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58
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114
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • this. the GOP has picked their lane, and anyone who doesn't completely and unequivocally oppose the GOP is a fascist. this isn't a generalization or hyperbole, it's political reality now

  • as usual, the federal government will step in when each and every member of Congress is personally affected. because, y'know, any societal ill you don't personally experience is just oversensitive snowflakes whining /s

  • Firefish née Calckey is a microblogging platform like Mastodon, but that's about all it has in common. Firefish has extra features like emoji reactions (like Facebook's, but you can use any emoji, including custom emoji), quote posts, and better support for deep threads (it displays replies in a tree view like Lemmy or Kbin, unlike Mastodon which tries to linearize them and makes them a confusing mess). it also supports text formatting like bold, italics, headings, custom link text, and even animations (don't worry, they don't autoplay). it's even themable, and supports migrating posts from other accounts so you don't have to start over!

  • hi, anti-Meta person here: it's not about how many users we have. it's about Meta's long track record of insufficient moderation and harvesting of personal data. thanks to their almost nonexistent moderation, they've facilitated genocides, let deadly disinformation spread unchecked, and contributed to the rise of fascism. and they harvest enough data from their platforms to create digital duplicates of us, and if they join the Fediverse, of course they're going to harvest data from anyone federating with them too.

    would you trust them to play nice in the Fediverse after all they've done?

  • Blindsight by Peter Watts. it's a really unique take on first contact, but wow is it dark

  • a new instance doesn't know about any other instances at first. when someone on the new instance, instance A, searches up a community on instance B, instance A now knows about the existence of instance B and starts pulling content. the more communities people on instance A subscribe to, the more of the Fediverse instance A sees.

    what this means in practice is that a community can be hosted on any instance, and people from any other instance (that isn't blocked by the community's instance) can post and comment on it seamlessly. the community you posted this to is hosted on lemmy.world, but you have an account on kbin.social. and i have an account on sopuli.xyz!

    this means that you get the freedom to pick whichever instance you want to set up your account. since each instance is its own independent website, if one instance goes down, the rest of the network isn't affected. you could even set up your own instance on your own hardware! different instances have different rules and vibes, and if one instance is misbehaving (e.g. mods have lost control, the software is glitching and spamming other instances with too much traffic, there are nazis), other instances can block it temporarily or permanently.

    as for how many instances there are, FediDB lists 1,175. no instance sees every other instance, so there isn't an optimal one to join like some people have asked about

  • you don't have to know coding to enjoy Linux! it's got a reputation of being techie-oriented thanks to users of Arch Linux (a very techie distribution of Linux) dominating the Linux community, but there are plenty of distributions for everyday users, like Zorin OS and Elementary

  • i wouldn't go with ranked choice voting. all the systems i know of have their own flaws: IRV can have really weird results with more than three candidates, Borda count disproportionately favors the moderate, and the Condorcet method can completely fail to select a winner. instead, what about approval voting, where instead of ranking candidates, you just check as many boxes as you want?

  • conspiracy theories i agree with, but religion? organized religion, definitely. joining a religion with a hierarchy signals that you want someone else to give you all the answers, which is very much a mark of poor education. but religious beliefs are not an automatic marker of poor education, as long as they're sincerely held, don't supersede science, and are frequently revisited and revised based on personal experience and knowledge. even basic, broad frameworks like animism or some parts of Buddhism can help you make sense of the world when science can't help you

  • taking Ayn Rand's work seriously. five seconds of critical thought and her entire philosophy comes crashing down

  • if a liberal/anarchist/not-ML instance popped up and started behaving like Lemmygrad does, they'd get mass-defederated too. like i said, it's not their views they got defederated for, it's their behavior

  • let me see:

    • physical media is Just Better (cds, game cards, etc.)
    • the Internet is a technological dumpster fire
    • devices are too "smart" nowadays
  • Lemmygrad isn't blocked because of their views, it's blocked because it's a massive troll farm. the posts that you see don't include the replies they make to posts which they deem not communist enough, where they sealion and argue in bad faith until the op is driven out

  • probably not, but you'd get the same amount of horrible stuff as you'd get if you turned off all the security precautions on an email server. the point i'm making here by quoting Maloney is that blocking is a security precaution. less is more, and by joining an instance that doesn't block anyone, you're exposing yourself to a lot of terrible stuff. besides, instances that don't block get blocked themselves, so horrible stuff would be all you'd see

  • Some folks think that defederation is a bad thing. OK.

    Here's a little experiment you can try at home.

    1. Stop using GMail, Hey, or whatever email service you're currently using.
    2. Set up your own mail server (there's instructions on the internet).
    3. When the instructions say to use a Remote Black List just ignore them.
    4. When the instructions say to validate domains, ignore those too.
    5. When the instructions say to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC just let those slide.
    6. Try to send / receive email
    7. Also try to read your inbox. For added benefit turn on all notifications for received mail.

    Voila. Now you have an unfettered email experience.

    And this, class, is why defederation is useful.

    Please send your comments to the overworked TA in the back of the room.

    Craig Maloney

  • i wouldn't trust The Sun further than i can throw it. its accuracy is on par with The Daily Mail