Squabbles, another recent reddit alternative, seems to be taking the doomed "free speech" path
luciferofastora @ luciferofastora @discuss.online Posts 0Comments 39Joined 2 yr. ago
I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn't make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.
But I'm still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.
Absolute big brain move
You mean the magazine would pay people to write a story people would want to read... only to make money for the magazine? Like, they're doing it for profit, and not out of the goodness of their hearts? Next you're going to tell me my grocer is only selling me food to generate revenue.
There's a difference between "just marketing" and "buy this stuff, but also, turns out Lebanon has quite some distance to go in terms of human rights in general and gender equality in particular". Companies can't have morals, because they're not a natural person, but the humans working for them can, and it's not unthinkable for this story to be both: An expression of moral frustration on part of the journalist that also happens to be profitable for their employer.
Wolfman dies, kills some monkeys, does some rope stuff, performs eye surgery and kills himself (depending on what ending you go for).
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/720/
Image for hotlinking https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/recipes.png
If we divide, we'll be conquered. That wisom is at least two thousand years old by now. Better to unite and defy.
Yeah, that's the Paradox of Tolerance. Short version: If you're being intolerant, why should I tolerate you?
To paraphrase Karl Popper: A society that values tolerance to the point of indulging those that oppose it will effectively be defenseless against that hate. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to reason with them first, but we need to reserve the right to shut them up, by force if we have to.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Karl Popper, 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies
Suppose I have a javascript file for a node server's backend access named db.js
Suppose I write tests for those functions and name the test script file db.test.js
Suppose I tar and gzip that file (bear with me), now named db.test.js.tar.gz
Suppose I sign that file with PGP, now named db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp
Now suppose I want to hide that signed compressed tarball of a javascript tests file for my db functions, and to do so, I name it .db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp
Now I have a file that looks like it consists of nothing but extensions. I'm sure you could push it even further though, if you tried.
but but but but you'd get something good for it! You would never have missed it, but maybe you just didn't know you wanted it? Come on, I'm sure consuming shit that will make you happy twice for two minutes each (once when clicking buy, once when getting and opening the package) will fill that hole in your soul! Spending money on stuff you don't actually need is good!
(That was sarcasm, if it wasn't clear enough.)
I'm aware why iOS is bad, thank you. I still don't wish restrictions on its users. That's just not a nice thing to do.
There's also the argument of lasting improvement: If people switch to other systems, I'd rather see them do it out of a positive motivation (i.e. "this is better") than a negative one (i.e. "the other one so bad I had to finally jump ship and find a different solution").
That motivation will bias your mindset, and a positive mindset will lead to a better user experience. If they just switch because it's not as bad as the other, that will taint their experience. They'll be inclined to think about what they miss, rather than what the other offers.
Example: Me, trying to wrap my head around the communities thing here after leaving reddit. I miss the relative simplicity of finding topical subreddits, which is harder here both because there's less traffic overall, and because I had a sizeable collection of subs there that I can't simply migrate here. Part of me wants to return to the familiar hell, even if I rationally understand why it's shit, and I feel that sours my experience with Lemmy so far.
Humans tend to prefer the familiar, so if they leave iOS for something better, I want that better thing to land as well as possible, to encourage getting familiar with the new environment and expand their horizons, and to make future leaps in other areas less scary and off-putting.
If they gave people more choices, it would be less of a shity ecosystem though, wouldn't it? Wouldn't that be a good thing? It wouldn't fix any of the other issues, but less freedom is never something to be glad about.
I hate apple as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean I have to hate their users or wish them ill. We should strive to stand above the petty us-vs-them mindset.
What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That... is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly "does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members", particularly the "is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it's also a multiple of 400?" bit with leap days.
You'll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it's a start.
...and if I don't need the year, my eyes simply skip to the dash and continue to read from there.
Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don't make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn't make any sense, and don't make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.
Germany too
The whole point of making a federated network of independent instances is to avoid the issues arising with one central instance, right? Putting the content out to multiple instances plays into that: If it's important content, no single authority can easily censor it, and the loss of a single instance won't erase it.
If it's trash, of course, every community in every instance you post it to will have to clean it up separately. Arguably, that puts more strain on the respective moderation teams, but if (ideally) those are disjunct people (again, to avoid the issues of a single authority), the strain should be distributed.
And on the plus side, it would enable each community (in the lemmy sense) to enforce their own nuanced rules, additionally leading to slightly more choice between the types of moderation you favour (as opposed to "There's one big sub, take it or leave it").
Individual communities may be smaller, but maybe some more form of coordination of similar communities across instances could amend that (like linking to the other communities in your sidebar etc.).
I could also imagine a super-community solution that would allow you to aggregate several communities across instances similar to multireddits. I'm new here, so I'm not sure if that exists, nor have I given the implementation any thought, but I suppose that could be convenient.
Yeah, automatic voting gets dangerously close to automatic censorship and botting.
Also, human language, context and nuance is complicated and the unknown error bar on "correctly flagged posts" scares me. It's not entirely predictable what kind of posts people may make, and accordingly not entirely predictable what the plugin would and wouldn't recognise.
A post chain "Madness?" / "THIS" / "IS" / "SPARTA!" may make sense and be fun in the right context, but the "THIS" comment could get botted to hell.
The familar taste of poison
I don't think the Nazis care about what I think they should or should not be allowed to do. They're going to use violence, whether or not I hold a gun or a white flag. If I say "No, force is bad!" they're going to say "Suit yourself!" and use it anyway. How am I going to stop them?
An ideology is worth only as much as the people defending it. If I am so concerned with the letter of the law if tolerance that I refuse to defend its spirit, I'll be condemned along with it.
That's the point of the paradox: If we deny ourselves the use of force, we're essentially conceding that right to them.
This an ideological conflict. We each believe the other is in the wrong, so whatever rules the other attempts to impose have no bearing on us because they're wrong. Hence: We should try rational argument first and hope to keep them in check by public opinion, but when that fails?
You can go stand in the middle and be proud of your enlightenend and nonviolent convictions. And when they next shoot up a gay night club or a black church, you can go and look the dying victims and their grieving loved ones in the eye and say "Aren't you glad these people get to freely encourage each others' bigotry?"
So when it comes to dealing with fascists, I'll listen to the guy that watched the rise of the original fascists, the failure of democracy, and took notes
(ibid)