As someone who first switched to lemmy, and then quickly switched to kbin due to rampant de-federation in the lemmy world, I say I just first heard about lemmy.
But, Kbin is much more modern, and spectating the changes done in the last days alone, it moves fast and attracts many developers while all lemmy 0.18 did was breaking federation with kbin. I can fully recommend the switch to Kbin, its that good.
There is also the issue of Lemmy being developed by a group of genocide denying tankies.
About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.
It's for all these reasons I'm fascinated Kbin hasn't received a larger influx of new users. It seems truly the easiest to easily switch from Reddit, you just need a browser.
Kbin.social was not really ready to accept a large user amount until a few days ago when they did a large update to the infrastructure, also a little more then a week ago the site still had stability issues and would error out a lot. That just changed and now it is ready to grow faster. But, so far 51k users on kbin.social already.
Arguably it's probably still not ready - I have heard rumours that running a kbin instance is still much more complicated than Lemmy, and that moderation tools are still somewhat lacking. Which probably explains why there are currently more Lemmy instances out there than kbin.
The confusing thing is that despite this, kbin.social seems spectacularly well moderated at the mement. I guess that's partly because ernest is a champion, and partly because it didn't have to deal with the same insane influx of users that Lemmy has.
Still - I think the slow growth model benefits kbin quite nicely, and with federation it doesn't really matter to the feasibility of the platform whether people are here or on Lemmy. :)
Honestly, I've appreciated the smaller community size here. Sure there are less niche communities with actual users like reddit, but there is just a much smaller concentration of idiots here than other social media sites, which makes actually talking about shit fun, rather than infuriating.
Part of the reason I stuck around even after all the redditors swam back is because I like the company here much more.
Kbin already is, it was very much a side project by Ernest that was no where near as mature as Lemmy. As it stands it is growing extremely fast, proportionally it is way more active and grows faster than Lemmy itself. Kbin.social iirc is neck and neck with Lemmy World.
Well, there's the thing, you need a browser. You'd be surprised how many newer Reddit users access the site primarily or even exclusively on their phones, and who tend to use apps rather than their mobile browser.
I use kbin primarily on a browser (firefox) on mobile. My only complaint is the side menu options for aubscribing/blocking being located at the bottom of the page instead of higher up.
Artemis is in the works for a native android client, but, also, kbin is a Progressive Web App on mobile. By that I mean, you can go to the site with chrome, firefox, etc, click the menu, and find "Install" or "Install App". That will give you an icon to put on your home screen, which will just open the site like a standalone app. But using your browser. Which means if you use Firefox mobile, you can still use extensions and user scripts and such if you want to.
You should always use the language you are most comfortable with, and for ernest that simply is PHP. Its not what I would have chosen either, but things like the facebook and telegram backends are in PHP and they certainly work very well.
Yeah i heard of Lemmy first, but when I found out about the developers being tankies I switched to Kbin. I actually prefer Kbin a lot now! It's obviously still earlier in development but I think it shows more promise.
About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.
It may resemble digg 1.0, but it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit. It's a project by the guy who originally built Automod and is very much like Reddit was just prior to the launch of the subreddit system - two years before digg 4.0 launched and the refugees started arriving.
Intended to be more of a wide-open commons than a platform for subdivided or niche communities.
Tildes has very limited adoption during the reddit protests because it's on an invite system and doesn't want a huge influx of new people all at once, for all that it is accepting and even seeking growth over time.
You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.
The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?
Reddit thinks they don't need mods. Tildes seems to think they don't need users.
it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit.
Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.
And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.
At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.
This reads a lot like you're kind of working to shit on them, though.
It looks dead.
Ok? I don't know how you'd get that impression and you don't really elaborate, but I don't really see what might lead to that impression.
You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.
Yeah. Invite systems are a valid solution when you're looking to limit the pace of growth, and social media sites like aggregators often want to rate-limit growth in order to avoid an Eternal September moment changing their culture. Password recovery is amusingly antiquated. Their scoring works different and the numbers don't translate 1:1.
The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?
Yeah. Welcome to Tildes, a site utterly dedicated to high-concept, high-content, participation and engagement - with near every aspect of its design based around discouraging low-bar contribution and encouraging effortposts. If you personally find a long philosophy section and a ultra-simple aesthetic to be disengaging to you - then they're probably working as intended, and you're just not the target demographic. They're reaching about the same growth point as Reddit did when it made that decision themselves, and from what he said in the announcement they're facing the same problems. They're sitting at numbers well above "100 users" though, - as mentioned, they're not trying to be a highly-active and super-busy space. Several thousand users on Tildes produce a much smaller total footprint than several thousand users on lemmy or kbin.
Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.
And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.
At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.
This is the part where it's just like ... did Demiorz kill your dog and fuck your wife or something? Because these read as if it's coming from a pretty personal set of feelings for you.
It's a website where you are not the target user. That's fine. You don't need to hate them for that. They don't need to change for you.
If this whole thing isn't personal between you and them and is simply about the fact that they're a 'reddit alternative' that isn't the Fediverse, I think playing Websites We Use like it's sports teams where our guys are the best and everyone else is shit is ... kinda juvenile.
A fantastic answer, though I'll add that OP is likely unaware that the vast majority of the "growth" on Lemmy is actually due to bot accounts. Which is somewhat irrelevant as it is still an enormous platform even after accounting for that.
Also I saw that r/ModCoord leaned more towards Lemmy, seemed somewhat biased against Kbin, and was reportedly enormously biased against Squabbles even to the point of deleting posts trying to talk about it (which not being able to check deleted posts anymore, I did not try to verify). That would make sense then that that could be why people heard about Lemmy before hearing about Kbin.
Plus the mobile app too - although I'm mostly happy with the browser view of kbin (for reading, though writing comments in it is a huge pain).
There is also the issue of Lemmy being developed by a group of genocide denying tankies.
That’s probably the one thing that will catch up to them. I think there will inevitably be a hard-fork of the codebase in order to get away from the original devs.
I personally also went with Lemmy first but switched to Kbin after 2 days because I preferred it's interface (as well as the full transparency on up/downvotes).
I heard about Tildes way before all the API stuff went down (like 2021-ish) but a text only platform just never was my cup of tea, personally.
I have an account on both. But I timed myself for about 5 minutes on both Kbin and Lemmy (yes I am that kind of person) to see which I found more intuitive, fun etc and just felt like Kbin worked better for me. Just feels more natural somehow
But it's also good that there's different options for different people and everyone's not just having to use one centralised website like the one most of us have just come from...
I have also signed up to Squabbles which is another centralised service, kind of a cross between Twitter and Reddit. It's so-so, but a lot more interesting than tildes
I wouldn’t say defederation is rampant, but there were a few very high profile examples that hit right when people were new. Specifically, Beehaw/LW and Exploding Heads/everyone. Plus the whole thing about NSFW content and types.
While it’s true that many of the original devs have problematic views, it’s not really meaningful. The software is open source, there are tons of new developers (with varying views), and the code has nothing to perpetuate their ideas. In fact, they are pretty isolated on their own instance (Lemmygrad) since everyone defederates them almost immediately.
Worth noting that lemmy.ml is also run by the developers as their general instance (while Lemmygrad is the tankie one). It's easily forgotten at least for kbin users though, as federation with it has been somewhat broken for a while now.
Besides lemmygrad and explodingheads which are truly legitimate cases, defederation just hurts everyone. New users just expect to sub to the communities they like on reddit. That includes NSFW because that simply is something people want, and it never was an issue on reddit. The whole discussion on larger lemmy is childish and prude.
And about the developers, lemmygrad is largely isolated, but lemmy.ml is not and those same tankies run that. In fact its also the only lemmy instance that blocks all kbin instances via blocking the kbin user-agent. The development is also still largely steered by those tankies.
The NSFW stuff was/is a bit more complicated than it might appear on the surface. A lot of instances do not allow NSFW. No judgement, it is what it is. But people on those instances could sub to NSFW communities elsewhere, primarily LemmyNSFW. Less so now, but for a while it was common for those posts/communities to not be tagged NSFW, which caused them to show up on All for people that didn’t want to see it.
Then there was the question about types of NSFW content. Even people that enjoy your standard porn categories had lines they didn’t want crossed in their feed. Specifically animated/cgi CSAM and scat. The former is illegal in some jurisdictions, and caused a different instance (name withheld) to be widely defederated. The latter was more of an issue with limited tools, but the result was the same- either LemmyNSFW blocks that (at least until better tools are available), or they also get cut off.
