I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."

It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.

And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.

Makes sense.

Elon undoubtedly has folders full of cool images he's saved, so while he was still focused on the "X" idea, he rummaged around and found that one and thought, "Yeah! This is gonna be sick dude!"

Thus are decisions made by the world's richest teenage edgelord.

It's really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from "Do no evil" to "Don't even bother pretending not to."

The "why" is certainly that someone in the state beef industry gave him a pile of money.

This shouldn't be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they're fined less than they made off of it, it's not even really a fine. It's just the government taking a cut of the action.

Ah... the venerable old "make a 'loan' then forgive it" strategy for paying bribes.

At this point Thomas might as well have a tattoo across his forehead that says "I am corrupt."

If he had even a speck of integrity, he'd resign.

Even without any details concerning the cases, I can entirely confidently predict that they're going to fuck us over at every turn.

Well... except that "cis" is actually a shortened form of the precise, latin-rooted, technical term "cisgender," which is the opposite of the precise, latin-rooted, technical term "transgender."

And it has nothing at all to do with heterosexuality, or with sexual preference in any way, shape or form.

So he's not just wrong, but wrong in pretty much every way he could possibly have been.

Which seems to be pretty much par for the course for the world's richest middle-aged teenage edgelord.

Of course they are.

A pertinent point that Solzhenitsyn made in Gulag Archipelago - he said that in all the time he spent in the gulags, he never once met a person who had not been legitimately convicted of a genuine crime.

The way it worked was simply that the USSR had such an extensive and nebulous set of laws that it was effectively impossible for anyone to obey all of them all the time, and so much information on all its citizens that whenever an official wanted someone disappeared, it was just a matter of checking through their records and finding which law(s) they had broken, then arresting them, trying them and convicting them.

The US oligarchy is actively pursuing the same basic strategy, and for the same basic reasons.

"Lemmy" can't handle anything. That's by design.

"Lemmy" is really just a piece of software that people can use to run forums that will federate with other forums and so forth and so on. There is no central "Lemmy" authority that could do anything, and that's by design, and a lot of the point. It means that there can never be a Lemmy spez or Musk or Zuckerberg, fucking things up for everyone.

The highest authorities are the individual instance owners, so it will fall on them to deal with illegal content as they see fit. Presumably they'll generally work to keep it off of their own instances through active moderation, and they'll block other instances that they have reason to believe do not maintain acceptable standards.

And like it or not, some share of responsibility will fall on individual users to manage their own activities in order to avoid problematic instances.

The trade-off for having no central authority that can fuck things up for everyone is that there's no big mommy/daddy to watch over you and protect you. The fediverse is better suited for people who are okay with that.

It's to the point that he might actually have benefitted the UAW by doing this.

It might well have reached the point that he's so widely recognized as a shallow, childish, fatuous, vindictive douchebag that he's a sort of reverse bellwether - his opposition to someone or something actually leads to increased overall support and his support leads to increased overall opposition.

Yes - he must face whatever penalties are appropriate and justified.

Exactly as the Jan. 6 participants and organizers must face whatever penalties are appropriate and justifed.

Pleased (if surprised) to see that we're in agreement on that, Donny.

So... aren't these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?

I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.

It's as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then... um... you know... um... do some business... kinda... stuff....

Years ago, on IMDb, a poster called rabbitmoon kept a thread going for years on the Rambo board that is still the best I've ever seen.

The whole thing started with him posting that he was shocked when, about a third of the way through the movie, there was a scene in which a character was shot with a bullet from a gun. Then he countered, completely earnestly and deadpan, every response he got.

The original thread is long gone, and the only thing I could find of it is an excerpt that was posted on Reddit - LINK

Good.

It's reached the point (or had a couple of years ago, which was the last time I went to a wiki hosted there) that it's virtually impossible to even read an entry, since there are so many ads that the actual text of the article spends more time off the screen than on it.

Neither Gosar nor Trump have served in the military.

That pretty much goes without saying, but bears repeating anyway.

Yes - it is sociopathic.

That's not a coincidence.

