Because it abandoned the idea of the site admins being responsible for moderation, in the name of expanding to unmanagable size.

On Reddit and Facebook, groups do not have a common moderation team, so they lack the right to dump a post in someone else’s group.

Downvotes are already a questionable design choice, which encourage passive-aggressive drive-by behaviour rather than engaging with and countering challenging ideas. They’re kind of a dark feature, which give the user a sense of participation, or worse, the sense of being a cop, while contributing nothing.

They are catharsis without praxis, and they almost certainly contribute to online toxicity.

Actually giving them forum or site moderation power is… Well, it sure is doubling down on that feeling like a cop thing.

And what are all cops?

We have to stop sending end users to software solutions for web admins. We don’t send them yo “nginx” or “apache”, after all.

Someone throw up a website using this software and give the site a sensible name, and then direct users to that website.

2. So, the thing to keep in mind is that “PixelFed” is not a place where you can go to see things. It’s the name of the software that powers a bunch of websites. You’re using a website. That website knows about what is hosted locally. Your friend? They’re using a different website. When you look up their account/ you’re looking up a copy of that account that’s been sent to your website. If things are happening on other websites, your website doesn’t know about any of that, any more than Reddit knows what your friend posted on Facebook.

The whole fediverse works by requesting remote accounts to send your website a copy of whatever they post. This works like a magazine subscription. Your dentist (the website you’re using) says “please end me Kichae Quarterly” and the publisher sends them a copy every time a new edition is publisbed. When you go for a cleaning, they have a copy of every edition starting at the time their subscription started. They do not have the back catalogue, and they certainly don’t have copies of everyrhing the publisher has received in the mail (comments, favourites, etc.)

3. Are you using the same server? Which website are you using? If you create an account on a different website, it’s a different website. If it’s the same website, well, storage costs money, and your account was inactive. Maybe they just removed the old posts?

These are usenet data sales. Usenet is an old network of distributed discussion groups that predates the web by about a decade. It contains a large trove of media and software - particularly older media and software - that is easy to acccess because it’s not a P2P network that is reliant others keeping their shares alive.

Many usenet providers offer bulk data plans, rather than continual subscriptions. This means you buy x GB of bandwidth, and you use it on whatever time table you like.These are great if you don’t do a lot of downloading, or if you’re just trying it out, or if you’re using usenet as a secondary or tertiary source for things.

Like the fesiverse, most usenet providers do not provide a full view of the whole network, so it can also be good to have a secondary provider that has different retention policies, so a lot of usenet users will buy these data blocks for that purpose, as well.