I am not even speaking about LemmyNSFW and the discussion around what should be allowed on there and the discussion if they allow CSAM or not. It hit me when my favorite furry focused instance got blocked from feddit.de which was my home on lemmy because it has two mild NSFW communities on there. Nothing illegal, nothing legally questionable. Still de-federated.
Assuming they mean the thing with the loli. There was some poll or something about what was allowed, but if I recall, things that were visibly meant to be children was not too well received. They settled on allowing porn of people that looked youngish but not verifiably underage, because the consensus was it could be hard to tell.
Obviously a polarizing issue. One side wants scorched earth on anything under 35, severely limiting half of porn and almost all of Japanese porn. Other side wants to know if it's logically illegal to date short people now.
Other side wants to know if it's logically illegal to date short people now.
Bit of a tangent, but I've noticed a bit of an over-correction with the age thing. Back in the 'good' old days, a grown ass man like 40 year old Seinfeld would date a sixteen year old, and it would be tolerated or accepted. Obviously icky in retrospect and it's good that it's now illegal. But now you'll often read people say online that a 35 year old dating or even being attracted to a 25 year old is a red flag. I mean, it may not be ideal, and age gaps can cause issues (IRC women who date older men are more likely to be abused), but adults finding adults attractive or dating isn't necessarily creepy.
I do find porn where a petite 20+ actress is clearly pretending to be younger quite problematic though. It's not so much what they look like, but how they act. Like Piper Perri, the small blonde woman from that meme with her sitting on the couch with the black guys. Looks really young even though she's 30. As you say, there's a lot of porn like that.
Obviously even having this discussion and discussing the nuances of it can make you seem really creepy, and as you say make the discussion polarising. A bit like deciding to have a discussion about how to solve Israeli-Palestinian conflict on your first day, no one sensible wants to have it whatever side of the argument they may fall, and I get why many people would not want to see anything even remotely questionable pop up in their feed even if the actors are in their 20s. If only that they don't want to have to explain why they're subscribed to that content to their significant other, family or friends.
Child Sexual Abuse Material, basically the current term for child porn. Nepenthe@kbin.social is completely right on all of it. There is a missing detail that loli (along with a few other questionable/objectionable subs) were banned from LemmyNSFW, and went to a different one that promised to be less restrictive, and is widely defederated because of it.
(Side note: While it can be difficult/impossible to draw the line based on appearances, these were clearly and obviously meant to be depictions of children, and often very young children)
While it can be difficult/impossible to draw the line based on appearances, these were clearly and obviously
Ugh. Why am I not surprised?
I think there's a discussion to be had about questionable porn, like I mentioned in a comment above someone like Piper Perri (of sitting on a couch with black guys behind her meme fame) is nearing thirty. I get that people wouldn't want something featuring an actress like her in their feed because she looks younger, but I also get why people would find it draconian to ban it as she is an adult woman.
But you can't really have a nuanced discussion on where to draw the line, and end up having to err on the side of caution, because of the creeps.
Reminds me a bit of discussing free speech or Israel. There are nuances, and the line is blurry, but nuanced discussion is impossible, because before you know it you're agreeing with someone with a swastika tattoo on his forehead.
Sounds like you joined one of the anti-porn instances. I can’t read German, so I can only guess that the rules say that, but it’s not obvious on Join-Lemmy. I really wish they’d include some meaningful detail on their standards for fed/defend, since that’s what really matters. Instead we have that garbage about matching your values, and each one has a one-liner about who they are.
You are correct that there’s overlap of users with lemmy.ml, but I don’t see much of the offensive content coming from there. If nothing else, they put their masks on when on that instance. I’m sure there are people on EH with alts elsewhere, but they aren’t given the free reign to cause the same problems.
Lemmy.ml is no longer a recommended instance, and probably won’t be again. But yes, I agree with you that the confusion caused by defederation is a bad thing.
Does some of them being tankies have an effect on the code?
As I see it Google and others are going to have a hard if not impossible time to incorporate the fediverse, and the fact that the same content can exist on multiple servers.
So I'm working on a search engine specifically build, for Lemmy at least. Where it'll take you to whatever your preferred instance is when tapping on a search result.
I hope to have a MVP up and running in a few more days.
IDK, isn't it the same for reddit? It also encourages crossposting, so the same content is on there several times. Maybe I don't understand the fediverse well enough yet, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
That is great. Thanks for the initiative. Have you considered contacting the people at DuckDuckGo so that that search engine can access Lemmy/Kbin content?
Interesting. I hadn't even thought about how the fact that instance1.[post] and instance2.[post@instance1] is essentially the same thing and how search engines would handle it. Interested in what you come up with!
Thanks. If you do some digging you can find the project on GitHub but note that it's a work in progress still. The UI is lacking and it's rough around the edges but it's "working". And I still need to do some optimizations on the crawler itself, etc....
It's also going to be completely self-hostable just like Lemmy, etc...
Yep and I'm one of them. Go look me up on Reddit and I think I have maybe 20 posts over the 14+ years I was on the site. ...joined Lemmy and immediately got frustrated that I couldn't find anything. So I figured I take a crack at it. Especially since I couldn't see how Google would ever be able to link me to my instance. Let alone make it easy to search the entire fediverse without having to write out every possible site, with new ones popping up every day.
I wonder if it's possible to have a sophisticated search engine similar to Google's, with BERT and kNN or vice versa. It would be the closest thing to Google search but specifically for Lemmy posts.
One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.
What's the general consensus as far as fear for future profiteering? Right now these platforms are great because the are run by people who genuinely care. Do you think there is any risk of this growing so much that federated content reaches the front page of search engines, followed by advertisers wanting space here? Or what about risks like reddit gold which was initially just a fun add on, which then became a "temporary" paid feature, which ended as a full scale scam.
Anyway, I love what we have for now, I just want to know what everyone else is speculating for the future.
Meta, a well-known for-profig company are gearing up to join the Fediverse, reaction is mixed, some server operators seem keen on welcoming them, some cautiously optomistic while others want nothing to do with Meta at all.
In terms of paid features, might be a thing down the line but it will very from server to server. Cool extra statuses (e.g. Wow I'm a gold tier superstar supporter on this instance) likely won't appear on other instances unless they decide to include something in the federation protocol that would display it.
The thing with the Fediverse is that things like this aren't really possible. The creators of Lemmy are pretty anti-capitalist, so the source-code won't ever support ads.
An instance admin could try to modify it to incude Ad Sense, but the users would just reject that instance and move to a free one.
I personally wouldn't mind premium features, like animated emotes and stuff for people that pay for monthly subscriptions, but again, things like that don't work in the fediverse because they won't be supported on every instance.
Maybe there will be some creative solutions that get made, but it's highly unlikely due to how things are setup.
I’d say because it’s in the air. Obviously companies watch each other. Like the layoffs in January. The initial wave was the companies that needed to do it and had been planning it for awhile. Then when there was blood in the water everyone was doing it because then they aren’t big mean company, they are just another company doing layoffs right now. Lost in the crowd. It’s already come out some companies did it purely because big companies like Twitter and Google did it.
But we are seeing a big increase in anti-consumer moves because there seems to be no backlash. Like there’s the vocal minority, but it seems by and large a huge amount of the customers for these tech companies are unwilling to move away.
Every time Twitter does something some move off Twitter, and they get such growth! But then eventually stuff like Mastadon’s activity has a noticeable decline over time and Twitter carries on. Some people go back, some quit Twitter entirely. But these are fractions of a percentage probably. They still have the biggest celebrities and a crap ton of users.
Netflix just cracked down on password sharing, in a move that people were calling foolish. The outcry was everywhere and anytime Netflix was mentioned was 20 comments saying they cancelled that day. But subscriptions are up, Netflix won.
YouTube has been pushing more and more ads on users, there isn’t as big as a direct backlash. Like there was more outcry on removing the dislike button. Which…no one cares now lol. But YouTube pushing’s more ads, and they don’t seem to be loosing money for it. I’m sure they are trying to find the ‘breaking point’ for customers. But either people really are willing to put up with 2 30second unskippable ads every 5 minutes or premuim subscriptions are skyrocketing as they ruin the free experience.
