1. Shake hands thoroughly after washing to minimise excess water.
2. Move hands together as if you’re applying soap while using the dryer. This keeps the water evenly distributed on your hands, to maximise evaporation.

Would recommend Case of the Golden Idol for a similar detective vibe.

Source: I’m some guy on the Internet. You can trust me.

With the amount of AI slop out there, in this day and age this is actually a surprisingly high level of trust.

It sounds like that would require unifying the architecture of all fediverse platforms, which nobody is interested in and very much goes against the point (decentralization). Right now all of these platforms are written independently, with unique architectures and different programming languages.

Suffice to say that, while it’s a nice thought, what you’re proposing is not really realistic, nor is it actually desired.

Matrix is not part of the fediverse, so that’s kind of a special case and doesn’t work the same at all as the rest.

What you describe sounds very simplified, but let me assure you that there is nothing simple about this problem (I say that as a software engineer that has studied ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse).

It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.

They are. It’s called the fediverse.

There’s no reason why any of these software options couldn’t support all the same stuff, as you say. But so far they have chosen not to.

Maybe another option will come along one day that supports more of it at once.

Let’s apply quality control on upvotes, so any post can get only 20 upvotes till it gets a specific amount of comments then the limit could be pumped up to 40 upvotes till it gets more comments, etc…

Ultimately this is just limiting ways that people can vote. Voting is the democratic way to sort posts. I don’t think you can limit without ultimately influencing the system in unintended bad ways, since that will restrict how people can vote. Just let people vote.

Reputation, word of mouth, history, etc. Same way you decide anything else you consume.

How do you pick where you go shopping? You pick the closest one. Then if it turns out to be bad, you go elsewhere.

Why are you worried about admin abuse? If you are worried that your admin will abuse you, you should switch to an instance you trust more.

I don’t think this is a problem. If the communities are similar enough, one will eventually win and be the bigger and main one. If they are different enough, they can continue coexisting.

the Lemmy devs are very much against merged comments

For good reason perhaps? It merges distinct communities together, making communities less distinct. Different communities can have different moderation and participation standards and norms. Merging them I feel is a bad idea.

We ought to moderate well and do better than elsewhere though. Well, at least I would hope that users would gravitate towards instances that moderate their users better, so we get more civil behavior.

Well, what is it then?

being corrected about objective things

Language is anything but objective and is constantly evolving based on how people use it.

What does that say about the sorting algorithms though? Should we sort posts based on votes then, or should we sort them based on something else? Do we want the posts at the top to be the ones the hivemind agrees most with and the ones the hivemind disagrees with should disappear at the bottom?

Perhaps sorting should be based on total votes and not just downvotes? So downvoting is effectively still “voting” for it, just in a different way. I’m just spitballing here, I find the theory of sort/vote systems fascinating.

They don’t actually explain what this is anywhere.

Yea I’m thoroughly confused, what even is this? Is it open source, code anywhere?

I’ve messaged you on Matrix :)

You should also consider what instance the user is from and whether that instance has a proper sign up application or not.

For instance I feel fairly confident that almost all users on Feddit.dk are real people because we vet every single applicant.

There are a lot of AI slop applications though so if other instances aren’t as vigilant, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of bots.

Also your avatar and the image posted here (not the thumbnail) seem broken - I wonder if that’s due to Anubis?

Most search engine bots publish a list of verified IP addresses where they crawl from, so you could check the IP of a search bot against that to know.