AgreeableLandscape

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

“It’s time we grow up,” says former moderator of jailbait subreddit.

See this is another thing, how is Reddit management not in prison and on the sex offenders list? They willfully and knowingly distributed child pornography for YEARS. And it's not like they're rich enough or have enough high up connections to get out of it. What the fuck?

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

Canada: VERY common and considered standard practice, we like to make fun of the Americans for being obsessed with their flag but overall we're just as bad. It's also flown by Nazis as often as the American flag is.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

Flying Canadian flags is generally a more subtle sign that someone is like that. Usually the people that do are polite and not overtly assholish, just avoid the following topics with them:

1. Immigration
2. Indigenous rights
3. China
4. Russia
5. India (Canada has a huge Indian diaspora and sadly they experience quite a bit of hate and racism)
6. Islam (non-Christian religions in general)

They will still be super polite while being racist. Canadians seem to have mastered that.

Interesting thing is that racist Canadians are often still fairly LGBTQ+ supportive, those are generally seen as separate issues in Canada, which is better than nothing I guess? The way that is counteracted like in your example is if they fly the Canadian flag with another country's flag, immigrant families do that a lot and they are usually genuinely pleasent and nice people.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

To be fair, the downvotes might also be part of the joke. That comment was the most downvoted in Reddit history before EA came along.

And it's not like there's karma on Lemmy so I don't care lol

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

pOpCoRn tAsTeS gOoD

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I was going to opine about how "this is the problem with centralized cloud-based providers, at the drop of a hat they can be acquired and suddenly your content is owned by a company you wanted nothing to do with," but then again, you chose Google as your domain provider. I think that's your fault.

I'd usually say the solution is to self host whenever a cloud provider has a shitshow like this, but in this case that's not viable unless you want to go all the way up to becoming your own domain registrar or making your own top-level domain. Symptom that maybe the domain name system is broken, maybe we should campaign for it to be opened up for anyone to register their own domain, or least have a reputable co-op or community-owned domain registrar (maybe the open source/fediverse community can pool our funds to set up a nonprofit publicly owned registrar).

Remember that the fediverse entirely runs on the domain name system as the domain of the instance is used to identify it, and all the security measures relating to inter-instance data sharing is relying on the security of the domains.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

If the government really wants to come for you there's little you can do, but I'm more concerned about your average basement troll who may have gotten really pissed off during one of the debates/flamewars that have been popping up and is looking to get even. We've already had to ban some... interesting characters... and I just don't want to give them any easy targets from this site.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

Unfortunately an account transfer feature is pretty complicated to develop so it might still be a while. Devs need to make sure it doesn't cause issues with federation when content changes home instances and domains, and transferring live user content over while retaining points, interactions by other accounts, and while having the same timestamp but now being hosted on a different instance, while ensuring there is only one canonical location/URL of the content on the fediverse, is not easy.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

On more mature projects this is indeed the case. Lemmy only started federating like two years ago and is very much still in beta. We'll get there eventually and it is already in the dev queue, but keep in mind that there are only two people working on the entire codebase full time. Don't expect a Reddit level of fit and finish, but at the same time you also need not expect a Reddit level of corporate, shareholder-over-user antics.

Finally, since Lemmy is open source, if you really need a feature right now, you can always submit a pull request!

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

I mean the easy solution is to have your instance enable registration screening. That's what it's for. It takes less than a minute to answer most instances' registration yet (based on experience) that simple barrier is enough to stop most trolls.

Until a Lemmy instance gets large enough to actually hire full time admins to catch and remove abusive content ASAP, I don't see instances reasonably being able to go without registration screening because the trolls will seize on that opportunity every time.

Admins of larger instances see it all the time:

1. New instance pops up, yay! And most instances automatically federate with new instances!
2. It doesn't have registration screening, this is quickly discovered by trolls and adbots and the instance gets filled with rule breaking content.
3. Large instances start blocking it because by federating with an instance that is being used in this way degrades the quality of your own instance and adds a ton of workload to your (unpaid) mods and admins.
4. The instance eventually enables registration screening, and other instances start unblocking it.

