If we all wiggle in the same direction we can probably put another coin into the money pile on the other tracks.

If everyone goes home happy, then it’s a success. Leave the fierce competition for tournaments.

Expecting online gamers to have grave, a bold move Cotton

I know, It’s getting so that you just can’t trust unsourced images of alleged tweets talking about political topics on social media anymore.

smh my head

I grew up in the age of Internet forums, in the ancient days of the late '90s-early-00’s before the (Eternal September) Smartphone dumped every human being onto the landscape.

Having small communities is so much better. I often hear people complain that Lemmy isn’t big because there are not communities with 3 million people like there are some subreddits. Much of the reason that Reddit is shit is because of how big it is.

On the old Internet, you could know the people who were part of the community. I have old friends, that I’ve known for 20+ years, that I met playing MUDs on BBSs. Now, I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person that I’ve ever interacted with on social media in the past year.

Digg and Reddit came on the scene and pulled a huge crowd because we didn’t have The Algorithm to recommend content and these link aggregation sites were the first time people got a taste of that kind of ‘See all of the newest things from every corner of the Internet in a single place, curated by a process that produces good quality results’ that we now just expect from recommendation algorithms.

The old communities were essentially starved of population. Nobody wants to take the social effort required to become part of a community when they can just scroll Reddit mindlessly.

There’s very few people that even had a chance to experience the magic of spontaneous communities full of people working together.

If you still want a taste, check out the Something Awful forums.

The barrier to entry is higher: you have to learn the rules (read the rules), the social norms and there is a $10 one-time fee (so getting banned has some sting to it, read the rules).

In exchange you get an actual community of people. Many of the people posting there (or, in the various Discords now because that’s a thing) have been on SA since they were edgy teenagers and are now professionals with careers. That isn’t to say that there are not trolls and assholes, those exist in any community, but there’s a much higher ratio of good to bad posters.

One of the interesting decisions that they do is that rulebreaking posts are rarely ever deleted. If a person is probated (temp ban) or banned, their comment stays up with a “(User was Probated/Banned for this post)” edited into the post so you can see, and hopefully learn, from the bad behavior. In addition, there’s a ‘Wall of Shame’ section where you can see everyone who’s been actioned against, who the moderator was and the moderation reason.

I’ve always hated the fact that comments on Reddit just disappear. You can never see what a mod removed and there is no reason why it is removed. This allows all kinds of bad and manipulative behaviors to be done by people with moderation access.

Yeah, it turns out that a system that rewards people for simply having possession of something leads to behaviors that are harmful for society.

The problem isn’t landlords, that’s just the group that most people interact with directly. The problem is that our rules (primarily taxes) are setup to reward that behavior and to add burden to people who actually do work for their income.

If you’re a billionaire you can get your effective tax rate to single digits or zero. If you work for a living you pay way more taxes proportional to your income.

I got into computers when I destroyed a Windows 3.11 install on a PC we’d been given.

Nobody wanted to use it without graphics. So I started playing with it and typing words into the MS DOS prompt and reading the output.

I found qbasic and the gorilla and snake games. Then a text editor and so I learned how to make batch files. Learned how to edit basic by trial and error so I could make the gorilla’s bananas blow up the whole screen

Found some DOS games, like scorched earth and a copy of wing commander which led to me learning to hate DRM and also how to operate an unguarded photocopier at my school.

Fast forward 30 years and I’ve picked up a few more tricks

If he only had a hawk-sized watch, we wouldn’t have this problem

You’re confused. I said “this thread” and not “The OP”.

If you read the comments, do you see a frank discussion of people attempting to locate a gender neutral term for a tech enthusiast or a bunch of people just riffing insulting terms?

Regardless, to address you specifically. You’re trying to “win” an argument using rhetoric in place of reason. You’re not winning the argument, you’re just throwing a punch and declaring victory.

You win arguments by having better arguments, not by coming up with the best clever clapback so that you get more upvotes

This thread is basically “Please help me brainstorm pejoratives”, a very toxic mindset to have.

(This is a bad decision, we should support Ukraine, fuck Trump. Genuflection complete)

For people who didn’t read the article:

The clickbait headline is framing it as if there was a recent decision to specifically target Ukrainians. That is not the case.

This is from a January 20th executive order to the DHS directing that they end temporary humanitarian parole programs.

What the article points out is that this would impact Ukrainians too.

