https://sopuli.xyz/u/supersquirrel posted on Feb 20, 2026 00:53
I used to visit the verge all the time, but their paywalls have gotten so aggressive, I just wrote them off.
I get it, but also the internet sucks these days and it’s hard to make money on advertising alone. I can’t blame a reputable journal for asking for money to see the articles they publish, and since I tolerate all sorts of patreon business models, I have to be realistic in thinking that this is going to be the only path forward for real journalism. It’s a shame, but it just seems to have worked out this way.
I can’t blame a reputable journal for asking for money to see the articles they publish
lol is the verge a “journal”? GTFO bro
propublica is about as “real journalism” as it gets, and i’ve never been blocked by a paywall with them
staying in business is the business’s problem, not the consumer’s problem
paywall = close tab
period
how about the jacobin?
Please stop using archive . today and its other domains.
In the past, they prevented Cloudflare DNS users from resolving the site, because Cloudflare didn’t forward EDNS data that would allow Archive.today to dox users.
And recently, they embedded malicious DDOS code into their captcha that would cause visitors to unknowingly DDOS someone.
They are extremely shady and no one should be using them.
https://archive.md/ bypasses almost all pay walls and things
“Now when new users join Mastodon from the mobile app, they may see a button to “join” a recommended server rather than the default “join mastodon.social” button that’s currently displayed.” Wow. Didn’t know that mentioning a server adds complexity. The bar is very low nowadays with all things digital.
I’d take an alternative if you’ve got one. Otherwise, unless there’s a serious change for the worse, I’m probably going to keep posting them. Sorry!
Hmmm, thats why mullvad is blocking them?
Here’s your alternative:
I don’t think Mullvad is blocking anyone. I’m not sure if Archive . Today is still doing what they did in 2023, but if they are, it would be more correct to say Archive . Today is blocking you for using Mullvad’s DNS servers.
You know that’s not a real alternative. I wish it was – it’d make all of this a hell of a lot easier to navigate. But it just isn’t.
I can’t access to archive websites with mullvad vpn activated, with the dns blocking everything.
I really, genuinely, no sarcasm, do not understand why it’s not a real alternative.
I wonder why people see selecting a server as a hurdle when that’s exactly what they’re asked to do when making an email address
Problem is, younger people don’t even do that when they make an email address.
They just “create a Gmail”.
The internet has become such a sad place.
Scroll down. Archive.today can archive things other services can’t. That’s why Wikipedia was in a panic about the verifiability crisis removing their 700 000 links would cause. Most can’t be replaced.
Okay, I’m just gonna explain where I’m at with this right now and why.
This isn’t a huge issue for this community but for our hard news discussion communities, abandoning archive.today would instantly make a large amount of news inaccessible (probably 1⁄3 or more, but that’s just a guess) to the vast majority. It could limit being fully informed to those with means. That would suck. It’s a real harm.
We’re in agreement that archive.today is problematic. We really need a working alternative. The ddos attack is shitty and immature. It’s a betrayal of trust. However, the victim stated in the Ars article you linked to that this hasn’t really had any discernible impact on them. So for now it’s a theoretical harm (and an abhorrent practice) vs a real harm.
For me, as it stands now, I’ll use alternatives where I can and use archive.today where I can’t because I care a lot about that harm. I’ll be ecstatic when a real alternative emerges. Like Wikipedia fell into different camps, we’re probably similar. I respect that you come down on this differently, but that’s where I’m at with this.
Well I was used to MMOs with different servers and I thought I’d have to create an account for each if I wanted to be with my friends. I didn’t know Mastodon was NOT a mere Twitter alternative, and I wasn’t familiar with the concept of the fediverse.
With this attitude you’ll get the journalism you deserve, alas.
It is simple: nowadays security awareness is drilled in for most of the online population. If presented by a choice people can’t oversee, the default safest option is not to chose. I mean, how many new Mastodon users know any of these servers?