WB killed a ton of shows outright, basically burned a bunch of media and shuttered a ton of HBO Max’s staff. People upset… Twitter all a buzz. Now it’s back to HBO is the best streaming service (Which it is lol)
Like it just keeps going. I think it’s just a combination of companies making terrible blunders steal the spotlight from each other and society as a whole has a 3 day memory. The Reddit protests are already cold news because Twitter just DDOS’d itself. People who saw all this with Reddit and call it disgusting moves by the company and the unspoken bond is broken, always end their diatribe with something like “Well I’ll just use old.Reddit with an ad blocker” like they are winning when they still provide Reddit with their usage.
People like us who walk away and move to spots like this are the minority of a minority. It’s up in the air how many will stay and how many will slowly forget their outrage at Reddit and go back.
This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.
If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.
It isn't at all a new concept and I'm not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don't feel like you need.
Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.
Adding an edit as I've thought a bit more: I think it's important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are 'unlimited' options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.
This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.
I think it's lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you'd like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.
I’m here from Reddit and that’s what I’ve been doing, just subscribing to whatever I can find for each subreddit I’m losing, and then whichever one seems like it’s either most active or has the most quality content stays and I unsub from whatever sublems aren’t providing content.
This OP seems pissed off about subbing to multiple sublems that are the same but like…you don’t have to. Go use Reddit? lol
The multiple sublems thing is kinda the point of Lemmy, there isn’t one big overlord controlling everything
Cross instance communities or a way to stich these places together better needs to happen though. Splinter groups making their own community is fine, but there needs to be some main communities for things.
It’s not just a make it more like reddit need. If lemmy.world decides to defederate like beehaw (or goes down), then all that content is gone from lots of other people, and the fediverse as a whole loses. If there exists a way to blend communities, then maybe people only notice less posts on memes rather than just an empty void.
It’s also a huge discovery problem, some people are going to think there isn’t an active NSQ community, and maybe try making yet another, because the didn’t find the one active community. It’s also possible that there’s 5-10 small/tiny- communities that could become a single thriving community of they were able to actually discover and coordinate with each other.
Discovering new communities that share names and topics will be the biggest core improvement in my opinion. Like having a way for an instance to poll all federated instances for communities with the same name or with a name that includes a term to easily add would be awesome.
Then the ability to combine them into subsets of your siscriptions by whatever topic you want would be awesome. Like instead of subscriptions as a while you could have 'Tabletop Gaming' with various 40k, CAV, BattleTech, and other games grouped how you want or subgroups for each game.
It’s a sticking point because it’s new to people who only have experience with reddit after it became more mainstream. Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc. and how they all work together isn’t a super simple concept. For all the shortfalls of a centralized social media website, the prevention of multiple separate communities having the exact same name is convenient and simple. It prevents duplicated posts. You want to capture all of the traffic in one place. That’s why link aggregation sites and blogs exist, so in order to do that you have to subscribe to all of them. But then there’s a pretty significant chance you’ll see the exact same post cross-posted to the other 3 communities…which would annoyingly bloat your feed obviously.
I’m not going to say that reddit is the bastion of how to properly run a website. Clearly r/trees r/marijuana r/earthporn so on and so forth is super unintuitive, but until the concept of how the fediverse works becomes more common knowledge, we’ll have to help new members along. It’s taken me a little more than a week to even get remotely comfortable with how it works.
I only just learned today that I can’t see content from users on instances like lemmygrad because the instance that I joined has it blocked. I didn’t even really realize what I was doing at the time. Fortunately it’s something I also would have done, but my point still stands that its not something that’s immediately apparent or intuitive.
I think that magnifies the point I was trying to make as well. Not many people understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are two separate “websites” in the same way that Facebook and Instagram are. They’re both associated with Lemmy and there’s no “Lemmy.com” per se.
Even doing this for a month now I still forget that a lot and treat posts like Reddit posts. Being a Kbin user, I have to constantly stop myself from replying to questions about Lemmy and app suggestions for features that I already have thanks to script mods. And that's even with mods that highlight the post isn't from Kbin!
It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community. Given the hallmarks of the fediverse this is practically intended, to my understanding, but it is bad for initial growth and coherence of posts. This happened on Reddit as well, of course it did, but the way instances are completely separate and communities can have the exact same name compounds the issue.
Starting up is always hard. Short of copying over a subreddit to a declared official new home (which did happen for a few), you have to build up from nothing. I think it's come a long way in only the last few weeks. I've already seen a post complimenting the response time and answers from a Lemmy community when the Reddit posts went ignored, and also I've seen one community owner realize that the other communities of similar names are doing much better and decide to close up. Another group decided the best solution was not to try and pull in other communities, but act as a general discussion that also served to link up the many specific niche communities distributed throughout Lemmy and Kbin. Lastly the attacks on .world and .ml serve as a reminder of the benefits of having duplicity. What if one of those had been a long-time established home of a community with millions of posts and got wiped from such a thing?
This is evolution in action, what works best will prevail, and part of that will be redundancy and adaptive ability.
There is no "the community", though. These names don't "belong" to any one specific group of people, there's no "there can be only one" mandate.
As an example of why "there can be only one" is a bad thing, there's /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn't, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn't like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?
Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got "taken over" by right wing moderators and those who weren't of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community "Canada"?
there's /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit
Those two spaces had differing stances.
There also the case of InterestingAsFuck as opposed to DamnThatsInteresting, because why the fuck does "Fuck" have to be in the title?
But then there's shameless karma-farming duplicates, like ComedyCemetery and ComedyNecromancy.
You make good points. I think name squatting and squabbling over who is the “real” community was prevalent on Reddit, and the way it works here fixes that.
But I still think that a downside of decentralization like this is splitting the activity up, sometimes unnecessarily, and making discovery of new communities just a bit harder. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but I think it’s an issue that will have to be addressed either by Lemmy UI updates or third parties.
It would help, but frankly I think there needs to be more - both because it would be helpful and because, up to this point, Lemmy is mostly following in Reddit’s footsteps in terms of features.
Consider a “multipost” option, on top of the existing crosspost. Multiposting something to another community would push the post as-is (no edits allowed) there, then collate all comments across all communities it had been multiposted to into one comment section displayed on all of them. The original community each comment chain originated on could be marked on the parent comment, and child comments could automatically be routed so they originate from the parent community of the chain.
Just spitballing here, but something like this would help bridge the gap a lot more than just a multireddit port.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community.
They're different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you're not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.
Yeah let's get to that million first before splitting everyone. It's really not helpful in the current state.
And there are actually options besides "this is how it currently works so it's good". Like some kind of federated communities/magazines where when you post to one it's posted to all of them. And I'm not saying it would be technically easy to implement, I have no idea, but I'm saying there are always room for improvement.
Near-identical communities/magazines with the same exact goal isn't practical.
For the record I don’t think what OP describes would be right. But I am certain there are better ways to mesh together disparate feeds into one and have all discussion at least be cross-referenced - something better than just crossposting. Because while
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic
May be true, it doesn’t hold true at smaller scales; a hundred users spread out across ten communities of ten active users each is pretty much a ghost town.
Indeed, there's a viability threshold for a community, and it's probably on the order of 100 active users. Having them spread out isn't doing any of them any favours.
But that points to the need for and importance of discovery tools. Community tags, better search, better federation tools, better back-linking and cross-posting tools, user-defined lists, etc. The Misskey/Calckey "Antenna" saved-search feature would actually be very powerful in the threadiverse, particularly if coupled with community and post tags, and would really improve the visibility of new or undersized communities to those who are looking for them.
But forced amalgamation across independent and independently operated websites definitely isn't one of them.
I don’t think it should be forced, but I think some kind of option for “amalgamation” should be available, either user-side (multireddit-esque thing, etc.) or community-side.
If communities want to amalgamate, they can just collectively choose to use a different community. Negotiate mod status for the immigrating mod team, and abandon the old instance. With small communities, this is feasible. With large ones, it's not, as a significant number of members won't want to amalgamate. And they shouldn't have to.
At the user level, lists and antennae would give users a lot of power to shape their streams.
I think a lot of users on Reddit (including some who gave migrated to kbin/Lemmy) haven’t experienced a lot of the forum and IRC era of the internet.
As you’ve mentioned, “fractured” communities can actually be beneficial since each contribution is that much more valuable and nuances can actually exist between the similar communities. It allows things like the instance I’m on where I know I’m more likely to get a Canadian perspective in the communities on lemmy.ca versus other instances. To me that’s a huge feature over centralized platforms where those nuances would get drowned out.
