I'm not happy with this development, but I'm slightly amused by the irony being that lemmy.ml is pro-china and has been moderated as such.

I'm pasting an old comment of mine from the official lemmy.world post discussing potential future federation with threads/meta:

I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you've done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines the sentiment and reservations held by many within our community.

I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the "wait and see" approach.

What's to say Threads won't follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?

If I go to a friend's house and their child spits in my face every time, I don't want to go to my friend's house. I tell them this. The friend again says, "Well this time just might be different, let's just wait and see!" Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.

Why should I believe this kid won't spit in my face all of a sudden, when they've taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein -someone.

Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users' well-being. There's no reason to wait and see. It's not logical to believe this time will be different.

Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.

Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta's practices as a company.

This really should be obvious by now.. but Meta mines and sells their user's information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads... That alone should tell you there's no reason to "wait and see." Just look right now. They haven't changed...

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users' feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government...

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

• Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

• Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

• Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

• Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

• Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

• Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.

I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?

I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.

However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.

Once again, I appreciate all the work you guys have done. But I respectfully and severely dissent on this issue.

Important to note that the population of the study all had a history of cardiovascular health issues, and were not representative of the rest of the population.

Also important to note is the failure to assess a distinction between combustion and non-combustion consumption.

Combusting marijuana results in particulates, carcinogens [1], lack of oxygen, and off-gasses benzene. [2] These are very important factors to control for, and this distinction was not addressed at all.

Definitely in need of further studies on the topic. This is an interesting area to explore, but this study falls a little flat in addressing any causation.

This pertains to the US:

A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don't really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.

Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said "But I need to get provider approval for that.." I told her "I think you better talk to the doctor then."

Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said "Oh my god, yeah of course he's approved for the emergency list.."

Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you've got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it's been so strained ever since covid...

The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.

Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source

If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.

Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don't be afraid to reach out for support. If you don't have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don't give up hope.

Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.

How to pass/invalidate a lie-detector test.

They are not considered admissible evidence in court (but the criminal justice system still use them to a degree..), and they can be interpreted with intentional bias, so I think it's fine to share.

One of my psychology professors told me that if you hide something like a sewing needle in your shoe's insole, you can ever so slightly apply pressure so that the poke causes a physiological spike. They monitor for movement, so it has to be very minute. The goal is to do this on every control question so that they cannot establish a baseline and have to give up.

The only post visible between ads is one that's been reposted thousands of times... This perfectly captures the steaming pile of shit that is the official app (and the reddit experience in general).

Calling his opponents vermin is a classic dehumanizing technique. Viewing a group as sub-human makes it easier to justify cruelty, and is a component of most genocidal regimes.

And that's totally in line with trump's open love and praise of murderous, genocidal dictators across the globe. Like most everything trump does, it's sickening and blatantly obvious.

Edit: Thought this was a great graphic I just saw on MeidasTouch Network.

While I'm not ethically opposed pirating, I understand and would probably do the same for a server I was hosting. Anybody remember Kim Dotcom's mansion raid?

What I do not understand is blocking a community surrounding magic mushrooms.. No one is going to prosecute the L.W admins for people discussing shrooms/their use...

Substances are legal/illegal depending on where one lives, just like weed which is apparently perfectly fine to post here, even tho possession is a death sentence in some countries.

It simply doesn't logically follow that weed, or even alcohol communities are permissible while a shroom community is not.

Banning any content deemed illegal in any country in the world establishes a very dangerous precedence (if that's the justification here). Free speech/dissenting from the government is illegal in many places in the world.

One thing the community must remember tho, is that you have to operate your server in accordance with the law in which country you're hosting it (in this case Germany).

I'll gladly admit I'm not too familiar with German law, but it seems unreasonable to expect government persecution for hosting servers which hosts a shroom discussion community.

Just gonna paste a comment I just made on another off-topic post...

I think the mods here need to start removing off-topic posts. Otherwise people see them and keep perpetuating the trend..

This is a community specifically for the lemmy.world instance; not reddit. Please post content like this on lemmy.world/c/reddit. These off-topic posts are strangling out relevant posts here.

There's also lemmy.world/c/general for just general discussion.

Absolutely hilarious that they think they can remove 3rd party search engines when reddit itself can't be navigated for shit, especially with their atrocious search feature. Blocking 3rd party search engines just ensures no one will be able to find any specific posts/content.

Literally the only time I've gone back to reddit in months is to find an answer for a game-related issue from a search engine query. Forcing a log-in or disabling search engines is just going to ensure less traffic/none from me.