So, as couter-intuitive or even ironic it may seem, the “problem” is choice. People need to learn that social media is no longer a single entity, but more like email or choosing a bank.
A huge success for Google, I guess?
This is what I see?
Its already easy l think but okay nice.
I get it, but reader-funded journalism is always better than advertiser-funded. But if the reporting isn’t worth paying for to you, I don’t blame you for skipping them. I feel the same way some times. One article might be worth paying for but I’m not so interested in what they report to justify a full subscription.
Boy I don’t need the childrape administration to declassify extraterrestrial UFO documents when I can talk to space aliens right here on Lemmy. That’s not how email works and if you were a placental mammal you’d know that.
You don’t go to email.org, click Join and arrive on a page that says “Thank you for your interest in Email: the open, federated, ethical, cage-free non-instant text messaging standard of the web! To continue, select one of these 44 providers based on a badly rendered logo and three almost identical bullet points. Don’t worry, the decision doesn’t matter…well it kinda does, for reasons that aren’t going to be explained to you up front, so pick one at random, get the lay of the land, then come back and join for real.”
No, the majority of people ended up with an email account while signing up for another service, such as gmail accounts for Android users or icloud accounts for iPhone users. You probably have an outlook account if you use Windows (or if you’re a certain age, a hotmail account). If you’re a dad, you have an email account from your ISP, or you got one from work or school. If you sought out something beyond that, like Protonmail or hosting on your own domain, you started looking for a provider with some shopping criteria in mind.
People don’t know what choosing a server entails, because it does matter and a lot of people aren’t exactly helpful when they say “just pick any” or “it’s like email”
Server choice matters because:
So, server choice matters and people coming in from corporate shit don’t know how much they need to know to make an informed decision, thus giving up.
any improvements are always welcome; average users have become accustomed to seamless onboarding - primarily on mobile
you’re not wrong but you could’ve delivered that more nicely lmfao
I don’t think so. way too many people approve sensitive permissions and cookie tracking without a thought, and even more just go for a gmail account no matter what
not even that. when setting up their first smartphone, either them or their parents just accept to create a google account
What’s my username?
The email analogy just goes so far, because of mental models.
Yeah, those of us who have opinions on sudo vs doas will get it. Email is a protocol standard that allows different servers to exchange compatible data. Most people don’t conceptualize it like that; they conceptualize it like the postal service. The USPS, Royal Mail and others are one entity that most end users just handwave away as “in the mail” and their only concern is where do I go to send and receive my mail? Your mailbox is at the post office on the corner of Road st. and Boulevard ave. Your email inbox is at gmail.com. Gmail, or hotmail, or whatever, is your local post office for putting things “in the mail.”
Nobody conceptualizes social media like that. Social media is a place you go to be among other people. Back in my day we called them “Sites.” Myspace and Facebook were “sites.” Places you went. Now they call them “apps” but they’re still conceptualized as where the people participating in this culture are. Get it through the average Tiktokker’s head that you get the Loops app, and then you have to pick a server to connect that app to. “Just get me to Loops.”
Some servers are full, some you have to apply for, some are perfectly open to join. They all connect to each other, except they can choose not to, and choosing not to connect to each other is why some servers exist in the first place. We’re going to present you with a list of instances to join, you’ll be presented with the instance’s logo, which half of them left blank so you get a boilerplate image, a blue checkmark on every single one which carries no meaning it just looks social media-y, and the top sentence and a half of a description which is either default text or a description of the platform as a whole because it wasn’t explained to the instance admins what this description field was for.
So, new user who probably still isn’t sure how this works, make a decision about something that feels kind of abstract that we’ve done a really bad job of explaining.
I initially looked up a few servers, then I chose one with decent size and no prohibitive policies. Less than 24 hours after creating the account I got banned without reason. I appealed. No answer.
I guessed I was just unlucky, so I found another decent looking server. After creating an account, it took around 2-3 hours and I was banned. I appealed. No answer.