I think this answer is the most accurate. People get too hung up same names on different servers. There will always be multiple versions of a community whether they have the same name on different servers or whether one of them snagged the og name and others prefixed with Real_x / True_x. Imo I like it this way better because there's less favoritism to the one that comes first / people can't universally squat on a community name
I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it's necessary to consider the part after the "@" to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There's no such thing as a community named "No Stupid Questions", with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.
As an alternative solution there are issues for "multireddit"-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.
they collect as much information as they can from the device such as location from GPS, interests from follows, likes dwell time on posts, and other information you knowingly or unknowingly provide. This includes scraping information from photos and videos you upload to the app. Eg, you upload a picture of an expensive bag with the caption “my new bag” - the bag brand can be determined and assessed algorithmically.
the above extends to websites you visit with in-app browsers and the actions you take while on those pages
deduce what they can’t eg where you live & work based where you spend time during the day vs night,your real life interests based on places you visit eg gym, fast food places, church etc. Also they apply complex algorithms to relatively accurately deduce anything you don’t directly provide. Eg if you disable accurate location, they can figure it out based on the ip address(es) you connect to the app from (geolocation algorithms) .
and what they can’t deduce is bought from third parties. Those are companies normal people don’t know exist whose sole purpose is scraping and categorising information - sort of similar to credit agencies but different. In this case, they take what they know about you and send it to this third party which then returns eveything they have that’s related. Eg the app (threads) might send your email and username and get a response containing your previous home address (say scraped from some insecure government website)
With the above, even without knowing your name (this can easily be determined) , they are able to know enough about you to determine the kind of person you are, with whom you interact, where you go, your political affiliations, job, salary estimate etc and sell it to advertisers. This is usually sold as “audiences” but given the tools provided to advertisers, it’s easy to create hyper targeted ads and recommendations (remember Cambridge Analytica).
We voluntarily give up a lot more information than we realise.
And remember, the smartest people on the planet work at these companies, so the above is nothing in comparison to what behemoths like Facebook, Google, Tencent, etc are capable of.
This is a really good oversight (see: insight, overview, etc). Honestly, for anyone actually interested in this stuff and what makes the internet tracking/advertising machine tick, take some of the HubSpot Academy’s courses. There’s definitely other courses out there, but the HubSpot ones are all free, and the topics aren’t hard once you get immersed in it.
Plus afterwards you can put the faux-certs on your resume and knife fight with the 20,000,000 other adtech people that just got laid off.
Not a native speaker and kind of OT, but isn’t it supposed to be “overview” rather than “oversight” in this case? Maybe not necessarily “overview”, but I think “oversight” would only mean mistake or supervision. I was just wondering.
I submit that the giving up of information is not voluntary, but instead is coerced through 1000s of pages of ToS and EULAs that are so convoluted that nobody actually has enough time to understand them. While the clicking of a box to agree to the terms is voluntary, the act of giving up the data itself is generally, similar to what you said, unknown to the end user.
I stand that these acts are acts of coercion and legislation should be put in place to either:
make the collection of the data outright illegal or "opt-out" by default
ensure that the people who generate the data benefit from it monetarily, instead of a simple granting of access to that which the ToS/EULA gatekeeper wouldn't allow without first blindly agreeing
Phones give out a lot of personal information on their own lol. On top of the phone, don't forget that social media apps like Threads also require you to login... with credentials stored at FB/Meta... that they can derive all the aforementioned information on, as well as other type of things (Amazon purchases? Stuff you watch on youtube.com? Google queries?...) by using some creative tracking technology. You basically gave them a dog tag to identify you whenever you sign up for services after all
For shittier apps like Thread, apparently they also do some weird stuff like forcing the app to be on once the OS boots, so... yeah.
Sealioning is the constant bad faith, feigning ignorance, asking for evidence of everything under the guise of “just asking questions”. Then ignoring any evidence presented and moving on to the next demand. Used to shut down discourse entirely.
Tankies are leftists that defend or deny the atrocities committed by authoritarian communist regimes like the Soviet Union or the CCP. It was first used to describe communists in Great Britain that defended the Soviet Union for using tanks to crush anti-communist revolutions.
Tankies are leftists that defend or deny the atrocities committed by authoritarian communist regimes like the Soviet Union or the CCP. It was first used to describe communists in Great Britain that defended the Soviet Union for using tanks to crush anti-communist revolutions.
Ironically history has proven that decision to have been the correct one and even the soft-left here in Britain today acknowledges that the people who were called “tankies” originally when that happened were all completely correct.
Edit: Downvoters literally defending against the stopping of what were literal actual fascist-led uprisings because they know absolutely nothing about european history.
Nope, if you do (after Deng for China, after Stalin for USSR, for other time periods you could be a leftist) and have extensively learned about it you probably think you’re a leftist but you’re actually a rightist. Think about how exactly the sum of their policies align with left values more than right values.
Nope, if you do (after Deng for China, after Stalin for USSR, for other time periods you could be a leftist) and have extensively learned about it you probably think you’re a leftist but you’re actually a rightist.
So you think Jeremy Corbyn isn’t left? Lmao. What about Lula? Every Cuban politician?
Think about how exactly the sum of their policies align with left values more than right values.
This is you trying to re-align left vs right as culture instead of economic. It’s seriously america-brained bollocks and is not how anyone in the rest of the world views left vs right.
He’s not saying they’re right wing governments, just that they’re highly authoritarian, which is something that leftists, on average, tend to be against, so if someone claims to be “left” but supports Russia, they likely have a poor understanding of one of those things.
Idk if I like this “left means anti authoritarian” thing I’ve seen floating around recently. By that interpretation right wing individualist anarchism is actually left wing, because though it is called right wing in the traditional sense of individualism v collectivism where collectivism is left wing, it is certainly against authority.
Rather, I’m fine with this interpretation, but can we all get together and figure out whether or not “left” means “anarchism” or “collectivism?” This “it means either one of the two and people will just decide one is correct and deny the existence of the other definition and which one that is depends on who you’re talking to at that moment, and I won’t define it when askef, I’ll just act like you’re stupid for not knowing which one I choose to use today” shit is getting old and I’m like 99% sure it’s intentional as a technique to appear to win an argument without having any argument to speak of.
Like @shit (from shitjustworks, nice one) said, these don’t conflict. While I didn’t say anything about authoritarian (communism especially vanguardism is authoritarian and it never works out), I personally believe that modern China is right wing. For example, their current government wants to merge traditional values with law.
I mean it’s more of an up down issue and not a left right issue right? Most authoritarianism stuff ends up sounding the same. They both hate liberalism and want to stomp it out before they fight it out over the left right divide.
This is a major example of why I despise the left/right "spectrum" that is so universal in political discourse these days. These views are not simple enough to be defined along a one-dimensional axis like this.
I'm increasingly fond of the 8 values test, which splits things up along four distinct axes. Still too few, but definitely far better than just one.
50.6% on the economic axis towards equality, 59.4% on the diplomatic axis, towards nation. 50.4% on the civil axis, towards liberty 55.8% on the societal axis, towards tradition.
Makes sense that I get called a Nazi multiple times on this god forsaken tankie-filled site.
May I introduce you to the Far Right in America? They are often keen to downplay any Russian acts of aggression. ETA: Not saying that they would fit the definition of tankies, just that you don't have to be a leftist to (overtly or tacitly) support Russia.
G.O.P.’s Far Right Seeks to Use Defense Bill to Defund Ukraine War Effort
The group’s proposals have no chance of passage, but they have further mired the military spending bill in a partisan fight and highlighted Republican divisions over the war.
So, let’s put aside for a moment the rather shocking number of people casually advocating for murder in this thread.
I want to talk instead about how everyone here is just talking for granted the notion that removing the billionaires, Republican politicians, or whatever “they” you care to think of, would be a solution, or even a positive step, for modern social ills.
There’s a big undercurrent in almost any political discussion online, this implication that every one of the world’s problems actually has a super simple solution, that The Powerful could just snap their fingers and make it happen if they wanted to, and it’s only because of their greed etc that we have any problems that all. Obviously we live in a time of huge inequity and we’d be a lot better off if we found a good way to improve it.
But many (most?) of our biggest problems are inherent to the challenge of keeping 8 billion people alive and happy in a hostile universe, and in fact nobody has ever had a perfect solution. Throwing the entire planet into chaos by causally throwing away human beings’ rights and leaving an enormous portion of the world’s capital in uncertain hands, ready to be seized by some other set of psychopathic opportunists who happen to be in a position to do so, certainly ain’t it.
