Not to mention all the domain-specific knowledge you’d need to properly evaluate claims. All the critical thinking skills in the world are worthless if you don’t have contextual knowledge of whatever subject is in the news. It’s just not realistic for everyone to be a policy wonk.

There is too much information to process for any one person to just use their critical thinking skills to fact check a news organization as large as CNN, much less every major news organization. No, it’s not enough to teach critical thinking skills and hope every person is able to discern bias in the media they consume, because you’re asking for extremely domain-specific skills and legwork that a single consumer just isn’t capable of. Consumer watchdog organizations are a necessary part of protecting us against unreliable news agencies.

I’m pretty sure if we’re excluding instances with troll farms or hosting illegal material, the map of Lemmy instances is still kind of a single amorphous blob, with nearly all connected instances being just 1 connection away from their blocked instances. These can’t be defined as isolated instance-clusters. Lemmy.world users seem to always know what hexbear users are up to because of their federated neighbors, lol.

Can you expand that last line? I don’t understand clearly what you mean.

These aren’t global fediverse rules, they’re constraints meant to apply specifically to the new user experience on Lemmy only.

maybe they should need to maintain a certain percentage of high pop instances that federate with them. Basically establishing a standard of trust.

“At least 80% of instances with over 1,000 active users must federate with you to be a Lemmy starter instance.”

This guarantees that new users will see the majority of content, and the starter instances won’t be embroiled in federation wars. The % value and pop numbers can change to reduce it down to a manageable number of starter instances.

Very inside baseball opinion. It’s like me describing reddit as “endless drama” because I read every thread on subreddit drama.

A lot of disingenuous Lemmy users in that thread pretending that picking a server is more confusing than filing your taxes. I think join-lemmy should probably hot-list like 6 or 7 servers instead of making you choose via a primary interest, since you can migrate your account later anyway. But I am personally not tech oriented and managed to make an account and find an app without an issue.

The goal was never to convince people who don’t know how email works to join, it’s to convince an average reddit user to join.