maplebar @ maplebar @lemmy.world

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Joined

9 mo. ago

I prefer F-Zero as it's super fast, unique and fun, but Super Mario Kart is also pretty good and has multiplayer. Both have classic music and a very memorable look.

That dipshit Putin is standing in the fire, so of course we're gonna throw fuel on it. If nothing else, I'm happy to see the world making this invasion of Ukraine as costly as possible for the Russians who started it.

There's a lot you aren't taking into consideration, for example where those users are coming from.

• Threads is just Instagram, it's essentially the same account, so its users were baked in from the start. How many of those Threads users are just people who already used Instagram?
• BlueSky really isn't pulling users from Mastodon, it's pulling them from "X.com", which if nothing else represents a breaking up of old Twitter, which is good for decentralization in general. Any fracturing of social media is good for the fediverse.
• Both Threads and BlueSky are, to some degree, copies of Mastodon in terms of their relationship with federation. Threads uses ActivityPub itself (a win for the fediverse, depending on how you look at it), and BlueSky has their own AT federation protocol, which shows that the ideas behind the fediverse are already winning out. It's entirely possible that, at some point in the future, BlueSky and Mastodon learn to speak to each other using one of those protocols (or a new one), and then the fediverse wins by default.
• Fediverse apps like Misskey are apparently doing great in Japan, which is great for the existence of Japanese artists and the international side of things.

The fact that we're here, right now, discussing this on the fediverse, shows that ActivityPub has come a long way. Bluesky is nothing more than a shallow copy of Mastodon with far less federation and far fewer features.

Mastodon is a bit like Linux, due to its free and open nature. It can be in 3rd place for 20 years, but it'll keep chugging along, improving and growing over time until it snowballs into something truly formidable. Linux doesn't need to be the most popular operating system ecosystem to be great, nor does Mastodon need to be the most popular social media server. Unlike a corporate product it's not just going to die and disappear just because it isn't the most popular of the social media platforms.

I haven't played Cyberpunk, but I already felt that way about The Witcher 3, to some extent. CDPR makes nice looking games with seemingly vibrant and populated worlds, but I feel like interaction with the world and NPCs is pretty thin and boring.

Spoiler: it was Russia.

Anyway, let's be honest, the dream of the "world wide web" is, and always was, pretty damn naive.

The internet and society at large would be a better place if we told our geopolitical enemies (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc.) to fuck off and make their own internet (which they're trying to do anyway, but today are benefiting from the best of both worlds). This one-way great firewall bullshit where foreign governments restrict what their people can see coming out of the west, while easily manipulating what our people see on social media via disinformation and troll farms, has not been working out.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but we would be much better off with multiple multi-national intranets among allied nations with shared values, interests, laws, and accountability.

Yeah I don't know why it took people so fucking long to realize that being on Twitter does nothing other than help the oligarchs, but here we are...

BlueSky is really just Twitter pretending to be Mastodon, but that's a minor issue compared to the problems associated with platforms like "X" and TikTok today.

What matters most right now is killing off Twitter and breaking up the dominance of any one platform on social media. I really don't care where people go as long as they get the fuck off of Twitter and TikTok. Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion. Divide and conquer.

Corporate nationalist social media like "X" (American oligarchy) and TikTok (Chinese oligarchy) are a danger to the sovereignty and stability of the Western world.

they are using religion as a tool to get what they want.

This is what religion has always been used as. Religious law existed before civil law, because it's easy to get people to do what they're told if they believe that their godlike creator will punish them eternally for breaking the rules.

Again, how did people convince the world that gay sex is not only taboo but something to be entirely shunned and punished?

You tell them that it's a sin before the eyes of "God", who in his anger will turn you and anyone who even looks in your direction into a "pillar of salt" or whatever. Remember the existence of "sodomy" (read: homosexuality) in Sodom and Gomorrah wasn't just something bad, it was an mortal sin that supposedly wiped entire towns off the map, as they want you to believe that what your neighbor does in their bedroom isn't just their own business but also an existential threat to your entire society. In the literal interpretation of all 3 Abrahamic Religions, it's not enough to avoid homosexuality yourself, it has to be eliminated from society entirely lest we all end up like Sodom and Gomorrah...

And for what? Obviously we all know that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is pure bullshit, even many religious people today hopefully don't take it literally...

But the simple truth is that someone, thousands of years ago, felt disgusted by homosexuality and created a big lie about it in order to convince people that gayness anywhere in society would eventually bring about God's wrath. And that utter fucking bullshit has lead to thousands of years of fear, discrimination, violence and hate, lasting even today in various degrees throughout the world. Humanity chose to go down this path when we chose to believe in religious lies.

Because THAT is exactly what religions does--that is what religion was designed to do: to keep people in line, to oppress undesirable people and qualities out of society, to avoid coming face to face with the unknown, and to impose the will of the few on the populace at large. Religion tells people what to eat, what to fuck, when and how they can listen to music, how to live and how to die. Outside of a few exceptions, it's mostly a toxic ideology that empowers nobody and oppresses billions of people all over the world, and to top it all off, it's just a bunch of fake, make-believe bullshit.

