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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2024

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  • You are right. According to the definition of social media, Lemmy is social media. However, “social media” would by definition fit any kind of digital communication media. A forum, or a blog, or an IRC channel are also, by definition, social media.

    I would argue that the social media has a distinct association with Facebook, Instagram and the diverse spawns of those, and by association doesn’t fit anything else. At best, we simply lack a different term, which splits “old-school” stuff like forums and blogs. I view lemmy more like a forum. You have categories, and users can go into categories to start discussions. You don’t follow anyone. People also don’t create and post their own content, but rather seek discussions or share other stuff from the internet. Your goal is not reach, follow count or like count.

    It is social media, but it’s definitely nothing like Facebook. We simply lack a better term.




  • I know, but if it was that easy to shift perspectives, the world would be a completely different place. I dislike the donation format since it plays a lot on the moral and psychology of the person - how much is enough, how much value does it actually provide me etc. Like I am the one doing the sales for the person. I much rather have a clear price.

    Maybe it’s just because of donations and the “uncertainty” it makes me feel. I did pay for open source software before (open source != free), guess I prefer just to see a clear price tag.


  • If you have browser with search suggestions enabled, everything you type in URL bar gets sent to a search engine like Google to give you URL suggestions. I would not be surprised if Google uses this data to check what it knows about the domain you entered, and if it sees that it doesn’t know anything, it sends the bot to scan it to get more information.

    But in general, you can’t access a domain without using a browser which might send that what you type to some company’s backend and voila, you leaked your data.








  • I understand, but the shift in user behaviour is significant and I think websites are not taking it into account. If the users move more and more to AI, and since Google introduced AI mode it’s only a question of time until it becomes the default, we will see more and more of what we thing are AI crawlers and less and less organic users.

    AI seems to be the new middleman between you and the user, and if you block the middleman, you block the user. For people with hobby websites or established sites it may make sense because people either know of them, or getting more exposure is not a wish or requirement, but for everyone else, it will be painful.


  • I just realized an interesting thing - if I use Gemini, and tell it to do deep research, it actually goes to the websites it knows/finds, and looks up the content to provide up-to-date answers. So, some of those AI crawlers are actually not crawlers, but actual users who just use AI instead of coming directly to the site.

    Soo… blocking AI completely could also potentially reduce exposure, especially as more and more people use AI to basically do searches instead of browsing themselves. That would also explain the amount of requests daily - could be simply different users using AI to research for some topic.

    Point is, you should evaluate if the AI requests are just proxies of real users, and blocking AI blocks real users from knowing your site exists.