how could they even have the cashflow to support that?
I'm guessing new deals with advertisers. These changes will incentivize more neutral, advertiser-friendly comments on their platform. I imagine that's going to make them more lucrative to advertisers going forward, so that their ads are shown next to harmless memes instead of bad-faith political arguments in cat pic subreddits.
Pretty sure that's exactly what they want. Those are way more neutral/marketable qualities to advertisers than "Sometimes your ad will be shown next to a 10-page, expletive-ridden tirade about poop-knives, and no, they won't explain what it is".
It's rumored that Reddit is about to launch a new "creator program" that will pay Redditors for high-karma activity on the site. This change is probably meant to accommodate this new feature.
The issue I take with this is that PixelFed is meant to be a community. I feel like using their resources for image hosting, for a platform that PixelFed users may not ever even interact with, is a bad move.
I've been working a night shift for a few years now. Last 2 of which have been from at home. The social isolation is real. The only people you'll ever really get to hang out with outside of work, are the people you work with, since most of your normal-sleep-schedule-having friends aren't gonna be available when you are. There also won't be anywhere good to hang out at because everything's closed by the time you're off work.
Most of the world isn't designed for people with our schedule, unfortunately. Need to go to the post office for something? You're gonna have to either get up early or stay up late to do it. Need to do something that can really take up some time, like go to the DMV? You might need to schedule some time off, because that'll ruin your sleep schedule for a few days.
Being able to retain your sanity on this schedule really does require a bit of self-sufficience. You'll need to rely less on services that aren't available at night. You'll need to get comfortable with losing sleep to get important stuff done. It's tough, and while a lot of companies pay a differential to hourly employees on the night shift, it's rarely enough to justify the toll it takes on you if you don't have the right mindset for it.
I used Reddit Is Fun for over a decade. It made Reddit usable on mobile for me. The UI for the mobile site and the official app make poor use of screen real-estate, IMO, and are designed to force you to continue scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. They're attention vampires.
RIF and other third-party apps had much cleaner UIs, that made it easier to find the content I was actually interested in, hide content that I didn't care to see, and interact with comments in a way that made sense for me. It was also easier to customize my notifications so that I would only be alerted by things I cared to be distracted by.
Without the third-party apps, I've reduced my Reddit usage tremendously. I used to spend probably a few hours a day just reading through Reddit, but now that I can't do that from my phone in a way that works for my use-case, I just simply don't use Reddit as much anymore. I only ever access it from my laptop now, and I only ever use my laptop while I'm on the toilet.
My Reddit use has been reduced to literal shitposting. Fuck Spez.
Today kbin.social is blocking a huge list of domains just to get federation working again.
The reason for this temporally block is not to defederate, but rather to get the large backlog of 500k messenger queue processed again. Anyway, this does mean that kbin.social is federating again with other instances.
This is a temporary measure. Several users / developers are looking into how to better optimize the failed message queue, as we speak. Hopefully Ernest has eventually time to dive into solutions as well instead of workarounds, once his instance is migrated to Kubernets. See my preview thread: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/updates/t/4257/Kbin-federation-issues-and-infra-upgrade
they did not respond to a request to use the app with screen curtain on.
That's pretty damning. If they can't even demo it while simulating a real world use-case, then that tells me how little faith they really have in their product.