compartments, where they'll be endlessly manipulated into chasing dopamine, guaranteed to consume an endless firehose of lowest common denominator content, and if we're lucky they'll click on ads.
Machines that perform the conversion of human attention into cash are what their actual customers are paying them to produce. These are the unholy apparatuses consisting of dark patterns paired with machine learning, and now, slathered on top of what was already a massive shitshow, what is referred to as "AI" has supercharged these efforts.
Fueled by sweet sweet ad revenue and all that juicy personal data and telemetry "insights", their purpose is to sort people. The Fediverse has no such mandate - the same pressures just obviously don't exist here. I assume the vast majority of us are here because we've rejected the (big "A") Algorithm. The Fediverse is simply a bunch of (mostly) chill people who decided to get together and create a (mostly) pleasant and self-governing little oasis for each other to land on, and maybe even make some genuine human connections. The algorithms making this run are downright quotidian, utilitarian necessities which prioritize organic growth, and center the human by getting out of the way. It's unrecognizable compared to what's under the hood of meta and friends.
And how do you quantitatively differentiate between "sorting posts" and "sorting posts, but evil"? Moving a post up the list is by definition prioritizing it. Moving another down the list is suppressing that one. Which posts get which treatment is governed at least in part by dopamine, since people are going to make pull requests based on how they want to use the site.
There are a couple of fundamental properties of the Fediverse that give it decently robust immunity against the "evil" shit that either has been, or will be, the downfall of all the traditional closed-source social media entities.
Because it's FOSS, there's transparency into the way internal things are supposed to work, and everything that happens on here, from mod actions down to the level of individual votes can be tracked and audited.
AFAIK, the actual sorting/ranking of your feed happens on the client side (on the device you're browsing from). And is strictly for user quality of life. Because those are the views the bulk of users like to see. It may even differ depending on your client, but they seem to operate more or less the same.
The server-side has no reason to give different weights to individual posts/comms/users, nor any mechanism with which to do so. The incentive for someone to unilaterally decide what users see on this platform simply doesn't exist.. I'm sure it's targeted by individual bad actors all the time, but the very nature of this platform makes it next to impossible for any one person or entity to gain enough leverage to rise above nuisance-level. There's really nowhere on here to hide malicious intent long enough to accomplish a meaningful level of funny business before the network cuts you out or grows around.
The instance database of course stores the communities, the actual content of each post and comment, associates everything with the relevant users, keeps track of timestamps and the individual vote counts. Most everything beyond that gets layered on by whatever you're using as a client.
Given the utter simplicity of the ActivityPub protocol and the ability of any interested party to gain granular visibility on everything down to the level of who voted which way on what comment? It seems to follow that anything falling outside the pattern of those parameters would raise immediate suspicion and get dealt with pretty quickly.
Advertisers and corporate types are just not particularly attracted here. The prevailing incentives just aren't compatible with their aims.
I suppose you could say "well, what if the devs have a change of heart and go in a different direction, go rogue or start walling things off?" Whatever project that happened to would get forked the instant a whiff of impropriety was detected. The fork would probably end up better than whatever it replaced!
If a rogue instance started being a little too weird it would get dealt with and defederated just as swiftly by a large mass of federated instances, isolating it.
Anyone can bring a lawsuit, I don’t see how this would translate to government overreach like you suggest. It’s already illegal to target and harm kids. META got caught doing it. IF a lemmy instance is also doing it I’m fine with them being shut down and fined with similar evidence as is being presented against facebook (loads of internal documents explicitly outlining their strategy, not to mention multiple whistleblowers over the years).
I'm on a lemmy instance dedicated to copyright infringement. Its already been around for years. You have to get quite big to get the government's intention. Also the site Myrient was just doing endless copyright infringement for years and shut down because it ran out of money, not because the government caught it.
Like dedicated to doing copyright infringement? Or like stopping it?
doing it, obviously. dbzer0 was a former head mod of r/piracy before the api shutdown
Encouraging it. "Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights, Do Maths"
Well if there's a fediverse instance methodically and intentionally targeting children, then I think they absolutely deserve to be destroyed. Fortunately, all instances have the ability to defederate, so we don't need the government to end association with such terrible people.
That's what you get when your CEO is incompetent.
Guy runs a failed social media company that pivoted into a failed vr company that pivoted into a failed ai company. Why is he a billionaire?
They are all incompetent - during my entire stint in the corporate world, I never sat across from one that wasn't.
I hate how dumb this argument is, everyone likes seeing Meta get fined a massive amount, myself included, but this stupid abstinence culture style approach to social media for younger people is really really nauseating.
We have been through this so many times with so many moral panics and I just want to actually hold these people accountable and have an actual conversation about why kids are miserable which is that... well look up.
It's not abstinence culture though?
If the only offence was providing social media things wouldn't have gotten this far. There's plenty of evidence Meta has intentionally optimized their system to damage mental health to increase profit.
And enabled chatbots to have sexual conversations with children... https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-guidelines/
And used photos of children from parent's accounts to created targeted advertisement to adult men implying those children would be available to chat with them... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/20/parents-outraged-meta-uses-photos-schoolgirls-ads-man
I mean the fact that Zuckerberg is only now taking notice of a consequence for his actions says a lot. It feels like a bad faith argument to imply the courts are somehow in the wrong/taking things too far.
Right I mean that they should be punished for doing those things, not for the basic act of providing social media to youth, which I am afraid this will continue to morph into as a moral panic as it is elsewhere in the world like Australia and the UK for example.
That's a separate concern. I will point out it's the same way we treat alcohol, and that direct messaging with friends apps aren't banned.
Those are rookie numbers.