One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.
There's at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That "at least one" is me, which is how I know. I'm not here all the time and wouldn't be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.
And if "symbiosis" is too much, "combination". I also like "meld(ing)", but that might be somewhere in the middle.
I wouldn't use "hybrid" because that word has definitely made it into common vernacular and implies they've bred which isn't strictly accurate, and "chimera", while more accurate, is probably the more terrifying-sounding, if not still technical alternative.
How sure are they that his hasn't happened in the last billion years?
Maybe it happens once every 1,000 years but they've all died out before humans were able to observe it. It's not like things like this tend to leave much of a fossil.
And if you don't like 1,000, there's a few orders of magnitude to reconsider between there and 10^9.
I registered the next-in-sequence for one of them. Haven't seen that username since. I like to think I broke a script somewhere, but it could just as easily have broken a spammer's tiny little brain. The disappointing but more likely explanation is that they shrugged and moved on to a different set of usernames.
In Field of Dreams the ghost voice says "If you build it, they will come.", but fails to say "Oh yeah, you have to look after it once you've done that. You're gonna need a ride-on mower."
Like many folks on aggregator sites, I'd create magazines / communities / sub-sites if it didn't mean I then had to manage and moderate them afterwards. (There are many things in life that fit this pattern.)
Rhyme criticism:
"-zines" and "weeks" is, well, weak.
"Arrives" and "cries" is slightly better, but not by much.
"Soul" and "foul" don't rhyme either, despite appearances.
Then again, maybe it's my own accent that's spoiling these?
The lack of answer to the question "Why are Meta suddenly so open and willing to integrate with the Fediverse when they've basically been doing the opposite with their own products?" is a huge concern.
My guess is that they don't have an exact game plan yet, and are letting their naive, enthusiastic staff - those with no idea of the answer to the above question - do the initial scout and integration work with a view to see how it can be perverted for Meta's profit/benefit in future.
Meta probably wouldn't use the word "perverted", but from an outside perspective that's what it'd be.
My thinking here is exactly the same as in comments I posted about Microsoft's embrace of Linux a short while back: 12
There are browser extensions available that can help with the choice. From old-school Reddit habits, I tend not to use them on kbin, but here's an example from the one I use in other places: 🥦 (Hoping broccoli is a safe choice and doesn't have any weird alternative meanings.)
I only know that one time an obscure thing I was talking about here on kbin.social, perhaps as a response to a post on some Lemmy or another, ended up being indexed incredibly quickly by Google regardless of however things are structured in URLs.
This became apparent when I tried to do further research on the topic and I found myself staring at my own comment as federated on yet another Lemmy.
As long as search engines remain as on the ball as whatever happened there, we might actually end up with a repository anyway.
Unrelated username commentary: Your leet/hex username had me wondering if it resolved as an IP address too. Turns out you belong to the US Department of Defense. Unsure if you knew that already.
For obvious reasons, I decided not to try to actually visit that IP.
Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.
Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.
Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.
Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.
Mastodon is a lot harder to enshittify being as it's decentralised and uses an open protocol.
If it looks like an instance has gone down the path of corporate enshittification, other instances will stop federating with it.
The software itself could be a target, but it's open-source. Even the original instance created by the software creators (mastodon.social), turns to the dark side, someone will inevitably fork the last open-source version of the software and other instances will then update from the most popular fork.
As long as the underlying protocol remains the same, it doesn't really matter what happens.
Heck, kbin is totally different software but uses the same protocol to federate with the various Lemmys, other kbins, and, yes, Mastodon instances too.
Consider what happened a number of times with Reddit where various groups left and used the last open-source version of the software to set up their own Reddit clones. It wasn't particularly successful for them, but one or two of them are still out there.
If there had been a large number of them all sharing content and posts like Mastodon etc., maybe they would have been more popular. (For better or worse).