It has felt pretty toxic more recently. Often I’d see something and end up just leaving to do something else, I’ve been describing it as the “two-minutes hate” internally for a while now.

On the flip side, I’d love if companies put up their own instance. Raspberry Pi hosts their own mastodon and I think it’s a good way for a company to have representation.

You need to access them through Beehaw, not directly. This can be done through the Communities menu at the top, or the search function (put in the !community@place or the full direct url to the community).

That is not a dumb question.

kbin is it’s own thing, originally it couldn’t talk to Lemmy. It can also have its own instances. Today it can talk to Lemmy and Mastodon and should be able to talk to anything else that talks to them. It also has its own communities, and people on Lemmy can access those as if it were another Lemmy instance.

Unfortunately they’re all copyrighted so won’t work for income.

Potentially. It also might just mean they post, or posted one time, things that go against the commonly held groupthink.

I don’t think a reputation system is bad necessarily, however I think Reddit is well aware that the one they created results in many users chasing that carrot, and people take the scores very seriously. You see evidence all the time with “downvotes, really?” or “of course my most upvoted comment is”. The dopamine hit and avoidance of downvotes (or ability to punish wrong-thinkers with them) help create some of the echo chamber.

A reputation system could easily be based on a global ratio and labels for example, but it would be less addictive. I am on an instance that doesn’t even have downvotes, and I like that, and I still hide scores, so my concern for identifying trolls through a points system versus the things they say isn’t all that high.

“Karma” and the gamification of it make it worthwhile to do whatever gets you those upvotes. I like that Lemmy votes stay attached to the specific post or comment without it giving an overall score for the user. I also really like that the scores can be hidden by the user entirely.

I think there is potentially less reason to do the low effort stuff here.

Currently Lemmy does not have a way to move your account to another instance even if the server is still up. It would delete your user and content, however that content may still exist on other instances.