I’ll admit I don’t spend enough time on here to have a well-formed opinion, but aside from the occasional obvious spam post, I don’t see a lot of obvious bot activity… Depending on the instance/community, you’re going to get a lot of very strong and, uh… controversial opinions.

Keep in mind that the (still relatively) niche nature of Lemmy/Piefed (and the fediverse writ large) means that a higher proportion of people around here are going to be far from the center of the political gradient… and the western world is very much experiencing a cultural/political paradigm shift which is driving people to the fringes.

I also think that a lot more people are using the platform than a year or two ago and that has knock-on effects on moderation that we still need to figure out how to deal with.

I’d like to see similar testing done comparing models where the “misaligned” data is present during training, as opposed to fine-tuning. That would be a much harder thing to pull off, though.

Honestly I think proper search is one of the biggest things holding the fediverse back from mainstream adoption. It needs exposure, and it needs to be easy to find information and communities around obscure topics in order to really replace silos like reddit and facebook. I’m glad to see this exists, and I particularly like that it supports kagi.

Edit: Maybe this should have been obvious when seeing that it uses other search providers as a backend, but all it does is pass a list of fedi websites to filter results for. That’s… not a proper search. It’s a potentially useful tool, but it’s not doing any of its own aggregation and more importantly the list of websites is also painfully small. Color me disappointed.

idk, I feel like the phone and the mobile service operator could qualify as two different layers of scam.

Since it seems like most of the comments are along the lines of “haha stupid maga idiot 😂😂😂”, I’d like to make it clear that 404 Media is actually a pretty left-leaning publication which appears to be reporting on trump mobile from the standpoint of “wow, let’s see how bad this actually is”. Their reporting is mostly tech-focused, so this is in their wheelhouse.

That said, if it were coming from any other source I’d be laughing my ass off.