This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don't really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we're (along with other competitors, we're not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.

A chilly, distant demeanor. Is it an asshole that hates you, or is it an introvert that just wants to go home?

YES! Bots to moderate the bots! It's genius I say.

Funny the kind of folks that get suspended on Elon's twitter.

We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development--open source. All of our content--available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.

However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.

He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.

Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That's the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.

Yeah, but I'm still doing it on purpose to help the community grow. Somebody's gotta fill this place with content, and at the end of the day that's our job.

Normally I'm more of a commenter exclusively unless I need the services of a specific community. (video game question usually) But the Lemmy project has sent me digging for all the best youtube stuff I've seen in basically the past decade and then finding the community to shove it in.

Put it on a smaller Instance, based out of a location where this law does not exist.

Good news. But let's not forget with this one in particular, this battle will probably not end in our lifetimes. We let down our guard, and support for net neutrality starts to waver, it'll get attacked again. Maybe in a different way.

This one takes a lot of vigilance and determination to keep. It won't stay permanently "won" any time soon, despite the breadth of the coalition of sorts that supports it. There's just too much money that could be made on the other side, creates a lot of pressure.

Oh nononono you don't. A former republican supported by the Orthodox Jewish community, which is heavily associated with the right-wing Israeli settler movement?

Yeah, we'll be watching how he votes.

I feel like every person in this thread that cannot fathom how he feared for his life has never had personal experience dealing with someone with severe mental illness, in their family or in public or something. Direct experience, though, of interacting with a large, loud, mentally ill person.

If you think you can just assume a stranger you encounter who shoves a phone in your face is mentally healthy, you're missing some facts of life.

... wtf is going on over there... What kind of douchebags did you guys elect? I mean, I'm American, I know I can't throw stones here, but y'alls were better than that. You like, wisely stood against our 9/11 invasion and we probably should've listened.

But, wtf?

btw, if anyone was too lazy to dig, this publication is a nigerian newspaper that actually seems legit. Founded in 2020, so pretty new still. Looking at their front page they mostly just do local reporting. Has had run-ins with local power.

NTD.com, or New Tang News, is a Falun Gong-funded organization founded in NYC in 2001. It is owned by Epoch Media Group, the owners of the Epoch Times. It leans strongly right and does not check its facts. While still potentially capable of reporting true things, this is one of the least reliable sources out there.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ntd-tv-new-tang-dynasty/

All I know is that if you're very worried about being surveilled by governments, the Fediverse is the absolute last place you should want to be.

This is one of the most transparent platforms we have come up with yet. Instead of all your data only being viewable by a host company, it's viewable and able to be analyzed by basically anyone who puts some effort in. This makes it economically worthless, can't really sell something that everyone can already just get for themselves.

We're all out in the open here. So, wave to all the national security agencies everyone. Hiiiii! Hope you're all enjoying the memes!

I appreciate it as a self-aware jab at the nature of online communities in general, and it amuses me. Every human is a lemming in some way, shape or form, there's just nothing new under the sun so-to-speak. But by being aware of this tendency we can control our own behavior more consciously and effectively.

Gotta be able to laugh at yourself though, which is a capability that not everybody possesses.

Because even if they actually had an income of zero, they had saved up enough money over the years to be able to survive off it for some time. Commonly referred to as a "war chest". They don't actually have an income of zero though, their income is actually quite significant since they still have major trading partners like Iran, India and China to sell their fossil fuels and other resources to. They don't buy fossil fuels, incidentally, they sell them. Like Saudi Arabia.

Also, you can buy things with more than just money. People figure that Kim Jong Un probably isn't trading his stuff to them for money, but instead is getting technological assistance from them. Just one of their modern fighter-bomber tech, for instance, would be immeasurably valuable to N Korea, where their own tech has lagged behind a good bit over the years.

Lastly, people in the west have been doing sanctions evasion. I recall some German financial/tech company has its CEO now wanted by Interpol for being a Russian agent. So, when your own people are playing fast and loose with the law, that's going to make things like sanctions more difficult.

Oh god I've got so many.

My latest one is remembering that you can't really fight fire with fire, unless you're being extraordinarily strategic about it. Attacking bigotry for instance, simply makes it stronger, as it feeds off strife and fear themselves. Remembering why Michelle Obama said when they go low, we go high. Not out of any great preference, but out of a lack of viable alternatives in her situation.

You can't actually "fight" it. You can exclude it. You can corral it. You can trick it into running itself off a cliff. But you can't actually destroy it by combating it directly, because it feeds off the combat, just like Trump does. You have to outmaneuver it.

Protip: If your thought process begins to sound like "either you're with me, or you're against me", you may be in the middle of the process of turning into a tv villain.

Vice did a lot of very good, and generally in-moderate-depth reporting over the years. Hope an overabundance of people scrape that shit while we still have an opportunity. Once its hosted somewhere safe, you could probably even dump access to it somewhere like ... the fediverse.

The Washington Times was founded on May 17, 1982, by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon and owned until 2010 by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate founded by Moon. It is currently owned by Operations Holdings, which is a part of the Unification Church movement.[9][10]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times

... how do they find out which marriages do and do not fail? They generally don't take divorce photos too.

Yea, might be right. Doesn't really change anything though. We're still basically fighting for an independent Fediverse. Fucking over Zuck is just a side-benefit.