Their "prophet" Muhammad had a 6-year-old "wife" (read: child sex slave) who he fucked when she was around 9, Aisha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha

Isn't religion just wonderful?

Its not about religion, its politics.

It's about religion. In a theocracy religion is politics, and law, and culture too.

Religion isn't something that empowers people to do more or live more freely. Religious dogma is nothing more than a set of arbitrary laws and norms, written and decided by man, but given the weight and authority of god(s)--the fear of eternal damnation in the afterlife being the only way that people knew to keep others in line in a world devoid of secular laws.

How did we convince women that they were lesser beings throughout human history? Why do we consider some forms of consensual adult sexuality to be morally wrong? Why do we believe that human beings are destined and entitled to live on this planet forever no matter how poorly we treat it?

The answer is religion. Religion is mass delusion, used mainly as a tool of oppression. Socrates was sentenced to death by a jury of Athenians for thought crimes against Athena, showing that religion, democracy and justice simply do not mix. Thousands of years ago (or more) gods and religious law were the inventions that ushered humanity into the post-truth world that we live in today.

Hate to break it to you but it’s Israel who pays for disinformation campaigns to dehumanize Palestinians and erased their history and connections to the land.

You're a fool if you think that propaganda ans disinformation only exist on one side of this conflict, or any conflict for that matter.

Regardless, I'm instantly suspicious of any person online whose initial response in a comment is an obviously copy-pasted wall of cherry-picked information which paints one side as the forever victim and the other as a infinite aggressor. And then your next response is to quote that same shit to me again? That only makes you look less like a person discussing the matter in good faith. Is that wrong?

First documented in the late Bronze Age, about 3200 years ago, the name Palestine, is the conventional name used between 450 BC and 1948 AD to describe a geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River and various adjoining lands.

If we're going to talk about the modern English name "Palestine", maybe we should reflect on the fact that it comes from Hebrew:

Pəlištī (פְּלִשְׁתִּי; plural Pəlištīm, פְּלִשְׁתִּים), meaning 'people of Pəlešeṯ' (פְּלֶשֶׁת)

Peleset was indeed more or less the region that we think of today as "The Gaza Strip", and was most certainly not a contiguous or well-defined region spanning "the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River". Regardless of what your propaganda says, there is no evidence at any point in history of a single "Palestinian" nation "from the river to the sea". That's a fabrication, in my opinion. But maybe you have a legitimate historical source?

Further, the Philistines (the original tribal people from Peleset) had very little in common with today's Palestinians--whose culture is derived almost entirely from an Arab Muslim tradition forced upon them during the genocidal conquest of the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate ~650AD.

Today's nations of Israel and Palestine are mere creations of the British and the League of Nations after the fall of the Ottoman Empire post-World War I. Throughout recorded history the Levant has been under the control of various empires and factions (the Ottomans, the Islamic Caliphate, The Byzantines, the Romans, the Persians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and so on). Today's Israelis and Palestinians both have legitimate historical claims over land in the region dating back hundreds, if not thousands, of years (much like Native Americans have a legitimate historical claim of America's lands dating back thousands of years or more), but that means very little in the context of modern geopolitics and the people who lived in the Levant in the Brozne Age has very little resemblance or cultural similarity to those who live there now, obviously.

Maybe that's a tough pill for people here to swallow, but I don't care about that because it's simply the truth.

Oligarchs get cozy with oligarchs, what a shocker.

The fact that people are downvoting you for scrutinizing this obviously shitty and biased source shows that they aren't interested in the truth.

Let's all take side in a dumb fucking holy war that has nothing to do with us? Fuck that, give Israel and Palestine back to the Turks for all I care.

They aren't really the same answer.

People suggest that Mastodon is too complicated for the average knuckle-dragging moron to use (and it might be, but frankly I consider that a pro, not a con) because it has "servers", as if the entire point of the internet wasn't to have a global network of communication across a multitude of clients and servers. Do these same people think the concept of websites and email are also too complex for the regular person? Maybe... But again, if the regular person is that fucking dumb do we really want have them in our community at all?

What's more, BlueSky is supposedly federated (or "will be"(tm)), and as such it'll have to deal with all of the same challenges around federation that Mastodon deals with, and people are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.

Otherwise I agree with your last sentence. Social media is about money and fame, first and foremost. The average person will always go where the most money and fame are concentrated.

Why would the #1 backers of Palestine do this?

I thought that Islam was an open and accepting cult, but now I'm confused because this just seems oppressive and toxic!

Yep. I'm glad you see it that way too.

We don't make art or music anymore, we make "content" for YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. Kids don't grow up dreaming to make the next killer movie or fun game, they want to become a rich and influential "content creator". If they are lucky, the "content" that they make for big tech company "platforms" will eventually lead to them gathering a dedicated group of loyal followers over whom they can hold a strong "influence", and that influence can be traded for money via advertising corporate products.

What it comes down to is that the tech corps have money, and they will use some of that money to entice people to make "content" for their "platforms", and that's a big part of the framework of the modern era. If they ever gain the ability to create genuinely desirable "content" using AI, they will instantly cut out all of the human money-sinks from their business model.

You want the bullshit "Mastodon is too complicated and hard to use!" answer or the real answer?

BlueSky has rich people behind it.