Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @kbin.social

Posts

26

Comments

275

Joined

2 yr. ago

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.". ― H.L. Mencken

Her constituents Josh and Aschleigh just heard "Blah blah blah Constitution blah blah blah brown people bad," and that was enough for them, so it served its purpose.

I think all references to Turkish foreign policy should include the phrase "this week," since next week it'll likely change. Again.

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right." ― H. L. Mencken

IMO, the fact that those people aren't here is the best part of the fediverse.

With all due respect, fuck that.

I block every bot I see. If I just wanted an endless stream of mindless "content," I'd be on Reddit.

I came to lemmy/kbin a few weeks ago to check things out, and have been here ever since.

While I'd say that it is absolutely the case that the ruling class must be eliminated before there can be meaningful change, since they're too far removed from common life (or sanity for that matter) to make any of the necessary concessions of their own volition, I think it's undeniably the case that a rational society cannot be built by people who believe that killing people is an acceptable approach to problems.

I think the only hope is that our descendants, when they rebuild civilization out of the rubble we leave behind, will do a better job of it - at the very least, that they'll know better than to let psychopaths gain power.

Rottcodd is a character in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels. He's the curator of The Hall of Bright Carvings - a sculpture gallery in a far distant corner of the castle that virtually no one ever visits - where he leads a simple and contented life. When he isn't working or loafing about, he spends time observing the distant life of the castle - or what he can see of it at least - through a single tiny window.

For better or worse, I relate...

Yes - of necessity and by design, there is and can be no central authority in the fediverse that can be meaningfully expected to promise to protect blithering morons from the consequences of their own actions.

Whether or not people face the fact that posting publicly things they want to keep private is bash-yourself-in-the-face stupid
and make the plainly obvious sound choice to simply not do it in the first place is entirely, as it should be, their concern and their responsibility.

I would assume that this is just the first in what will be a widespread effort among red states to do the same.

Simply because banning abortion is essentially guaranteed to lead to an increase in pregnancy-related deaths, and that's a statistic that undermines the conservative position.

And it's ALWAYS the case that when truth is contrary to conservative positions, the positions don't change to accommodate the truth - the truth is hidden to protect the positions.

There is no "we" that's empowered to do anything on the fediverse, and that's by design.

You, as an individual, are free to start or register with whatever instance(s) you want and start, engage with, subscribe to or block whatever communities you want. And all the other users here are exactly equally free to do any or all of those things.

It's safe to assume that over time, activity will tend to concentrate in a few specific communities, and that most notable topics will come to have a dominant community. I think, snd self-evidently many others also think, that that's something that should happen organically over time rather than being forcibly implemented by some authority. But more to the point, that's something that only can happen organically and over time, since nobody has the authority to do it any other way.

when that has been confirmed to not be the case

Quick epistemological clarification - nothing has been "confirmed" to be or not be the case.

It has been asserted by one of the actors that the action taken was not malicious or underhanded or whatever. In the simplest terms, in response to the accusation that they acted in a malicious way, one of the actors said the equivalent of "Did not!"

That might well be true. It might even be argued that it's likely true (though I would say that the combination of the backroom dealing with which it was done, the capricious way in which the decision was just presented to the community literally at the last second as a fait accompli, the opaque nature of the new instance and the arrogance and disdain displayed in the linked response all serve to undermine that likelihood). But the simple fact of the matter is that it's just an assertion, and the truth value of that assertion cannot be known for a certainty by anyone else, so it does not and cannot rise to the level necessary to serve as "confirmation" of anything.

What they did is and should be allowed, simply because nobody has or should have the authority to prohibit them from doing it.

But it should also be the case that by abandoning the original community, they lost all claim to it, so anyone else who wants to should be free to claim it. I wouldn't be surprised if that's already the case, and if not, it should be.

Mm... you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it's actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.

And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.

I don't think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic "content" with the hope that it'll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you're just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it'll be two, then three, then...

Well... yes and no.

I'm not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.

To belabor the analogy a bit more, it's not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.

That that literally can't happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead "content" one at a time - doesn't make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.

I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."

It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.

And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.

Do posts from one website only appear on the other if the community already has subscribers?

Yes.

When instances federate, they don't just automatically share content. They only share the content from a specific community/magazine if somebody from the federated instance subscribes through that instance to the community/magazine on the host instance.

If I'm following it all correctly, what actually happens under the hood is that subscribing to a community/magazine on another instance triggers the creation of a new community/magazine on your home instance, which from then on will mirror the content on the original.

So in your example, the original is surveypolls@lemmy.world. Initially, it's not going to appear on kbin.social - there has to be interest in it first, as demonstrated by the fact that somebody from kbin.social subscribes to it.

At that point, for all intents and purposes a new magazine is actually created on kbin.social - surveypolls@lemmy.world@kbin.social. So you're not actually accessing surveypolls@lemmy.world through kbin.social - you're accessing a mirror that's hosted on kbin.social. And the trigger for creating that is someone on kbin.social subscribing to surveypolls@lemmy.world.

At least I'm pretty sure that's how it works - note that I'm just some guy who likes to figure out how things work and not a dev.

I love the entire game, but there's one part that stands out for me, and that I always look forward to - the flight through the asteroid field with Juni when you first arrive in Kyushu. It's just this beautiful, tranquil interlude in the middle of all the danger and drama.

To me, the thing with the game is that it's just quality all the way through - the story, the characters, the mechanics, the graphics, the controls, the gameplay, the combat, everything.

There are so many places to go and things to see snd so many different ways to approach it. And it's all balanced so well - there's a constant calculation of risk vs. reward.

The only thing I don't really like about it is that there are so many mooks. It gets tedious when I'm trying to explore or trade and some scrubby ships pick a fight that they're absolutely guaranteed to lose. There's no risk and no challenge - all it is is an interruption. But I can put up with it - all the rest of the game makes it worth it.