Just like with Twitter, it seems like the reddit team is purposefully tanking their platform. I understand that much of it is for short-sighted payout, but even then, their decisions have been asinine and self-sabotaging.

I'm sure the attacks are just as annoying for you guys as they are to us, if not more. Appreciate the update.

Edit: Loving the endless scroll for the front page! I've been eagerly awaiting that. Such a small change, but such a big impact.

I trained my previous German Shepherd to understand a conditional question. It took a few years to teach, but I would ask "What do you want? Do you want [option]?" Could be go out, food, water, treat, play, love, walk, ride.

After enough conditioning, I could ask him "What do you want?" and he would literally tell me. I'd ask him and sometimes it was clear he was just bored, and would literally start to slow wag his tail and try out options. Like he'd go up to his treats and I'd say "No, you don't need any more of those.." and he'd get this little tail wag and then go try a toy or something. Was really handy if he ran out of water or something. I'd ask "What do you want?" and he'd lead me to his empty water bowl.

Incidentally thru different keyword use for toys, he learned to differentiate the names his favorite toys. Like his basketballs were always one of his favorites, and he comprehended that his ball had a specific name, but still fell into the category of "toy." So if you said "Go get a toy" he might bring his basketball, but if you said "Go get your ball" he would only grab his basketball.

He sadly died a couple years ago. He imprinted a bit on one of my current dogs (also a GSD), and I've been trying to expand on toy names with this guy. The names he's got down well so far are blue ball, basketball, jack, long jack, cactus, pineapple, donut, and the ring. Maybe a couple other toys I can't think of that he's learned. (we spoil our dogs with too many toys..) But I can tell him "Go get the cactus!" and he'll tear off and search until he finds the specific toy.

It's very enriching for him and really shows off the intelligence of dogs that people take for granted (intelligence definitely varies on breed tho..).

He says: "Yesterday Sam flew the plane and said that just 8 people were sitting in the trench, just 8 khohols [Ukrainains], f*ck! And our men go there by the hundreds, and they are not even capable of taking a f**king thing!"

Ukrainians are a force to be reckoned with when they dig in.. I will never forget how long the Cyborgs lasted at Donetsk Airport. The Cyborgs' nickname was coined by russians trying to cope with how disproportionate their losses were against dug-in Ukrainains with small arms.

Ukrainains are tough as hell.

Appreciate your update and I'm glad to see more people donating.

I've been outspoken on my disinterest and resistance to Threads, but you and your team should not have been harrased like that..

That's wrong regardless, but you guys have clearly been working your asses off to create this space for everyone, and people need to respect that you are doing this on your own free time for the benefit of others.

I feel I've leveled heavy criticism against federating with Threads, but this is something to be addressed with open discussion, not emotional reasoning and vitriol..

I see so many users acting like your team has already announced definitively to federate with Threads and that it's implementation is immediately around the corner. That's just not true.. Instead of jumping to conclusions and throwing threats and tantrums, users should actually voice their concerns if they want them heard... That means arguing points, not threatening or insulting others...

I appreciate everything you guys have done and I'm sorry for how some in our community have acted. With that said, I still desperately hope that Threads is not federated with. But that's a topic that should continue to be fleshed out within the community in a healthy manner.

I'm pasting part of a comment I made a few days ago on a different post:

This is called implicit racism, and it permeates our society to a systemic level. Healthcare can be a good example, and the U.S. criminal justice system is the best example imo.

One thing that really drives home the systemic implicit racism in this country are studies that have people rate black and white men on how strong/large/muscular and threatening they perceive them to be. The black men were perceived to be more threatening and that use of force was more likely to be viewed as justified. Black and white Americans both perceived the black men to be stronger, taller, and more muscular than their equal-sized white counterparts. Source

Another study found that people view black boys as older than they are, and that they are more responsible for their actions than white boys, whose actions were more likely to be excused by the belief of childhood innocence. So our society essentially strips black boys of their perceived childhood innocence. Same Source

Also should definitely be pointed out that Black Americans are incarcerated at a nearly 5 times greater rate than are White Americans. Source

Of course this is total speculation, but releasing this and then trying to appeal his case because of it sounds exactly like something trump/his lawyers would do..

That's why they've been acting so belligerently in the civil case. They want the judge to fight them on their outrageous stunts, but he's not giving them any feasible reason to warrant an appeal.

I've never changed my voting habits. I downvote trolls, hate, spam, and irrelevant content. I never downvote out of disagreement, nor do I use the upvote as an agreement button. I will upvote people I disagree with/am debating with if I believe they are promoting relevant discussion. That is how voting is intended to be used.