What a load of shit. "Ohh, the poor rich people can't help it, they're doing their beesssttt, they can't just fix everything! It's such a haarrrdd probleemmmm!!"
This garbage might be respectable by someone with no actual sense if "The Powerful" ever tried to fix anything, but they don't. They sit on unimaginable shitloads of money that people "imagine" could be put toward some beneficial purpose and do nothing but ruin Earth and ruin humanity through the influence it implies. Hell, these people can cause change without even spending any appreciable portion of "their" money and they still won't do any good for anyone.
I'm disgusted that I even have to type any of this; bootlickers deserve no respect and "The Powerful" deserve worse. "Sit down and shut up unless you have a perfect fix for everything right now" while the fucking planet is burning is possibly the most asinine thing I've heard. Enjoy your navel-gazing, I guess. Let us know when you've figured everything out without hurting anyone "worth" more than a few million dollars.
I just don't get some people's mindset. Thousands - millions - of people die every year from causes that are either preventable through the application of money, or else can be directly laid at the feet of just these few individuals, but ohhh no, we can't let THEM be killed, that's an intolerable moral atrocity!
They are actively putting the future of the entire human species at risk and your answer is just "well things can't be perfect lol". Things can't be perfect, but things CAN be better. To seriously assume that some lunatic like Elon Musk has humanity's best interest at heart is naive at best. I'm not saying we need to resort to violence, but we are clearly running out of time, and might even be out of time.
Guardrails can only be enforced by the largest concentration of power. Since power will concentrate to those who push up against those guardrails most, they're incentivized to remove them. This is the conclusion of capitalism.
Democracy is supposed to help stave that off. Ideally we create a strong government that wants to retain control and it fights back the corporations. But it only works if we stay engaged.
Even if it were possible for everyone to stay engaged with every important issue, which it isn't, we now live in an era where automated propaganda can reach the entire world and create the illusion of democracy. This illusion is created by drowning out actual people's voices. When we're able to do better at automated language translation, which is very soon, this will be an even bigger problem.
You can see a lot of this in a lot of non-US English speaking countries where some people fly Trump flags or are sovereign citizens or buy into "The Great Reset" covid vaccination conspiracies despite their "evidence" not applying to their country's reality.
Guardrails and democracy doesn't quite cut it when the people who have the power create the guardrails and disguise themselves as the majority.
We need to change how we ascribe power, and for me that means changing how we ascribe rewards.
None of that is particular to capitalism though. Why do you think changing that would change the way power loves power? Hell, the non capitalist countries of the world have even stronger propaganda than the capitalist ones.
I'm not who you originally replied to, and I agree it's not specific to capitalism. I do think that capitalism does a great job of showing how money as a reward system and people's ability to purchase power can lead to horrible things.
My personal take is that we need to re-evaluate what we reward and how we calculate value. But I acknowledge that's a very long term sort of thing, not an immediately actionable next step.
The base problem is that those with the money can easily buy out those with political power. Until that ends, there's literally no other task before us. Kill the rich, or kill the politicians...at least until they have a SMIDGEN of thought in their minds that taking a bribe might mean a bad end.
Currently, there's no such mental block. Talk ALL you WANT. The law won't touch them.
And I'm someone who doesn't want violence. I've just watched 40 years of it and seen no other solution.
lol so the rich can buy out those with political power...but a bunch of angry peasants show up at their doors and you think they're suddenly helpless? They'll go out to the mob and say "I'll give $1 million each to the last 10 men standing" and the mob will destroy itself.
Well put. Things are bad for many, maybe most right now. But they are generally also better than they have been at any point in the history of organized civilization (not for every individual, but for an ever larger proportion of people). The climate being an exception, and the tearing at the fringes of both sides of the political spectrum becoming a little more visible/tangible. I don’t think the world of 10/15 years from now will look anything like the world we have today, and a lot will change. But you are probably right that it’s an oversimplification to just blame it on an elite cabal that runs the worlds governments by proxy.
There’s a big undercurrent in almost any political discussion online, this implication that every one of the world’s problems actually has a super simple solution, that The Powerful could just snap their fingers and make it happen if they wanted to, and it’s only because of their greed etc that we have any problems that all.
You mean like when Musk said he'd solve hunger if someone told him how, then they told him how, and that it would require only a couple percent of his wealth, and he did jack shit?
It's interesting how just 6 days ago, a boat with 750 people on board, including 100 kids, capsized near Greece, only 104 survived, and it's less of an issue than those billionaires
People tend to care more about the stuff that happens closer to them, or is somehow related to them. You probably don't care all that much about the armed conflict in Mali between the government, ISIS and Wagner Group.
if you live in europe, the Mediterranean sea is you know, right next to you. And way much closer than the distance of the titanic to the shore in America, which is about 1000 nautical miles.
I don't disagree, but missing sub is an unusual phenomenon and mystery that gets people interested.
I don't think the billionaires part is all that important, I didn't know about it until today. The Kursk, the kids trapped in a cave, the miners that have spent months in a mine, those were all news too.
But yea immigrants from war-torn regions - nobody cares unless they have "blond hair and blue eyes".
Who gives a shit about a couple of billionaires. Why does this have to be a world-wide news story? Why don't we care about the 100s of refugees that die all the time in maritime accidents and why are those things dominating the news?
Time and time again we give the rich people all of our attention. Fuck that. We shouldn't be letting the media direct our attention like this.
The Greece tragedy is lacking the irony and hubris of this.
I mean, it's a tourist submersible that was aiming to bring billionaires to view the Titanic wreckage and it likely got wrecked itself. And they named the submersible Titan.
The sub's company OceanGate was dinged by a former employee for all sorts of safety issues and they fired and sued him. There are also lots of choice quotes from the CEO (who happens to be on the vessel) about moving fast and breaking things, and regulations stifling innovation. So there's some possible karma involved.
I think it's because the story about a missing submersible is unusual, and moreover, it's about a rescue attempt. This makes it more interesting than many other, albeit more dreadful, news stories.
sure. It has nothing to do with the fact that in one of cases they are 5 billionaires while in the other one they are 750 poor migrants. No, totally not.
It's the mystery, where are they, what's their condition, what's going to happen, etc. ? It's like watching a movie. We're shallow and just want to be entertained.
Not entirely no, I didn’t see any news outlet leading the story with “5 Billionaires missing after Submersible lost contact”. For quite some time we didn’t even know who was on board. It’s more the fact that boats in the Mediterranean sink all the time, it’s still tragic but we know that that’s an issue we have now (most people unfortunately seem to have decided that they do not care that much). A submersible going missing and the coast guards of 2 countries looking for them, while thei only have air for a couple days, no one knowing where they are and it involving the titanic guarantees clicks, it’s almost like a movie plot. The fact that they are wealthy is certainly not the reason for it though, it’s the circumstances surrounding it, it’s unusual. People also know how ships work and why they capsize, while most people don’t have the slightest idea how deep sea submersibles work.
So yes, the ship capsizing and killing that many people is horrible and should get more attention, especially from the Goverments involved. It’s ridiculous that we let those poor people drown by the thousands and treat the ones who made it like scum. But I’m not convinced the Titanic story got traction BECAUSE the victims have money.
5 migrants? No fucking way. 5 average citizens of any developed nation? Sure. We perform expensive and resource intensive search and rescue operations for people lost in the wilderness or out at sea all the time. And once the media brings attention to it, there's a lot of pressure to keep the funding going, otherwise next election cycle people are going to remember the current leadership as "those guys who just left some poor people to die to save money."
I see your point, but I do think the poster above is right: "rescue" situations do tend to get a lot of media attention. The Thailand cave rescue and various mine collapses also spring to mind (Baby Jessica, anyone?). None of those involved particularly wealthy people (I don't think?) and they got some measure of global attention.
That may be true to your experience but for the first few days I heard about this story it had nothing to do with the who or how much it cost. Stories with novelty will always sell more than stories without much novelty. Edit: And I'm not saying that's right. The accident in Greece is a horrible tragedy, and we should value everyone's lives equally no matter how much wealth they have. There are legitimate points where we as a society turn a blind eye to the poor (always). But, this is not a story that's surprising why it's getting so much attention. It's gross how some people in this comment section are choosing to increase their hatred toward the rich rather than increasing their compassion for the poor
I agree with you, mostly, but you could also argue that the situation only exists/is only possible because they're wealthy (the same reason the only sub apparently capable of rescuing them is owned by another billionaire). But that doesn't diminish your point--were these somehow 5 poor people stuck at the bottom of the ocean in a sub near the Titanic, it would still probably get a lot of attention.
