JubilantJaguar @ JubilantJaguar @lemmy.world

European. Contrarian liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. **I nev

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2 yr. ago

I'm not contradicting myself. You are not reading the question asked.

This particular alternative history is uninteresting because its premises mean you have to invent a whole parallel universe. In plain English: it could not have happened and would not have happened, for essentially economic reasons.

The interesting alternative histories are ones that turn on a single fortuitous event.

PS: I am saying that OP's question is boring because it is unanswerable. It just invites a hundred other questions. If you want to ask THOSE questions, then ask them.

Fair enough about literal religious nuts people of firmly held religious convictions. This side of the pond there are very few of those, fortunately. My basic point is that plenty of people who vote "wrong" (Trump, for example) would actually agree with you on most of your vision of the good society. The questions are mainly over how to get there. This IMO is the tragedy of democratic politics today, and specifically the USA. An almost absolute breakdown in communication.

This exactly where I am on all counts. Stick with it!

generally we all care about what is true and the future of life on this planet

But (to stay true to the spirit of debate I just defended) is this not itself a straw man? Do you think, say, religious conservatives would say that they don't "care about what is true and the future of life on this planet"?

To be clear, you join the echo chamber because you won't be judged there and also because you want to dissent from its party line?

Ignore all the well-meaning geeks here urging you to become a full-time programmer, go with either of the choices you suggest, and just follow the prompts. You'll find it's all incredibly easy and that you're worrying for nothing.

If you want to tweak things, then think about that later. Just get started.

This is from 20 years of experience. Personally I use nothing but the terminal and a web browser. But the reality is that you only need the latter in today's computing.

Electric ones mitigate many of these problems and are hugely more energy-efficient than car transport.

The downvote button. It's a hobby horse of mine. Slashdot got it right: if you're going to tell someone to shut up, there should be a small price to pay.

PS: to the inevitable downvoters. Let's be clear that you are not just saying "I disagree". You are helping to hide my comment; you're literally telling me to shut up. Would you do that in person, without so much as lifting a finger to justify yourself ? Of course you wouldn't. In person you would have manners. This is the problem I have with the downvote button. It incites people to behave like uncivilized infants.

Agreed on all counts.

The real mystery to me is what value the echo-chamber residents get out of it. Why would someone join a group of people they already agree with, just to be told that their opinions are correct, and to shout down any interloper who contradict them? How is that not a boring waste of time? Is it that most people are insecure in their views and need validation, perhaps? It's a phenomenon I still don't understand.

This is how I see it too. Freedom from the toxic ad-supported business model is a slow-burning superpower.

Yes, good parallel, didn't think of that. Perhaps there's just a limit on how much you can decentralize without things breaking down for either social or technical reasons.

Very interesting, thanks.

Atproto scales quadratically, [...] harms performance AP scales horizontally

Clearly true. But this suggests to me that ATProto might still work well with, say, 5 or 15 "PDS"s. That is still enough IMO to guarantee a high level of pluralism.

In a commercial market, let's say for telephony or cars or web browsers, we readily accept that there are only a handful of players. Indeed, there's generally an optimal number, high enough to guarantee competition but low enough that we can keep track of the brands and trust that they won't go out of business tomorrow.

And nothing is stopping at least one of those few brands from being a "good guy", akin to Mozilla's historic role in the web-browser market. It could be run by say, Wikimedia, for example. At least we would know that it would not disappear tomorrow, which is more than can be said for most Lemmy instances.

I agree that there should be enough space for both ATProto and AP to thrive.

Very useful, thanks.

As I see it, Bluesky is fundamentally different from Xitter and it is a major step in the right direction. It is short-sighted to reject it because of some technical imperfections.

The fundamental question IMO is whether there is enough mindshare (i.e. users and attention) to allow ATSocial (AKA partial federation) and ActivityPub (AKA total federation) to both be successful. I'm thinking there is. After all, the vast majority of people are still on ad-fuelled corporate social media, with all its internal contradictions.

The fact that this is assumed "unpopular" is itself an indictment of the particular subculture that frequents these communities. In plain English: I agree with you.

For what it's worth, I am one of those letters and it is somewhat irrelevant to my identity. My identity is the following: human being.

I consider the identity obsession of Gen Z to be mostly narcissistic self-regard. It reflects our society's rampant individualism, where kids have become a lifestyle choice and pampered like fragile consumer objects. I don't have any answers about how to fix any of this. Indeed I'm something of an individualist myself.

Be nice to people, but don't feel the need to indulge their whims if it feels unreasonable.

Sure, but the third hottest is June, not September, so if the seasons last (12/4=) 3 months then logically summer began 3 weeks ago.

Well okay but the name "Midsummer" does kind of make my point.

Sounds awful. Your situation is extreme (ah rural America!) but I won't deny there's something freeing about cars. These days I hate cars with a passion, and I've always lived in big European cities where they're completely unnecessary, but even I had a car when I was 20, and I loved it. But then a couple of years later I got rid of it, and that also felt like freedom and I loved that too... Anyway, just an anecdote. As for your situation, good luck, you'll find a way out of there.

PS off-topic: I've always found "good luck" to be a bit lacking for these contexts, in French there's the much better "bon courage", sadly untranslatable but much more appropriate in your case.

For pace, it's basically directly correlated with the movie's age.

I have no idea how today's young screen-addled audiences would even begin to approach the idea of watching basically any movie from the 1970s, let alone the 40s.