I guess the username was a bit too random andmaybe looked like it was created by a bot. It had a lot of random letters, but it was my usual username. I would assume an appeal would sort it out. Or atleast lead me to an answer.
So my third attempt, I chose another server which looked fine and created a user with a simpler username. A few months later, the server shut down.
So now I’m on my 4th account.
It’s not like it was a huge hassle to create the accounts, but it’s also not like the system is without issues.
I’m glad they are taking steps to make the platform more accessible. This will make a difference if people can be convinced to give it another try.
Huh, I could have sworn it said MrNiceGuy a minute ago
same! Find an instance, sing up and access through app or browser!
The bar is very low nowadays with all things digital
Yes, Apple users be like this.
I don’t know how people ever figured out how to make a phone call to a friend on a different Telco /s :)
Yup
People literally won’t read what’s in front of them and then complain when something doesn’t work.
I had someone tell me, people don’t read the things he writes.
That same person then proceeded to not read instructions I had written for something they needed to do and they did it wrong.
People won’t read what’s in front of them and then complain when something doesn’t work.
I had someone tell me, people don’t read the things he writes.
That same person then proceeded to not read instructions I had written for something they needed to do and they did it wrong.
Edit: If it’s not a 10s tiktok clip it’s too much nowadays.
That’s odd (but believable), I think every server I ever used required a sign up to be manually approved so if you use one with open registration they may have stricter moderation for new users.
Yeah, figuring out Instances with Lemmy took several days for me. Lemmy.world simply wasn’t fit for my purposes, and potentially could have made me tune out the entire Lemmy ecosystem. I was like “this is it?”.
You’re part of the problem.
This is all about maximizing profit. Their site is covered in ads as well.
Please stop defending the people taking your money or showing you ads.
I see it as a filter. You have to be this motivated to join.
I’ve just “joined” the Fediverse a few days ago. I’m somewhat tech-savy I’d say. I still find a lot of it confusing.
“Most people don’t conceptualize it like that; they conceptualize it like the postal service. “ I think this was and still is in part true for me.
There’s the term “Fediverse”, which suggests that there’s one continuous “universe” of things. But actually - and please correct me if I got this wrong - there’s just servers connected/interlinked with other servers, which (strictly must, due to how it works) form bubbles/webs or islands of all sizes.
There are practically no postal service bubbles, because I can send mail to anyone I’d realistically wish. There are different postal service providers, but a “-verse” term would be better applied to postal service (-> “Postalverse”) than to federated servers, imo.
So ideally as a noob coming from reddit or twitter, I’d like to know what the biggest bubble of connected servers is and where I can enter.
A thing I haven’t figured out yet is why I can’t find a decent feed feature on Mastodon. On Lemmy there are local/all filters for communities a server is federated with, if I understood this correctly. My mastodon home instance (mastodon.social) doesn’t seem to have a feed, really. There’s a “trending” filter, but it has very few posts - afaik just the ones I specifically subscribed to - and it doesn’t differentiate between local and all federated servers.
Am I doing it wrong? :P
I’m expecting to have filters like in Lemmy, where I can just consume anything new, trending or controversial.
Yeah they hired / got on board one of the most senior designers fra earlier google and apple
I don’t pay for the Verge, and if I did and still saw ads, I definitely wouldn’t renew. “Maximizing profit” only works, if we fold. If we fold to ad supported journalism, then companies will plaster their sites with ads. The market regulates itself if the consumer is principled enough. The problem is that your average consumer is weak willed and less-than-principled. I’m fine going without even if it ends up being a pointless endeavor.
hopium
Because the term is loaded. There are technical implications (who will you be federated with and how do I connect with them?), and it’s jurisdictional (which laws apply when I post here?). Also, for non-technical people, you only hear the word “server” in techno-babble word salad from movies. I don’t blame them at all for being confused.
It’s already easy
I’m guessing you haven’t gotten a promotion in some time.
I think this was and still is in part true for me.
The distinction is one large company that has a monopoly on this specific kind of thing, versus a bunch of individual companies that all use the same industry standards to interoperate with each other.