That's just not the same. Drowning is quick and if you don't save them immediately they're most likely dead. Slowly suffocating in a sub while the clock ticks and something can be done about it is a different story.
You're assuming they're suffocating, when the smallest fault in the hull's integrity would make the thing implode, killing them before they realized what was happening.
Like everyone, my ability to care has limits. You can't worry and care about everything. I'll give my fucks for those who didn't grow rich exploiting others, thanks.
Definitely better than Andrew Tate from what I've seen. While he's clearly a very savvy clout chaser, and he's overtaken Pewdie Pie as the most popular YouTuber, he has made a serious effort towards philanthropic acts. The fact that he's using these acts as a marketing tool to further increase his influence is clearly intentional, but he's doing real good with his clout. He's also shown considerable evolution throughout his career, including:
In an April 2022 interview with The Daily Beast, Donaldson announced that he was no longer an evangelical Christian and identified himself as an agnostic. He also stated that he had long disagreed with his church's position on homosexuality. He states that during the time he grew up in "the heart of the Bible Belt", he had religion "beat into [his] head every day", and was taught that "gay people are the reason God's going to come and burn this Earth". Although he considered anti-LGBT rhetoric to be normal growing up, he has disavowed it since then, stating: "I realized, 'Oh, this isn't normal. This is just a weird place I grew up in.' So, that type of thing, I [wish I could] go back in time and be like, 'Hey, stop'."
Donaldson considers himself strictly apolitical, saying that "I don't want to alienate Republicans and Democrats. ... I like having it where everyone can support [my] charity. My goal is to feed hundreds of millions of people ... it would be very silly of me to alienate basically half of America."
...and...
In April 2023, Chris Tyson came out publicly as gender non-conforming and revealed their struggles with gender dysphoria. In response to claims that they would become a "nightmare" and distraction for the channel, Donaldson defended Tyson and said, "Chris isn't my 'nightmare' he's my fucken [sic] friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off."
This isn't to say he's perfect, but he's a helluva lot better than some other personalities your kids could be listening too.
That's my position as well. He does good, even if it's for self serving reasons, it's still good being done, but I don't know enough about him as a human being to make a statement either way.
"I don't want to alienate Republicans and Democrats. ... I like having it where everyone"
So he's a fascist. If you have 11 people trying not to alienate a fascist, you have 12 fascists.
Donaldson considers himself strictly apolitical
Refusing to take a side when one side has made the extermination of swaths of the population their stated policy goal is taking the side of oppression.
While I agree with your sentiment, it's not applicable in this context. He's stating a simple factor of most charity work (something I'm familiar with working in the non-profit world when I was younger). If you alienate your donators, you lose their donation. The easiest way to alienate someone is to declare a political stance, and the clumsiest way to do so is to do it by declaring an allegiance to a party rather than describing your support or opposition to policy specifics.
Ideological purity always conflicts with the tactical application of positive change. As an example, what would the US Senate look like if Franken hadn't resigned? What could have been accomplished? What positive changes were prevented? What would the Supreme Court look like now?
Secondly, your hyperbole obfuscates the fact that most Republicans are not pro-genocide, rather, extremists within their party are. Additionally, the identification of Republican or Democrat goes further than political identification in America - it's a cultural identification as well, one that splits along rural / urban lines. I know a number of rednecks from high school who are great guys, shoot their guns, love their gay and brown friends, support abortion, give to charity, and publicly identify as conservatives who hate Democrats... even when on a policy level, they agree with most progressive politics. A big factor in this is the conservative media landscape, which has actively fostered this level of cognitive dissonance, but that doesn't address the question of "how do you convince people to help you do good if they don't agree with your politics?"
Is it better to declare your politics and lose the donations that would allow you to do good?
Or is it better to keep your politics private, accept donations from all comers, and use those resources to make the world a better place?
In my opinion, the best path (and the one Mr. Beast appears to be following) is a middle ground. Don't declare your politics, accept donations, but if a donor has an agenda that conflicts with your politics or morals (like publicizing the donation to whitewash their reputation), reject them on a case by case basis. This lays out your support or opposition in specific instances rather than aligning your actions to the whims of a political party, and thus risk being aligned with the views of extremists within that party.
most Republicans are not pro-genocide, rather, extremists within their party are
There is no moderate wing of a party which caucuses with people who proffer genocide as a policy position.
10 people having dinner with 1 nazi is 11 nazis and a party that has members pushing genocide is a genocidal party.
Is it better to declare your politics and lose the donations that would allow you to do good?
Legitimizing genocide as a "political belief" by refusing to call out, "We should do a genocide!" as bad is itself doing a bad.
Again, you're not acknowledging the reality of the non-profit world or donor behavior. You also conflate my examples with the most hyperbolic policy as a defense of ideological purity on party lines, when in my comment I precisely draw out that policy specifics should and can be challenged on a case by case basis.
In other words, you're avoiding the context of the argument and repeating the old "if one nazi enters a bar, it's a nazi bar" trope, which simply doesn't apply in this scenario.
For instance, I am Democrat with $500k to donate. I am not a communist. If you were a white male conservative, running a charity to help the homeless, would you turn down my donation because of my possible communist ties? There are certainly Democrats that are communists, and many of them hold extreme views that would curtail the rights that you currently enjoy. Does accepting my donation make your charity a communist supporting organization? Is it worth losing out on the chance to do $500k worth of good to tell me to fuck off because you don't like my politics? Is it worth kicking out all of your Democratic donors to make a point?
No. It's an absurd conflagration of hyperbole, ideology and over-reaction to extreme views that the donor could possibly accept. There's no conversation as to whether the donor actually holds the views you oppose - you simply assume they do because they hold a party identification that conflates politics with regional and culture, and judge them on it without attempting to understand their actual political views or taking into account the positive impact you can make if you find common ground.
And assumption is the path to failure in any endeavor.
The only reality I need to acknowledge is that genocide is bad.
One party is currently enacting genocide and should be made to feel bad about that.
You can feel however you want about propping up the Non-Profit Industrial complex with money sourced from puppy kickers. Your "pragmatism" doesn't make genocide ok, nor does it render a refusal to call it out as anything but harmful moral cowardice.
Harmful.
Refusing to shun evil does real world harm.
Legitimizing evil as not evil because "evil money spends" bolsters evil.
Reducing opposing genocide to "ideological purity" is flippant, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing it.
The fact that the only reality you acknowledge is one you choose puts you in the same bracket of comprehension of those you oppose. An inability to consider oppositional viewpoints is the hallmark of a fanatic.
The world is not made up of good and evil people. No matter how hard you search, you will never find someone who has done only good, or someone who has done only evil. The world is made up of people who do good and evil things. The hardest challenge in this world is encouraging people who do mostly evil things to start doing good things, mainly because the evil things that people do make them rich and powerful.
You can't do that if you're not willing to find common ground. Assuming someone is pro-genocide removes your capacity to find that common ground and work cooperatively. It isolates both of you, leaving neither the wiser and creates a net negative for both parties. On the other hand, working from a stance of knowledge, action, and proven fact rather than assumption allows not only the immediate benefits of cooperative action, but lays the groundwork for discussing and exploring the policies you don't agree on in further detail, and encourage the other participant to see your viewpoint.
You can't encourage people to do better if you won't have a conversation with them, and no conversation is going to be productive if you assume the other person is evil.
Finally, your insinuation that I find genocide "ok" is a repulsive misreading of my statement in a transparent attempt to justify your unwillingness to engage with the argument in a constructive manner. At no point did I justify not calling out genocide. You conflated Republicans with genocide, which is subject to wide debate even amongst the most liberal of circles. It's not moral cowardice to acknowledge this - it's an analysis of the state of the Republican party.
In conclusion, it's not a charity's job to make someone feel bad about themselves - a charity's job is to do good.
Given your language and dedication to calling people out for the most extreme positions of their party, it's clear you've chosen the former.
Why do you want to find common ground with people who are actively engaging in genocide?
There is certain ground you shouldn't want to be in common with.
Certain positions you just oppose.
You are carrying water for people who want good friends of mine executed and you should stop doing that.
You'll have to include whatever point you think you're making there too.