Since nobody mentioned it, I will. It has a cool, short and easy to remember name.

Curb appeal and convenience are extremely powerful drivers of human behavior. Moreso than time-consuming, complex, rational processing in a world of nearly infinite options.

Yeah, I think they made that pretty clear awhile ago. In the interest of keeping their broader coalition together--every last piece of it--they've largely abandoned any pretext at compromise and co-existence.

Pushing the moderates away with this was inevitable, so they've pivoted to pushing radicalization to try to compensate for that in the long-term. Bolster recruitment with passionate, divisive rhetoric and all. It's pretty hard not to see some similarities with historical precedent, if you've any serious study in history, so this has done a little more than merely raise eyebrows.

I think they're more interested in repeating history than learning from it.

I have noticed a similar correlation, at different places and in different times. The internet loves cats. Humankind loves dogs and cats. You switch from one to the other at some point of growth.

Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we're going to come out much stronger for it.

Imagine the alternative--the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.

That could've theoretically killed us. Now it won't happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking "yep, security is important, that's true..."

If you don't want to parent your own son, there is someone out there willing to do it for you. They will not do a good job.

I'd categorize it firmly under "tex-mex", with some "california cuisine" influences thrown in. Very heavy Mexican influence, but not exactly how Mexicans cook it.

Could also just call it "southwestern" or "mexican-american" if you want, both work. Probably southwestern would be most precise.

This author writes like an insufferable teenage cryptobro that got a little older and got a degree, but never actually grew up. I guess he's after a very specific audience though.

Still though, slogging through that prose is slightly more annoying than a feisty chihuahua. Which itself is irritating, because I kinda want to know his actual opinions without having to dig them out of something full of endless paragraphs of his pointless bullshit fluff.

Ugh. Kids, if you write like that, you're literally what Shakespeare was making fun of like, a bunch of centuries ago, with that whole "brevity is the soul of wit" char. He was viciously mocking you, a dozen-plus generations ago. Just get your point out.

Definitely. It's going to take time though, since we're directly competing with all those pre-existing specialty subs over there, which complicates things a little.

I'm guessing it has to do with our early-adopter status still. Gotta remember, we're still the scrappy little underdog that only the weirdos know about. We are all weirdos, you, me, everyone else. Being here is sufficient to make that true. Over time that'll change, but for now we're just too unknown still.

So, what you have here is a lot of idealists that disapprove of reddit, a lot of people that got banned from reddit and can't go back, and a lot of tech bros and excited young people in general.

You can probably see how these different demographics can kinda come together to create what we see around us here, while a lot of the more "normie" content is still mostly back where we came from. (for us reddit refugees anyway)

That said, you can find a small handful of support group communities for things like alcoholics, and the food and cat subs tend to be fairly active and not so much of a constant clickbait downer. The various AskWhatever subs aren't bad either, though activity is still very light.

We're still in the very early stages though, a phase that'll probably last another year or two. Give us time, we don't even have our software at full functionality yet.

The idea of something being "not good enough for Lemmy" kinda amuses me a little bit. I mean, I get we're trying to do some decent stuff around here, but look around. This place is still pretty roughshod.

ngl, but if the evangelical Christian folks can actually get a YIGBY movement going, they could really do some great work in the world.

For all our strengths on the secular side of things, we never could beat NIMBY problems. They're just very difficult to overcome using our methods, and help derail things like nuclear energy.

I think Jesus would have actually agreed that YIMBY is a genuinely valid and wholesome idea, and that it even harnesses some of the good traits of Christianity. If this actually works, you can color me impressed.

You also lose users when you're basically asking your userbase to be alpha testers as you build from scratch. It's fine, it's an open source project.

People that are thinking this is some finished, capable competitor already are a little out of touch though. Which is unsurprising, given we're all in a weird, dark corner of the internet atm.

I mean, half the good subs are still gone. I can't even use my home feed anymore, its half just video game subs now. Places like r/interestingasfuck were regular features in my feed that were pretty important to it being a pleasant experience overall. I balanced that shit.

Now its all fucked. I still have my account and still go there, to poke around and participate in some of those video game subs, where reddit is still clearly dominant. But hanging out has gotten kinda lame.

Pokemon. It's just a franchise of watered-down jrpgs imo.

Now that's a name I haven't heard in awhile. She probably doesn't have much of any social capital left, but if she wants to spend her last bit on this, I get it.

tbf, the entire thing where Presidents pardon their predecessor was a very bad precedent to set. There's just not a whole lot of good that can come out of that idea.

In 2013, IBT Media acquired Newsweek from IAC; the acquisition included the Newsweek brand and its online publication, but did not include The Daily Beast.[11] IBT Media, which also owns the International Business Times, rebranded itself as Newsweek Media Group, and in 2014, relaunched Newsweek in both print and digital form.

In 2018, IBT Media split into two companies, Newsweek Publishing and IBT Media. The split was accomplished one day before the District Attorney of Manhattan indicted Etienne Uzac, the co-owner of IBT Media, on fraud charges.[12][13][14]

IBT Media is an American global digital news organization with over 90 million monthly readers, owned by followers of religious leader David Jang.[1][2]

Long story short, one of the more savvy outlets of the Evangelical right.

edit for formatting

Funny thing to me is how obvious and simple it is, that the real conspiracy is just congressional leaders telling certain subsets of people what they want to hear, for their political support.

Occam's Razor.