What kind of battle over cognitive dissonance must people like this face?..

Dude must have an Olympic gold metal for mental gymnastics...

This is entertaining, but I seriously don't understand how it's appropriate for the World News community.

This is entirely reasonable to me. I don't believe there is any good reason to federate with instances that are intending to astroturf, censore dissenting information, and peddle propoganda. You can see their vote brigading in a post on c/fediverse discussing this situation.

Federating with such instances does more harm than good, providing an audience for propoganda aimed at fomenting extreme perspectives thru deviant misinformation and content/narrative control.

Creating those kind of fringe echo-chamer instances is how we end up with toxic and extreme groups like SRS and incels or the donald (on reddit). They can even start out as satire and then quickly devolve into toxic hate.

The argument that we want a diverse fediverse doesn't mean that we should federate with toxic instances with bad intentions. That's not the kind of diversity that we should be promoting. That's the kind of toxic userbase that should be quarantined...

This is why we need continued/more support for Ukraine. I want this to be over for them as soon as possible, but the US/NATO should see the strategic advantage of russia continuing to exhaust their resources and military/prison population being thrown into the meat grinder in Ukraine. The longer russia wages war with Ukraine, the more definitively impossible it becomes for them to invade any NATO nations.

I mean, let's be real.. it's already an impossibility for russia to wage war with the US or European NATO countries alone... But it doesn't make any strategic sense to stop supporting Ukraine in a fight against our greatest enemy, who continues to threaten their neighbors with invasion. Let them further erode their military, munitions, and resources. Then maybe they won't be able to commit/assist in genocides like they have in Syria.

The Republicans fighting aid bills for Ukraine are just traitors. It's in the world's best interest to support Ukraine.

As someone who worked as a caseworker for adults living in various residential care facilities (RCFs) and assisted living facilities (ALFs), some infestations absolutely require professional intervention....

I've watched some facilities try to tackle them on their own with every home remedy, failing and just allowing more residents to suffer. I've hotlined facilities for their failure to manage and properly treat bed bugs.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but I have yet to see home remedies or heat treating rooms actually solve an infestation. All I saw was one room get marginally better while another room or two had them grow in numbers.

I luckily managed to dodge bringing them home all those years. Some of my team members weren't so lucky, and they had a hell of a time and spent thousands of dollars to eradicate them. One team member brought them to her house twice...

I greatly feared bringing those little bastards home, and that fear was warranted.

I had clients in federal probation whose freedom was dependent on the results of annual polygraphs. Refusal was considered a fail, and they'd be shipped back to FedMed or prison. Inconclusive results were also blamed on the clients, and would count as a failed test.

Was total bullshit, especially given the level of function and serious psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses of my clients.

I downvote that type of meme humor because I don't find it adds to discussion. Even if I agree with the person, I downvote them every time.

Up/downvotes are meant for promoting relevant discussion and suppressing off-topic content, spam, trolls, and hate. They are not and were never intended to be dis/agreement buttons. People just misuse them.

Anybody remember the Deadly Reflex Oblivion mod that Bethesda essentially based Skyrim's combat on?

If only the Kinder-Guardians were there...

I think the mods here need to start removing off-topic posts. Otherwise people see them and keep perpetuating the trend..

This is a community specifically for the lemmy.world instance; not reddit. Please post content like this on lemmy.world/c/reddit. These off-topic posts are strangling out relevant posts here.

There's also lemmy.world/c/general for just general discussion.

The only people being punished by this conflict are the civilians on both sides....

Yes, human tails are hairless. Here are photos of vestigial tails on humans.

Sometimes our body tries to include traits of our ape primate ancestors. Vestigial tails are not that uncommon. They are typically surgically removed from infants in 1st-world countries.

Years ago, I realized DBZ would be way weirder if their tails were accurately hairless....

I see many people purporting that users blocking Threads on an individual basis as a solution, but it's not... Blocking Threads will not prevent Threads users' comments in federated instances from showing up.

Even if you block Threads, you will still see hateful, harassing, and extremist content and misinformation.

Furthermore, even if it did block Threads engagement entirely on an individual blocking basis, it is still a failure on the instance admins to adequately protect their users and cultivate a healthy community.

.world admins defederated with exploding heads due to hate, harassment, and extremism/misinformation. Why would they then federate with Threads which harbors the same toxic users?