I'm not the one who made genocide the official party platform, nor am I someone who seems to think a person can vote for a party doing a genocide while remaining morally inculpable for doing so.
A party openly embraces fascism, throws anti-queer pro-insurrection planks in its official platform and you're back-and-forthing about if it's "ok" an 'I Like Ike' button was found among great uncle gerald's personal effects.
Why is that the side of the scale you feel needs weight?
For context, polling shows that around 50% of republicans support the Jan 6 insurrection in some way.
Now, I’m not an American, so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I do know that simply painting all the supporters of a party as fascist, when many of those supporters have deep concerns about that party’s direction of travel is not the way to get them to jump ship.
Sure, it makes you feel good about yourself, and let’s you stoke your righteous hatred, but it just paints those people as irredeemably evil, shuts down debate and makes it harder for them to switch.
he has made a serious effort towards philanthropic acts
Ehhhh. He engages in a mix of pity porn and charity-as-self-promotion/criticism shield. Never trust a wealthy person's donations when they have their name attached to them; there's always a reasonable chance that they came with strings. Doubly so when those donations are to charities they actively control.
I can appreciate that he's funnelled his money into things people actually need, instead of into grants so charities can buy supplies from tech companies he's invested in, but it's still PR, not philanthropy.
Self-interest is clearly a factor in his actions, but anyone who instills a sense of community commitment and betterment in their followers is a better influence on children than those who use racism, misogyny and bigotry to advance their careers. In a world full of fallen heroes, where where we see villains succeed every day, having a younger generation see a powerful man turn his popularity towards good work is something that should be celebrated and encouraged.
Perhaps, with enough positive influence and wisdom, he'll begin moving from doing charity stunts to addressing the systemic flaws that have led to the suffering he seeks to alleviate, but I believe he should be applauded for what he's done thus far, regardless of how much self-interest is intertwined with his charity. He shows the potential to become a leader for real positive change in the upcoming generation if he continues on his current trajectory.
“Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it.” — Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” Walden
Genuinely I need a better explanation of this. Philanthropy as PR just means that someone who only cares about clout is engaging in Philanthropy when they otherwise wouldn't.
Is there some controversy about the Cataract Patients I don't know about, beyond just calling it charity porn? As a theoretical, what are our chances of success if we were able to go back in time and intercept the benefactors of this stunt, and try to convince them "MrBeast doesn't actually care about your well being or your vision. He's just using you to promote his brand. You should turn down this surgery, because you're being exploited for clout"?
Frankly, I don't think they care. They got financial assistance with restoring their vision, something that otherwise would not have happened.
By that thinking Bill Gates has done nothing but harm, yet he has done leaps and bounds for health research. They're one of the few reasons malaria is even getting research money. He's probably a narcissistic ass, and I'm sure he's partially supporting the foundation for taxes/clout, but he's actually saved the lives of people. If they want to spend their millions and billions on helping people for clout, then go for it. It's better than whatever the fuck Musk is doing.
That's naive. Leaving the rich in a position to "save" the poor is nothing more than enabling a power fantasy for them. It leaves them with all of the power and control.
The last sentence feels a little “perfect being the enemy of the good.” Outside of wanting purity of intention, what is the issue here, if the result is people being helped?
None of this is ever going to change until regular people start voting for their own betterment, at least in America. There are more of us than them, but half of us are trapped in the idea that we're going to be millionaires someday. Or apathy.
Holy shit thanks for the link. That’s a very good write up explaining why we should be very wary of Meta’s intents. And the wiki page link was gold. Fuckers truly want to Embrace and Extinguish.
It seems so weird though. The fediverse is small. Extremely small. They are taking on Twitter. A million users on mastodon doesn’t matter when Twitter has 250 million.
I agree that fediverse is only a few million. But the fediverse is also highly populated with refugees from twitter and reddit at the moment, who just want another stable and popular social platform similar to what they’ve always used.
If anything, the fediverse will have people with stronger opinions: either they’re willing to change social media because of a couple bad changes (and aren’t too attached to the fediverse), or they’re hardcore fediverse fans who are less likely to move to threads than your average twitter user.
If we assume it to be a 50% split, then meta has a chance at stealing half the fediverse by promising a larger user base, thus more content, but on the false premise that Threads will be backwards compatible with the fediverse forever.
If their reaction is this strong even though fediverse is this small, it means we have something incredible and should fight for it and prevent coporations from gaining ANY influence over it. I doubt we will get any more chances if we blow this one.
I remember that. So the question begs how does the current federated ecosystem stay away from that? Never trust any company if they say they want to work together?
I'd highly recommend you start with a game engine like Godot. Very few studios, let alone individuals, code games from the ground up. Besides having lots of functions and libraries specifically designed to do the math required for games, these engines will have lots of tools that will be useful for performing all kinds of game-related work.
If you're looking for a true challenge and really hate yourself, and you really want to go from scratch, you could write your own engine in C or C++. Again, this is a Bad Idea™.
I'm on my language journey, and I've made stuff in Python, and I've also got some work in javascript and html. Eventually I'd like to learn C# as my main, working language so that I can make efficient windows apps and maybe hopefully create a game in Unity.
But if Godot is strong and it takes (practically) python, maybe I'll give that a go.
Honestly the biggest issue you're gonna run into when swapping into C# (or Java) is how truly object oriented they are.
Yes python has objects but it's not the same.
Personally I'd recommend starting with pure Java first and doing the basics like Pong, pinball, whack-a-mole before migrating fully into C# then try to add Unity.
Java is a lot easier to compile and you'll get to skip all the annoying C based compiler problems you'll get with C#
That's a good question that I find a lot of newer programs ask. The short answer is yes because the Java runtime environment abstracts out all of the platform specific things you'll have to be aware of in C# to some extent. Long answer is you can probably figure it out with some extra struggle that's going to be C# specific.
I fully understand that Java is not supported in Unity and that you will probably not use Java once you figure that out however, Java is still useful as a learning tool. I think that people focus on specific language too much (ie c# vs java) when in reality they are 99% the same. I think it's more important to learn the data structure and logic behind object oriented programming over the specific nuances of a language. When to use an if/else vs a switch. When to for vs foreach. Abstract classes vs interfaces. These things are all the same amongst all object oriented languages and are the real things you should be focused on. Once you figure out how to do it on one language it's a 30 second Google to look up the key words for whatever language you want to swap to.
So in summary use Java for it's ease of compiling to learn (and there's a lot of good java tutorials online for this) then be amazed when you swap to C# and how much worse the compiler is lol.
My main desire towards C# is that i'm 100% a microsoft guy. I've always used Windows OS. I've tinkered with MacOS and Linux but I just, I cut my teeth from when I was a child to well in adulthood with Microsoft and it just feels like a natural fit for me. So I'd like to have as my main language be the #1 supported language by Microsoft because I want to make Microsoft applications. I wouldn't necessarily call it a fanboy thing, it's just a comfort thing. I know my way around the OS like riding a bicycle
Godot is small. I would've loved to have it in high school because I would've dumped it on a flashdrive and built games on whatever computer I had access to. Even on flashdrives from the early 2000s. You will feel weird installing it... because when you download it it's just a .exe and it just... runs. No "let's check for updates" no "let's create an account" no "hey can you answer this survey?" It just, goes from the moment you double click.
Godot is entirely open source. Which sounds like a meh reason if you're not an EFF warrior but is SERIOUSLY useful if you want to do weird stuff with a game engine. You gotta PAY if you wanna edit source code to Unity. On the other hand, you can just freely edit Godot. If you want to create a brand new tool within Godot's interface, the hoops you jump through are trivial. Hell, Godot's editor is actually a game built within Godot they're literally teaching you how to edit the editor as you're making games. Meaning if you wanna veer into the avant guard weird ass shit as a hobby. Godot is the better option.
The GDscript might sound like a detriment, but it really does trivialize a lot of game engine specific concepts and tasks. Meaning that once you start getting used to GDscript... you no longer have to worry about a lot of things because the language takes care of it for you.
Unity though, has a larger base. So importing assets are trivial, porting to consoles like the switch are vastly easier (so I've heard). If you're planning on going big... Unity will probably make your final steps easier.
Godot is a viable contender for sure. There have been a number of relatively popular and good games recently using Godot recently, like Dome Keeper, Brotato, Cassette Beasts, and Ex Zodiac, just off the top of my head.
