But you can't ask an addict to start resisting their addiction, if the have nothing else.
They need something to resist it for. If they don't have that, their next high IS the most important thing to them.
And this whole thing where we keep saying "the addiction will win every time" promotes a defeatist attidue towards helping these people that has lead to policies that are literally killing them.
The addiction doesn't win every time. If that were true there wouldn't be any saving any addict ever.
Addicts can and will turn anything and everything of value given to them into money, that can then buy them another high, but that CANNOT be used as an excuse to refuse to help them.
Institutionlize, maybe, but that's a healthcare problem, not a homeless problem. And that kind of help should be available to a person before they are ever put out of a home.
Kicking an addiction is hard. Kicking an addiction without your basic needs met, is even harder.
People like to think that the homeless should solve the reasons for their homelessness first, and only then be helped. Because otherwise the help will just go to waste.
In reality, it should happen the other way around. The help makes it more likely they'll solve their problems at all, and hence actually leads to less homelessness overrall.
The only "ad" steam pushes into your face is the startup pop-up, which can be disabled in settings.
Without that, you can use whatever you like to launch your games. Valve doesn't care. You can have a desktop shortcut for every one of your games and never see steam open, or use something like PlayNite to aggregate the games from several services into one library.
But if any game you care about keeping is on GOG, it's a good idea to buy a copy on there, and then squirreling away the offline installer files/extracted game files somewhere safe.
The police are seldom allowed to be in possession of CSAM, except for in terms of grabbing the hardware which contains it in an arrest. The database used in modern detection tools is maintained by NCMEC which has special permission to do so.
And of course there are risks, but it's just digital data. Unless you are creating more, you're not actively harming anyone. And law enforcement absolutely needs that data to take some of the most obvious steps to prevent it being spread further.
Obviously, someone has access, but to get to the actual media files wouldn't be simple. What typically happens, is that anyone wanting to detect CSAM, is given a hashed version of the database. They can then scan their systems for CSAM by hashing any media they are hosting, and seeing whether there are any matches.
Whenever possible, people aren't handling the actual media. But for any detection to be possible to begin with, the database of the actual media does need to be maintained somewhere.
AI is a touchier subject, as you can't train a model to recognize CSAM not already in the database using hashes, so in those cases you have to work with actual real media. This is only recently becoming a thing.
It also leaves open the possibility for false positives. An oft cited example is parents taking pictures of their own children for innocent reasons, or doctors and parents handling images for valid medical reasons. In a system that flagged such content, it would mean someone else would be seeing that "private" content because it was flagged.
There are laws around it. Law enforcement doesn't just delete any digital CSAM they seize.
Known CSAM is archived and analyzed rather than destroyed, and used to recognize additional instances of the same files in the wild. Wherever file scanning is possible.
Institutions and corporation can request licenses to access the database, or just the metadata that allows software to tell if a given file might be a copy of known CSAM.
This is the first time an attempt is being made at using the database to create software able to recognize CSAM that isn't already known.
I'm personally quite sceptical of the merit. It may well be useful for scanning the public internet, but I'm guessing the plan is to push for it to be somehow implemented for private communication, no matter how badly that compromises the integrity of encryption.
ActivityPub unfortunately does need some work, and there's drama about properly following the protocol and not extending it with non-standard stuff that then breaks things when federating with stuff outside the given application.
I'm optimistic, but I'm also making sure not to put too much of a stake in it, as it may eventually become an inferior system when compared to some future hypothetical standard.
And other standards like diaspora and ATProto, are around, and seeing use.
What? It's a great umbrella term term for exactly this type of federated social media. Lemmy is just one application, and currently the biggest, but it already federates quite swimmingly with mbin and pixelfed.
You do realize Bluesky also tacks on .bsky.social? (Though with a dot instead of a second @)
And even without other instances, ATProto already allows people to sign up using domains they own.
The closest you can get to using Lost_My_Mind as you Bluesky handle is by aquiring a domain like lost_my_mind.com. And that still wouldn't prevent someone else from signing up using lost_my_mind.net.
And that's before pointing out that Impersonation and mistaken identities isn't a solved problem on twitter, either.
Bluesky is succeeding because its a smooth and familiar experience that obfuscates away the complexity of how it works.
Absolutely nothing about how the ActivityPub network works conceptually prevents it from being an equally smooth experience, given the work were put in.
Your first six paragraphs hit the mark, but the following rant about the "username univerasility problem" ain't it.
But there are web UIs you can run that allow you to run a lemmy instance more like a forum, and that could of course be federated with other fediverse instances, including other forum instances.
But not existing forum systems. That's something they have to implement, not lemmy.
Behind the scenes Lemmy speaks a protocol called ActivityPub. It can't just talk to any other similar arbitrary service if it doesn't also support the protocol.
Edit: Apparently the forum systems you mention do/will indeed support ActivityPub. There would certainly be potential for interpretability with the threadiverse, then.
But they don't need to be. They're essentially just indexers.
If two relays index all the same content, then any services using either will be "interconnected" in the sense that any users can see each other and interact with each other.
Each relay host can choose what parts of the network they want to index, and as far as I can tell, any services could use multiple relays if they like.
ATproto has some interesting advantages, and eventually the idea is for anyone to be able to host any microservice component of the network, including relays other than the one run by Bluesky.
The relays don't need to be centralized. They are indexers that provide functionality to others parts of the ATproto network.
The problem is that there isn't really any incentive to do so... Any additional instances or new apps running ATproto can just rely on the one big indexer provided by Bluesky, instead of running each microservice component themselves.
API debacle. Relay went paid.
Added some features I was missing in lemmy mobile to Thunder, and been happy since.
One friend, my sister, and dad, also got lemmy accounts when I told them about it.