Much further back… Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. The party was founded on anti- slavery. The current party has nothing to do with the original party.

I think while the general communities have made it, a lot of niche communities failed to attract enough population to keep on generating more content. As an example, just search for the “Imaginary” series of landscape art communities on the Fediverse (eg. ImaginaryVistas). Many of them don’t have any recent posts or 1 post per days or weeks. That’s not enough to keep people invested. Even the largest digital art community is still mostly carried by 1 person.

Should the instances that responded to you be refederrated? I’m pretty sure I saw some of them on lemmy.world’s block list. I think it would be sad for these small servers to not realize they are, in fact, not connected to the greater fediverse. On the other hand, if you’re an admin, and you don’t know what you’re doing to the point of not knowing your server was infected by hundreds of thousands of bots, maybe it’s too dangerous to refed.

Oh good to know. I guess I only really caught reddit downtimes in the past.

I like how it looks exactly like reddit’s status page, especially considering they just released old.lemmy.world.

Luckily I did bring my flashlight and batteries, otherwise I would have been screwed. I did not plan to stay up so late, but the ascent to the ridge hike took longer than anticipated, and of course, what was a sunny day in the morning progressed to clouds and rainstorm by the afternoon, which continued into the night.

I continued as best as I can. I was acutely aware of the danger of a trip and fall that might break an ankle and hypothermia - some parts of the hike still had snow, and anytime I stopped, I could feel the cold seeping in.

In the end, I reached my car at around 10 PM.

Getting caught in a large rainstorm in the evening while on a mountain trail with 3 more hours of rocky descent to go.

I just experienced my first actual report. 🙃

The Voyager app just recently added the ability to block a community directly from the feed without opening the post or the community.

The only person I met with that name, and only in small amounts, is Henrietta Lacks.

I feel like it would be a bot purge or lemmy.world and several other instances being down from the hacking.

I was really surprised to hear this, so I dug a little deeper. It looks like an honest mistake.

Here’s what their admin said:

We unintionally did until about 8 hours ago.

Lemmy.ml has a ton of bot crawlers in its nginx logs spam fetching posts, so I added the bots to an nginx block. Turns out one called kbinbot wasn’t actually a crawling bot, but their federation requester.

If we don’t respond quickly, its because we have notification backlogs that are months long at this point.

It absolutely can become a problem in the areas of advertising, politics, propaganda, misinformation, and scams.

Once out of the spotlight of the immediate popular phase (say, a month or a year after the initial post) and the greater scrutiny that carries, imagine changing the title to something anti-vax, or painting a company in a better light (Nestle did nothing wrong!), or endorsing a fake research result (global warming is not man-made and just a natural cycle!), or just flat out putting in a web address to a phishing site since you know someone’s grandma will click on it.

What a trip. I think I saved this piece in the time before I joined Reddit via the Digg exodus…

I have not been part of any major (to the point that it’s widely known and infamous) singular mod abuse, but I would say collectively, mods for some of the brand- or product-based subreddits downplaying or censoring valid criticisms and concerns about the product. I think it can be very insidious, especially in a discussion-based content aggregator system where you assume discussions are started from a grassroots perspective.