It's happened with plenty of instances before and will probably keep happening as long as spam and trolling exist.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

Plus kilts in Scotland, and depending on your definition of what a dress is a lot of the traditionally male clothes in Asia and the Middle East (namely loose fitting, flowing clothes) can be considered "Dresses."

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

"But dresses are naturally female!" (I've legit heard this exact statement multiple times.)

Naturally? They're naturally female huh? How? Did our ancestors the Neanderthals and Australopithecus africanus wear dresses? Are genetic female babies born in dresses? Do you see female non-human animals wearing them?

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

The number of trolls and spammers who will actually spend the time and effort to write a script to pull the registration questions, feed it into ChatGPT, and then feed its output back (which costs money to do at any significant scale, you're only allowed like 10 responses a day for free, and 7 of them will likely be either "something went wrong, please try again" or generally not make enough sense to fool the admins based on my admittedly limited experience with trying it) is probably less than 1%. At which point it's probably easier to just do it the old fashioned way and make stuff up on the screening questions yourself. If they aren't even willing to do that most of the time I doubt ChatGPT will change anything, trolls tend not to put tons of effort into their trolling. This is less like a castle wall and more like a picket fence, adding just enough resistance and requiring just enough extra effort to evade is enough to keep out the majority of the riffraff, we can deal with the rest much easier.

In fact, having screening makes it much easier for us to more effectively deal with the more determined trolls, by not giving them a place to hide among the casual trolls.

With all due respect, if it was pointless theatre we wouldn't be doing it. Reviewing registration applications is also a lot of work, and we only do it because it's less work overall than dealing with floods of abuse posts (also more pleasant to review applications vs having to look at the various unpleasant things trolls cook up in order to remove them). I don't need to theorize these things, the evidence is there: We see a significant reduction of abuse accounts with registration enabled to almost none, even if the admins don't pay super close attention to the actual responses (just needing to write something in the first place discourages most casual trolls), and again, the only reason open instances are being blocked is not because we're offended that it's an open instance with no screening (we don't even preemptively check if an instance has screening or not), but because we've actually noticed large amounts of abuse posts from an instance. I think the fact that the open instances currently have the most issues with abuse speaks for itself, something one can independently verify by looking at the new posts and comments for various instances.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

I think a major issue is instances that do not have registration screening getting blocked. Which can reasonably be very frustration when you suddenly find yourself unable to access most of the larger instances, when the entire point of federation is to interact with other instances.

Generally instances are unblocked when they no longer have an issue with spam and abuse, and this is usually achieved by having registration screening. At which point they will be unblocked by other instances.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago

Ah. There it is, that's why they don't write good fiction. It's not a fiction project, it's a propaganda project.

AgreeableLandscape, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Ironically, they've just backed themselves further into that hole because the biggest piece of worldbuilding this movie establishes is that now the Transformers can NEVER return to their home planet, because they made it very clear that the Transwarp Key was their last hope and they destroyed it to save Earth. It's like the Brian death thing Family Guy tried to pull (I swear, now that I said this, if a future Transformers movie is about them subverting this and going "just kidding, we had another way to get home the whole time" just like what Family Guy did, I'm coming back to this comment and saying I called it.)

They could have released one movie about the Transformers leaving Earth with the help of a group of humans, heartfelt farewells and all; then one about the journey back to Cybertron and all the space shenanigans they get into; and last but not least one about them finally coming home, and maybe their planet is unrecognizable from when they left, maybe the war that caused them to leave is long over and everyone has forgotten about them, or maybe the war left their planet in shambles and they are blamed for abandoning them, maybe they returned just in time for a last stand to defend their planet and get to help defeat the villains and win the war in one huge, gratuitously cinematic battle! There's so much conflict and untold stories if they would simply break the status quo of their series. And those are ideas I came up with for a comment on Lemmy after having watched one single Transformers movie, surely a team of professional writers with access to their entire internal lore document can come up with way cooler plots (you do have a central lore document for your long running billion dollar series, right?)

You have a premise about super advanced alien robots. You should be taking advantage of that. When I want to watch an alien robot movie, I want to see them do actual alien robot things, not be essentially giant, super strong humans on Earth with lasers, complete with acting exactly like humans and using human pop culture references. Take advantage of your premise and explore beyond the status quo! That's like the first rule of worldbuilding and making a series in fiction!