The USPS (and probably other countries’ mail services, too) is one gigantic corporation with a legal monopoly on letter carrying. The USPS uses the common highway, railway and airway systems that are also used for other passengers and freight to carry letters to their various offices to do businesses with customers across the nation. We have one The Mail Company. We used to have one The Phone Company too, but they broke up Bell Telephone.
There has never been a The Email Company. Email from the very beginning was meant to be an industry standard so that different organizations could host the service and interchange traffic between them. There are hundreds of them, a few big ones, a bunch of little ones, all sending standardized messages across the common internet.
Reddit or Twitter or Tiktok or Instagram or however many others are individual businesses. You sign up with an account with, say, Twitter, and that gets you access to Twitter, their backend software, their front-end user apps, their community, their content…one monolithic stack.
Mastodon is software you can use to make your own little Twitter. The folks that make that software operate a server running that software. So do other people; there’s a whole bunch of them. You can use it to make your own little Twitter all by yourself, which is how Truth Social works. But those of us who aren’t in a white supremacy retardation cult prefer to voltron all our little Twitters together into one big if nebulous network.
Lemmy does the same thing but with a Reddit-like form factor. So does Mbin and Piefed. Different software that speak the same protocol. I’m a member of sh.itjust.works, posting a comment to a community hosted on lemmy.world, replying to a member of feddit.org, each of these are Lemmy instances. Users on instances of Mbin and Piefed can also read and reply to this thread. So can Mastodon users, in fact. And Peertube, Loops and Pixelfed, which are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram-alikes. They all use the ActivityPub protocol and can interoperate…within their own UI limits at least. Imagine being able to Tweet from Youtube. Not embed a Youtube video in a Tweet…Tweet from Youtube. Well you can Toot from Peertube. You just…Can; abstract as it is it’s a thing this collection of software can do.
I’m not sure you can define “the biggest bubble” in objective terms; defederation is a thing, it exists to be able to cut off spammers, scammers, anyone acting in bad faith. More often it’s used to separate servers that disagree politically, which in some ways isn’t ideal but I’m pretty sure that’s an unsolvable problem. A mainstream instance will get you the sumtotal; it’s a bit like living in the milky way galaxy; there’s some of it we can’t see because the middle is in the way, and there’s nowhere in it where that isn’t true.
As for a feed algorithm on Mastodon…I don’t know, I don’t actually use Mastodon. It is my understanding that the lack of a feed algorithm is considered a feature, not a bug; how exactly to discover content I’ll leave to someone else to answer.
I do occasionally receive a temporary field promotion to Major Aggravated.
Depends on.
The regular social-media user for example will disagree with you.
Everything is easy if you can put up with an amount of friction. Most people don’t want to deal with friction.
It diesn’t need to be easy, it has to be nearly effortless for people to switch. E.g. writing one sentence to get an lemmy account is wayyyy to much for most people.
Thats good. The entry friction is really the most important thing when trying to get new users.
I’m thinking we should try and sell people on a particular community first, and let them figure out it interoperates with others on their own time.
Yeah I was pretty disappointed when my server started limiting what political servers I see by default. I want it to show up and then choose for myself, not have to sell out every community. Their supposed to just showvup. It’s not like they were nazis or porn even.
Unfortunately I think that bed has been shat, because everyone wants to be a general purpose instance. Nobody wants to be sportslemmy or musiclemmy or movielemmy where they only host communities that match their theme, which is why we have linux@lemmy.world, linux@lemmy.ml, linux@sh.itjust.works, linux@feddit.org…
So “Join an instance for a community you’re interested in”…not sure if that’s tenable on Mastodon but it sure ain’t on Lemmy.
I think we’re just kinda early. Having redundant communities is good for resiliency.
Honestly you could pick 3 and tell people “these are all fine choices, pick one at random”
Cheers for the lengthy explanation!
Lol. Truth Social using Mastodon seems so ironic.