Godot is entirely open source. Which sounds like a meh reason if you're not an EFF warrior but is SERIOUSLY useful if you want to do weird stuff with a game engine. You gotta PAY if you wanna edit source code to Unity
As someone who went from Unity to Godot, the contrast between "I have a small problem in Unity and so now I have to go on some website to ask them to please implement some feature/fix alongside thousands of other posters" and "I have a small problem in Godot, so let me open up the source code and change a single function to work the way I want/need it to" is like night and day.
You don't need to change things about your engine often, but it's really nice to be able to when you do.
Godot and Unity are pretty comparable in my opinion. Unity is a bit more mature and a lot more popular, but Godot is my preferred engine because it is fully open source and has a node-tree/server based system that resonates with me. If you have experience with Python, then learning GDScript will be a breeze for you. Godot also supports C# from what I understand (and can even be used with other languages through something called GDExtension) but I don't have any experience with that stuff so I can't really say if it's good or not.
If you're looking for a job you will likely have an easier time with at least some Unity experience under your belt (because it's extremely common and popular with small and mid-sized studios still), but Godot jobs are becoming more common and Godot experience is both increasingly valuable and also somewhat easily transferable over to Unity, should you need to.
Also you have to realise that when it says "The Godot Engine is a free, all-in-one, cross-platform game engine that makes it easy for you to create 2D and 3D games", it exaggerates slightly (it's not "easy", it's "easier").
This is the answer IMO. Godot is lightweight, easy to use, and free with fully open sourced communities. Check out GDQuest for tutorials. The best part is that Godot uses a programming language called GDscript which is based on Python. I've learned so much about programming best practices using Godot that it translates to my day job now when I need to use python. I cannot recommend it enough as a hobbyist.
As an additional point, Godot 4 just released and it is really giving Unity a run for it's money with features and capabilities.
Seeing boing boing articles in my Twitter feed was one of the reasons I started using it years ago. When junk started filtering in, that’s when I stopped using it. When musk started messing with politics and using Twitter to push his views, that’s when I nuked it.
This concept is also why I’m so hopeful for federated software. The federated model means that there’s no single instance that holds all the power. Many of these instances are run by admins of their own kindness and initiative. And at worst, if any instance were to start being “enshittified,” people could easily move to another instance and continue participating in the greater network.
Between all of what we’ve seen unfold in the last few months, and even weeks, on Twitter and Reddit, it’s safe to say that “enshittification” could be reaching critical mass. That’s why I came here, after all, and I’m looking forward to seeing this community simply persist here on the web.
Do you think the ultra rich will pay up? Also the government is the US is quite corrupt, this money won’t fix anything. Fist fix corruption, then try to help the poor.
Why do these have to happen serially? “Fix corruption” could take decades and honestly will probably never be fixed. “Tax the mega-rich” takes less than 4 years.
I am an Android user but this comment should be taken very lightly. As this is not the cause the truth is that Apple is at fault here for still using SMS as the default messaging protocol. However, with that being said, SMS breaks messages on iPhone and the devices have been geared towards iPhone users in away that makes it seem like Android is the issue with image quality and texting. The marketing is excellent on Apple’s end towards the competition and it is working.
However, that doesn’t mean iPhone isn’t the problem. I have a sibling who got bullied for having an iPhone. Apple’s answer to these problems is just, “get an iPhone.” This is equivalent to, “can’t figure it out? Just Google it.” The problem with this mentality is it gives more power to monopolizing platforms. Apple is a growing giant and if they had their way you would just have an iPhone and if Apple has expressed anything in the past 8 years it’s that they aren’t exactly the innovators with mobile devices anymore. To me the problem is on an iPhone nothing would change.
A little irrelevant rant but my point is that the average iPhone consumer has been given a marketing ploy so it is a deal breaker because they think it is an issue and in all fairness it is one but only Google is trying to fix. Issue is that Google should have tried to fix it years ago. You can’t blame iPhone users for wanting to use other platforms to message you if your message is compressed heavily by Apple’s shitty and stupid fucking decision to keep using SMS to control the market. The care about user experience is overshadowed by the desire to use that as a means to make money off of a user that doesn’t understand messaging protocols. Fuck Apple.
Problem are the Android users as well that refuse to adopt messaging apps just as much.
Standard protocol on Android is SMS as well. RCS behaves differently from carrier to carrier and many Android phones still don’t support it by default.
Even if RCS worked perfectly fine, if Apple doesn’t want to use it, than RCS is just as worthless as iMessage, when it comes to cross-platform communication.
Keep using SMS? What are Apple’s other alternatives, exactly? RCS is still a mess, the only way it has e2ee is if you use Google’s messaging app, and there’s no way you will see Apple adopting Google’s standard without having a say in it, and rightfully so - Google locks tons of proprietary features out of their APIs - EXIF data for Photos, Categories in Gmail, etc.
I think this is actually more of a comment on Google’s lack of direction with messaging - how many different messaging apps have they sunset by now? Half dozen or so? Messaging has always been a cluster on Android. WhatsApp is supposedly e2ee, but they have backdoor bugs being patched on a nearly basis - ask Jeff Bezos how his dick pics got hacked.
I mean you can install Google messaging apps on iOS (not that I would want to use them…). But try that the other way around. Apples option to not using SMS would simply be to provide iMessage for Android. Problem solved. They would very likely become the main messaging platform by doing so. Currently the majority of the market is likely split between WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat.
But obviously they fear that this would hurt iPhone sales. At the same time this also leads to iMessage being irrelevant in the majority of markets where iPhone isn’t as dominating as in the US.
If anybody wants to judge me based on the brand of electronics I use, my favorite band or the brand of clothes I wear, I have no interest in interacting with them lol. This whole consumerist worship-culture is just toxic.
If they don’t want to text you because they care what your device is, they’re not friends you want to have.
(this goes both ways. Lots of apple hate in this thread but, wtf, just get on with life folks. if you give a shit what hardware I run, or think i care about your choices, we’re probably not going to be friends).
Seen this sentiment that green bubbles = bad a few times online but never it's never come up for me. I assume this is a teen - early adult specific issue where the idea is mostly to be part of the group
It’s been happening in high schools, to the point teens are bullied and pushed out of peer groups if they have Androids. It’s frankly disgusting that apple willingly creates this division to profit off teenagers bullying each other, and they don’t get called out for it enough.
But in the larger picture, it’s definitely going to be more common among the young, because iPhones themselves are ubiquitous among the younger. It’s something the tech space is slowly starting realize: Apple has almost total market dominance among the rising demographic, and this has led to increasing tech illiteracy due to the way Apple designs its software, and inability/refusal to learn anything else. That is a huge problem for the tech industry when the only thing they can do to find customers is dumb their software down to appeal to people that don’t know how to use anything other than iOS
Oh c’mon now, Apple and iOS apps have too good of a user experience? That’s the issue? You call it “dumbing down software”, I call it implementing user experience research and design.
If you think that the reason Apple makes the bubbles different colors is “to profit of teen bullying” then I think perhaps you might want to go back to reddit or Twitter.
Everyone 30 and under at my office prefers Macs, to the point of bringing in their own machines to do 90% of their work and falling back to the Windows laptops issued by IT for the remainder.
To be fair, as a work machine, I far prefer macs. And there’s a reason why Windows has been implementing steadily more and more MacOS features into their OS over time.
I’m a software developer. MacOS is my choice for corporate dev (cause Linux isn’t an option) because it’s Unix based and has a working command line. Windows causes so many problems around dependency installs and frameworks.
Windows is still on my home machines, but they’re edging closer to going linux too.
They could be accessing virtual workspaces using a company VPN client. Or perhaps logging into a Citrix Receiver Workspace. Could probably access a VDI environment as well. 2FA with a work cell etc
Lots of ways for personal devices to be used in the work setting. Would I recommend it or do it myself? Nah. But it can be done.
About that, yes. Not in-depth and not each day, obviously, but I have quite a sizable crowd I deal with on a regular basis. Comes from having a lot of former students I keep in touch with.
It’s still about 30% here in Germany. It is rising though. And I think this is because of “clever” marketing. The highschools here in Germany started forcing parents to buy Ipads for their children a couple of years ago. Children with low income parents get it from the city for free. Nominally it is, because it is “easier to maintain”, but I honestly really doubt this.
These schools are using iPads in place of computer labs. I’m old enough to have actually managed a computer lab, and I can tell you that a fleet of managed iPads is way easier to maintain than a computer lab.
nostupidquestions
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.