Do you have the problematic instances, communities, and users blocked? Most of the maligned content that I’ve seen has come from two instances that I’ve since blocked from my feed, although blocking their bananas users requires each user to make themselves known first. Lemmy requires a bit of custom pruning of federation to fit each user’s tastes, interests, and values.

Secondly, there is a lot of despair going on due to the current state of society. For-profit media will show things through one lens, and non-profit forums will show things through another. There are a lot of people passionate about making a better world and stopping malicious powers.

Thirdly, amassing fandom communities takes time. Everyone is affected by global superpowers and politics, but they’re not going to be happy about it; in contrast, not everyone is into the same specific pastimes. Attracting people to communities for XYZ fandoms/hobbies/passions requires these communities to stand out among the sea of posts and catch the users’ eye, or for the user to actively seek them out and find them.

Last and least likely, you don’t happen to be sorting by Controversial?

If the artist is concerned, they can film or otherwise document their creative progress or snapshot stages of production over time.

I’m a big Lego fan and I agree that they are one of the best in this regard. However, they’ve taken up some relatively new practices such as compromising mold and instruction quality in favor of faster production, conditioning kids to gamble with minifigure loot boxes, commandeering a cornerstone of the secondhand market (BrickLink), and gatekeeping certain themes or genres behind massive price tags, which are not in the favor of customers in general.

Edit: There’s definitely been some price gouging with certain sets/themes too, ex. 76232 and 76292; and lazy designs and cheaping out on play/quality, ex. 76314. The Pharrell Williams movie and sets also don’t sit right with me because it feels like anybody can just buy their way into the medium/merchandise now. The Red Bull and Kick sponsors on the new F1 cars additionally are not true to how you’d want to think of the brand.

Re: bots

If feasible, I think the best option would be an instance that functions similarly to how Reddit’s now defunct r/BotDefense operated and instances which want to filter out bots would federate with that. Essentially, if there is an account that is suspect of being a bot, users could submit that account to this bot defense server and an automated system would flag obvious bots whereas less obvious bots would have to be inspected manually by informed admins/mods of the server. This flagging would signal to the federated servers to ban these suspect/confirmed bot accounts. Edit 1: This instance would also be able to flag when a particular server is being overrun by bots and advise other servers to temporarily defederate.

If you are hosting a Lemmy instance, I suggest requiring new accounts to provide an email address and pass a captcha. I’m not informed enough with the security side of things to suggest more, but https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted or the admins of large instances may be able to provide more insight for security.

Edit 2: If possible, an improved search function for Lemmy, or cross-media content in general, would be helpful. Since this medium still has a relatively small userbase, most bot and spam content is lifted from other sites. Being able to track where bots’ content is coming from is extremely helpful to conclude that there is no human curating their posts. This is why I’m wary of seemingly real users on Lemmy who do binge spam memes or other non-OC. Being able to search for a string of text, search for image sources/matching images, being able to search for strings of text within an image, and being able to find original texts that a bot has rephrased are on my wishlist.

Re: AI content

AFAIK, the best option is just to have instance/community rules against it if you’re concerned about it.

The best defense against both is education and critical examination of what you see online.

The person inputting prompt modifications may have controlled the larger assets as a whole, but they did not curate the Gestalt of the image. If the input is text that a computer is to output as a literal estimation, then it is data, not art; if the input is data curated by a person who means for a computer to output it as plotted data, such as with a complex lineplot or 3D model or even text as ASCII images, then that can be art.

Tony Iommi just used thimbles instead of superglueing the tips of his fingers back on and it seemed to work well for him

Not an old, but it’s because progeny function as a commodity to be exploited for personal or capitalistic gain and aren’t actually considered sentient human beings capable of feeling pain. Hope that helps 😊

Not giving both sides of an argument your platform to opine on if one of the sides is plainly bigoted and/or anti-scientific

I’m skinny but it’s because of IBS

Yes, although a lot of current pop culture stuff is so vapid, commercialized, and unstimulating that I could not care less about it.

