Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SJ
Posts
2
Comments
162
Joined
2 yr. ago

Can we call it Ex?

Jump
  • The evidence really doesn't bear that out. Twitter has lost some people, but there are plenty of people still on there. What I keep on seeing is people saying that they're leaving twitter, they might even deactivate their accounts, and then they're back on it a little while later. It reminds me of when kathy griffin used her dead mothers account to bypass her twitter ban. They're just addicted.

    Incidentally, griffin created a mastodon account and hasn't posted in months, and I strongly suspect her (locked down) Twitter is active.

  • That's a good point too.

    Honestly, the anti-establishment left and the anti-establishment right have a lot they could agree on if there wasn't so much media pointing out the few things they disagree on (or inventing things to disagree on)

  • Can we call it Ex?

    Jump
  • There is, but they'd have to actually put the twitter crack pipe down for that, and a lot of them talk a good game right up until it's time to actually do it.

    I would be better for the world if they did.

  • I'm actually happy to see the reduction in echo chambers for myself because it does 2 things:

    1. It reminds me that the people I think I disagree with have good points I need to remember, and
    2. It reminds me that the people I think I agree with have terrible points I need to remember.

    For someone who thinks for themselves, seeing extremism in some cases actually makes you less extreme because you see it and realize you don't agree with it at all.

  • Agree with everything you're talking about.

    The world changes, your personal life changes, and people's views change with it.

    When I first started on reddit, I was a virgin who had just started his first professional job making 20 bucks an hour after college. Today I'm married with kids, and I've advanced substantially in my career. Many of those things are things I thought would never happen or that I thought I'd never want to happen. Movements I supported won total victory and I got to see what that looked like, other movements I opposed grew and I realized they weren't totally wrong, lots happened.

    Just in 18 years, that's an entire lifetime.

  • I was going to say this, I'm glad you did instead.

    People's opinions have changed a lot in the last 25 years. In the late 90s we got to see the last gasps of the real power of the religious right, in the early 2000s we got to see the dominance of the neoconservative right, in the late 2000s we got to see a massive shift leftward as a backlash against the religious right and the neoconservative right, then from the more chill hippie left wing we got to see the rise of the authoritarian woke left, and right now we're starting to see a backlash against that. It isn't always from different people, it's often from the same people changing their minds.

    For quite some time I've thought of it like steering a car. If you steer hard to the left you're going to hit the ditch, if you steer hard to the right you're going to hit the ditch. Really what you need is to course correct at times just stay on the road. Sometimes you need to turn the wheel pretty hard in one direction or the other, other times you want to just nudge the wheel, and get other times you don't really want to move it at all.

    Some regions voted hard for Clinton, then voted for bush, then voted for obama, then voted for trump, then voted for Biden. Such a thing might look completely inconsistent, but politics is a dynamic system where circumstances change, certain movements win and then we get to see the consequences of those movements, new movements form, and maybe old movements collapse.

    This isn't a new idea. Hegelian dielectic proposes that in politics, a dominant idea (thesis) eventually leads to its opposite or challenge (antithesis), resulting in a resolution or synthesis of the conflicting ideas. Such an idea predates Marx, so it's been around for quite some time.

    There are quite a number of examples historically of people completely changing their mind on a topic. The father of Canadian universal healthcare, Tommy Douglas, was a powerful advocate of eugenics when he was younger, and as he got older he realized that he made a terrible mistake and changed his mind. Solzhenitsyn apparently early on in his life believed in the Soviet project but once he learned of the gulags had his views fundamentally change. A lot of people like to pretend that national socialism died with Adolf Hitler in that bunker, but a lot of people believed in and supported national socialism in Germany, and those people continue to exist after world war 2, but I think it's safe to say that for the most part they learned the error of their ways. I'm sure there are lots of people who supported Putin internationally in the 90s who wish they could go back and change that decision now.

    To me it's one of the deepest dangers of the purity spiraling we are seeing from the left right now. The fact of the matter is, as you kick more people out of the left, it becomes a less and less viable movement. As the left acts as if people become irredeemable the moment that their opinions are wrong, it becomes something that will inevitably fail.

    I feel like the modern left would take a look at post war germany, and post to japan, and would just immediately start implementing genocide. "Nope, they were Nazis they are irredeemable they need to be pushed into the sea". The most amazing thing about the end of world war II is the incredible wisdom with which the world powers helped to rehabilitate Germany and Japan into some of the most powerful nations in the world today, but for the most part lacking in the qualities that set them off to war and atrocity way back when.

  • Thanks to Big tech censorship, there are lots of people who are more anti-establishment right on the fediverse. Lots of fairly large instances. Some of them are real nasty pieces of work filled with folks dropping n bombs and swastikas, some of them are filled with some of the sweetest religious right folks you ever met in your life.

    I think one of the biggest differences is that you don't have the Jerry Springer algorithm trying to match up a bunch of black people with a bunch of KKK members. Most far right instances don't defederate anyone, but many of the far left instances defederate the moment anyone looks at them funny so despite sharing a platform, typically there just isn't that much engagement between the two groups. In the middle of there are instances that are more than happy to federate with both as long as they aren't too big of jerks.

  • That's just wrong. Totally ahistorical.

    There's a good chunk of the rest of the fediverse that's more right leaning, for the most part they've actively avoided Lemmy because Lemmy was actively hostile to any kind of wrongthink. It was one of the things that really limited it's growth because you could only be on Lemmy if you believed exactly what you were told to believe.

    I stayed on the threadiverse through lotide despite it all, and despite having some pretty limited takes, I quickly found myself banned or defederated from many instances. To this day I don't participate on those instances because I'm not welcome. Wolfballs and exploding-heads came to exist, but were similarly rejected and even now the very first thing to be done by many instances is defederating from those instances.

    I've heard through the grapevine that some of the people who run fediverse instances are considering starting Lemmy instances now that the platform is growing.

  • Besides lacking spaces and some rooms not letting you join, (and the lack of admin tools) the only big issue I find is that you plan to run something other than Element as the interface, you'll have to test it because many matrix clients expect synapse or dendrite and won't start with anything else. I've run fluffychat, I think kchat(whatever the kde matrix client is), and nheko, they all worked well with conduit.

  • My experience has been that dendrite and synapse totally maxxed out the server I ran it on (100% cpu utilization for days on end), so I run conduit.

    The one downside of conduit is it's a bit behind, so it doesn't support all the latest rooms, and it doesn't support spaces yet, and it has minimal admin tools so you'll want to create all the accounts you need then close logins because bad actors will try to create logins and get you banned from half of Matrix. That said, I can tell you that even on my piddly little server (an Intel Atom D2550), it runs Conduit, ejabberd, nostr, and lotide, and the server basically sits idle. I can't speak of bridges, unfortunately, because I don't really use them.

    This is the guide I used, it worked well to set things up:

    https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/blob/next/DEPLOY.md

  • A lot of people are pure addicts.

    They've been threatening to leave for 8 months. They disable their account, then a week later they're right back on it.

    Over the years it's actually pretty sad, a lot of really talented people got hooked and stopped making good content because they're too busy tilting at windmills on Twitter.