It’s like writing a headline that Trump has decided to raise the cost of goods and services for Ukrainian refugees but the article talks about tariffs that will raise prices for everyone. It’s not wrong, but it’s still a misleading headline.

We who?

Make the decision for yourself, crowd following doesn’t replace an informed decision.

e: my apologies for my prior use of a non-animated gif, Eternity let us all down, smh my head

You can’t expect Reddit moderators to have the bravery of a hawk

It’s promoting the idea that the opinions of politicians from the 1700s carry any more weight than the opinions of doctors from the 1700s.

Adherence to “what the founding fathers wanted” is a toxic meme. They were historical figures, that’s all.

The Supreme Court uses this meme as a totem to excuse motivated reasoning in their decisions and people are simply conditioned to accept the words of 300 year old politicians over the reality of the present.

We can understand the danger of Trump without quoting from old slave owners, pretending that they carry special wisdom.

You, and everyone up voting you, need to examine yourself to see why you’re preemptively surrendering to Trump and masking it as cynicism.

You’re joining the crowd of capitulation and cowardice, chanting “Resistance is futile”.

This is a Team Trump move.

You’re creating the impression that he’s invulnerable and unstoppable and in doing so making it easier for others to give up.

If you’re burned out, then take a break. The fight isn’t going anywhere. Don’t promote this “Trump can’t be stopped” mindset. It’s damaging the efforts made by the people who are actively resisting him.

There are Nazis at the head of Lemmy instances. Because it isn’t centralized it’s very easy to deal with.

When there is a centrally controlled social media and a Nazi takes over, it is a huge problem and requires a large amount of social effort to solve.

Bluesky could be purchased by Elon (or the current owner may decide they prefer the alt right by this time next year) and then we’d be in the same situation.

The weakness in Twitter and Bluesky is central control. Elon just provided a very poignant example as to why.

Don’t use Bluesky and also delete Twitter. Don’t support the idea of a single person or entity controlling the social lives of everyone else.

for no gain.

Nearly $3 billion USD flowed through the TRUMP cryptocoin rugpull, whoever owned initial coins made very, very large gains.

The $3 billion in quid buys a lot of anti-Ukraine pro quo

But, thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump could go on national TV and say he change US policy on Ukraine because he was bribed and he’d still be immune to any legal consequences (other than impeachment, but never anything criminal).

We don’t blame the whip, we blame the slaver

Bluesky absolutely belongs in the left column.

It’s not Transparent, Decentralized or Open Source.

It is a centralized social media network exactly like Twitter. The only ‘open’ part is a protocol that lets you interact with their, private, service.

The fact that it is ‘open source’ is largely a red herring, if Bluesky decides to no longer support their protocol then it is worthless. It cannot simply be forked and remain useful.

Bluesky is simply engaging in a PR campaign to steal customers from Twitter. It is exactly the same as Twitter in all of the ways that matter. It can be purchased by Musk or manipulated by the existing owner in the same way as Twitter.

Making a Bluesky account is simply trusting a new corporation to not act like a corporation in the future… which is a pretty naive position.

Ecosia is not open source, or decentralized. It is a private search engine based in Germany that provides search results from the major search engines and sells advertisements via Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks. These ad networks are part of Surveillance Capitalism and earn their money primarily by spying on you, collating your data and selling it/using it to place ads.

Stremio is largely a piece of software used to funnel people into paying for monthly for pirate streaming services. It’s not getting rid of Netflix or Disney+, it’s giving you the option of paying Russian or North Korean supported cybergangs instead of Netflix for access to streaming content.

The real open source alternative is Jellyfin. Then using qBittorrent along with Sonarr and Radarr to self-host your own media server.

The other suggestions are mostly okay with minor gripes.

• They could add GrapheneOS as an Android alternative.
• Linux Mint is not a bad option but ‘What Linux Distro should we recommend to new people’ is a contentious topic in the community, Mint is fine but there are other options (EndeavourOS is Arch Linux installed with the Calamares graphical installer and some sane options for a desktop PC, btw)
• While Signal isn’t ‘open source’. It is, for the moment, a secure option that doesn’t require a lot of user knowledge to setup. It is a vastly superior choice than using social media for messaging without requiring a lot of technical knowledge on the user’s part.

Luckily, we have alternatives.

There is an entire ecosystem of software that specifically rejects corporate, centralized, ownership. Self-hosting, while not for everyone, lets you largely stay away from these platforms that are being used to spy on you.