I’d like a good place to keep up with and search for local events, follow local businesses, and discuss hobbies and lesser known series but without being beholden to a corrupt billionaire who owns the social medium and without rewarding bigotry and mis/dis/malinformation with advertising revenue. I’ve found a couple of Discord servers that only partially fill some of these niches. Some of these problems can be resolved by growing Lemmy communities around certain topics, but I don’t think most social media/marketing managers would publicize on media with relatively few eyeballs.

Does anybody have a plug-in or a web function that can, for example, transfer a company’s Facebook page’s post history offsite? Also looking for a good live feed of events in an area? (I tried Eventbrite once but I got scammed with the refund denied)

I’ve been thinking today about how the mainstream means of mass communication and organization have been taken by corporations and grifters who manipulate them to algorithmically reward ignorance and bigotry, and how these social functions need to be seized back for effective and lasting progress to be made. Education is next on the chopping block.

I’d just say something preachy and berate them for not being content and convinced with just the bread

Pass myself off as Jesus Christ

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK

Go right on ahead and achieve a peaceful revolution to abate the suffering of the masses at the hands of malicious powers. A great many are waiting.

It’s more like a Bat Signal

My first thought for a substitute that meets your criteria is a private Discord server for each of your particular interests/hobbies, but I’m fairly new to Discord and I never really understood Pinterest. In any sort of situation, if someone who is provided access to non-public info decides to take that info and run, there’s fundamentally nothing to stop them apart from consequences; ex. a general who learned classified military secrets and wanted to sell that info to an enemy state would (ideally) be deterred by punishment from the law. Sure you can muddy the water by distributing information that is incomplete or intentionally partially incorrect, but the user/general still needs to know enough to operate without error.

Long side tangent warning:

Is your concern mostly the data being harvested, or when you say “safe from AI” are you also referring to bot accounts pretending to be real users? If the latter is a concern, I’ll first copy a portion of a Reddit comment of mine from over a couple of years ago (so possibly outdated with tech advancements) when I was involved with hunting bot accounts across that site and was asked about how to protect against bots on NSFW subs:

“I have been trying for a while to figure out a way for subreddits to require users to pass a captcha before posting and/or commenting; however, I haven’t been able to find a way that works and is also easy for the mods to implement. The closest solution that I’ve seen is the verification posts which some NSFW subs require. This is example is copied from the rules for r/VerifiedFeet:

Verification Required: Start Here Posts & Comments Reported as: You MUST include “Verify me” or “Verification” in your post title. Verification steps:

1. ⁠Submit three photos using Reddit’s multiple image uploader. Show your feet with a written verification containing your username, the date, and r/VerifiedFeet. Add a fold to the paper somewhere and hold with your hands or feet. Each photo should be a different angle.

2. ⁠Add “Verify Me” or “Verification” in your post title or it won’t be seen by Mods.

3. ⁠Wait for a verification confirmation comment from the Mods to begin posting in our community.

Instead of requiring the photos to be taken against the user’s feet, perhaps other subreddits could permit it to be against any arbitrary object of the user’s choosing. Seeing as the subs which you mod are all text-based without images, my suggestion is setting those subs to Restricted, creating a new sub for users to post their verification photos, and then whitelisting the users who have done so (as well as whitelisting the users who have already posted and commented to your sub prior to this).”

Since AI has advanced enough that higher end generators can create convincing images of verification photos such as these, one thing that it cannot impersonate yet is meat. As in, you can certainly verify that somebody is a living being if you encounter them in person. Obviously, this is limiting for internet use, but on a legal level it is sometimes required for ID verification.

Or if you’re referring to human users posting AI-generated content, either knowingly or unknowingly, there’s not any way to fight that apart from setting rules against it and educating the user base.

I don’t see how any publicly accessible info could be protected from web crawlers. If you can see it without logging in, or if there is no verification for who creates an account that allows access, then any person or data harvesting bot can see it.

I wonder if a cipher-based system could work as a defense. Like images and written text are presented as gibberish until a user inputs the deciphering code. But then you’d have to figure out how to properly and selectively distribute that code. Perhaps you could even make the cipher unique and randomly generated for each IP address?