It's a move to bring more users into the Fediverse, but it comes with costs and risks that do not justify the short-sighted gain of more users and inching towards becoming mainstream.

Threads has been subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta's information-harvesting practices. [1]

Threads was marketed to be open to 'free speech' (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3]

They fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads' launch [1], however they claim they will have 3rd party fact-checkers next year. [4]

Meta/FB/Instagram has a rampant history of illegal and unethical practices, including running experiments on their users which affected their moods and induced depression in many uninformed, non-consenting subjects. [5] Such unethical experiments could affect federated users as well.

(Edit: As @massive_bereavement reminded me, Meta also assisted in genocide! [6])

Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [7]

If exploding heads was defederated with because of this sort of toxic extremism, why would they want to federate with a platform plagued by that same content? One known for shortcomings moderating it? And one which comes from a company with a long history of unethical and illegal practices regarding users?

Due to these issues and Meta's rampant history of unethical and illegal business practices, there should be no federation with Threads for the well-being of the users in this instance.

I have donated to the .world instance since my first week here, but should they continue with federating with Threads, I will be cancelling my donations and finding an instance that won't undermine the safety and well-being of their users for a boost of (largely toxic) new users and an inch towards being mainstream.

The gains are immediate but minimal, and come at great costs which do not warrant federating with Threads (IMO).

Certainly drove their use statistics up a lot, which helps more than the incendiary messaging hurts them (IMO).

I've always trained dogs not to bite by firmly saying "Ow! No bite." They have to learn that we are more delicate than other dogs. It's also very important to provide them with an alternative.

So I make a noise like it hurt, say no bite, and then give them a toy immediately after. This promotes what I call 'substitute biting,' where I'll rile one of my dogs up with a little rough housing, and they'll grab a toy and start chomping down and shaking that while looking at me.

I fostered a stray who I basically had to train all the puppy phases out of when he was about 1 year old and as big as my wife (GSD mix/mut). Even tho he was starved of human contact, he too learned not to bite with this method. Took longer than most puppies.. but when I'd say "Ow! No bite." he'd stop and look at me trying to figure out what prompted it. If toy substitution didn't work, I'd stop playing. He learned that if he wanted to play, he couldn't bite the fragile humans.

Also worth noting that some dogs (common with GSD for instance) like to engage in a sort of handholding, especially as a puppy. It may seem like they're wanting to chew on you if you don't know better, but if they kinda just get your hand in their mouth it could be the 'handholding.' I break that habit because it can still scratch and I don't want someone to claim a dog of mine 'bit' them by doing it.

Worthless trolls. They're not hacktivists if they're leaking innocent government employees' personal information for the most cringeworthy demands possible. I've had to deal with data breach shit like this in the health industry.

Are these dipshits so self-deluded that they really believe they're some sort of activists? I thought Anonymous was cringeworthy enough... At least they aren't such pricks.

After months of planning, which included the removal of Kuzminov's parents from Russia to Ukraine, he finally made his move in August, flying the helicopter at a low altitude in radio silence mode across the border and into Ukrainian territory.

Was happy to read about his family getting out first. Always worry about that with russia, china, and north korea.

I stripped years of posts off of r/vans when I realized my submissions were almost always the top results on Google images when searching basic keywords (not gaming the search). I've built !vans@lemmy.world here and I've been posting my content from reddit here.

The thought of leaving my content on reddit and driving further traffic to that site just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Doing your own research being good/bad depends entirely on one's ability to scrutinize reliable sources. When I "do my own research" it looks like this.

When my brother "does his own research" he presents horrendously false information from terribly bias and debunked sources. He's the primary family member which influenced my writing that piece on radicalism.

If someone is unable to comprehend/recognize valid from invalid/biased sources/information, "doing their own research" is very dangerous in fueling further extreme/conspiratorial beliefs.

QAnon and covid/anti-masking are great examples in which people "doing their own research" resulted in a lot of unnecessary suffering and stupidity.

People should learn how to effectively scrutinize sources before they attempt to "research" something themselves. "Doing your own research" can be productive or unproductive, and it depends entirely on the individual.

Can't say fuck, but totally okay to see someone's brains bashed out! It's so idiotic and illogical...

I think this needs to be shared around:

This graphic is from this MeidasTouch Network video.

I 100% condemn Hamas and their terrorism, but I have been thinking of this skit a lot lately, wondering how many Isrealis are experiencing this revelation and asking "Are we the badies?"

When you hear people saying that technology has stagnated, that person clearly isn't following advancements in medicine. The medical tech I see now just blow me away.