It's less efficient than a centralized forum would be, but efficiency isn't the only or even the highest priority. Decentralization is the explicit point of the fediverse, and to the degree that that requires sacrificing some measure of efficiency, that's just the way it goes.

The goal was to build a system that would be robust and relatively seamless while remaining decentralized. That's more or less what they've done. There's a fair amount of fine tuning and tweaking left to be done, and actively being done, but the basic system is what it is because it best balances all of the goals.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.". ― H.L. Mencken

Work toward an eventual full withdrawal from NATO and an overt and full political and military alliance with Russia.

I'm not joking.

why do people need so much money

Mental illness.

Really.

The thing you're apparently calling "traditional" seems natural to me.

I've never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it's simple - it's my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I'd expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn't the important part because it's not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the "traditional" way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that's what's natural.

As already noted, on all of them.

The easy way to grasp how it works:

When you, on instance.alpha, view a community on instance.beta, you aren't actually on community@instance.beta. You're actually on an entirely separate copy - community@instance.beta@instance.alpha. That's the community you're reading and posting to and upvoting/downvoting in. Meanwhile, people on other instances are each on their own locally hosted copies of the same community.

The lemmy software (or kbin or mastodon or whatever) then periodically syncs up all the local copies of community@instance.beta, so you all end up looking at (more or less) the same content, even though it's actually a bunch of technically separate communities.

Yeah - the whole dynamic of claiming that you don't intend to do the specific shitty thing that you then intentionally and specifically do is infuriating already, and "yuck your yum" just adds an extra layer of cringe to it.

I grow more convinced every day that I've somehow been stranded among a bizarre race of insane savages.

That's really the only feasible explanation I can come up with. There's no way that a race of even reasonably intelligent and rational beings could fail to recognize that Netanyahu, for example, is profoundly and dangerously mentally ill - a clear psychopath - and shouldn't even be allowed out in public unaccompanied, much less granted power over others. So it can only be the case that human beings by and large - at least the not inconsiderable portion of them that support Netanyahu (or Trump or Putin or any of the other vividly insane people in power) - are both stupid and insane.

And somehow, I, with a working brain and an actual set of functioning moral principles, have ended up trapped among them.

My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.

So instead of going to church so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics, they go online so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics.

Seriously.

Of course they are - they're psychopaths.

They're each and all people who, in a sane society, would be institutionalized in order to protect others from the harm they inevitably do as a consequence of their complete lack of principles, morals, empathy and remorse. But instead they're allowed to run free, and this is what we get.

I find google works fine if I'm just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.

And I find that it's pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it's still just going to return the same general shit.

I'm not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it's been a year or two now, and maybe more - it's just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.

It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.

But starting a couple of years back, it's been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.

To anthropomorphize, it's as if it's developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you're looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn't matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term "movie," that's what it's going to focus on. So if you're lucky, you might get the actual movie you're looking for, but it's absolutely guaranteed that you're going to get streaming services and "18 movies with real blood" style clickbait.

Of course they did - that's the point.

And it doesn't matter in the slightest that there's no substance to any of their allegations, because the entire purpose is just to get the idea that there's something there to investigate out into the world.

And it'll likely work, no matter what, because Republican voters are angry morons, so all they're going to get no matter what is "investigate the Jan. 6 investigators because [words]," so it really doesn't matter if those words make sense or not.

Cowboy, no contest.

Samurai's lives belong to their masters. I couldn't live that way.

Pirates live by killing and stealing. I couldn't live that way.

That leaves cowboys. Certainly not the glorious and romantic life Hollywood makes it out to be, but generally honest work toward specific goals and freedom otherwise, which'd be fine.

Literally championing style over substance.

Suits are costumes. The point is to make people look classy and dignified even if they're actually skeevy assholes.

Genuinely classy and dignified people look it no matter what they're wearing.

I would assume that this is just the first in what will be a widespread effort among red states to do the same.

Simply because banning abortion is essentially guaranteed to lead to an increase in pregnancy-related deaths, and that's a statistic that undermines the conservative position.

And it's ALWAYS the case that when truth is contrary to conservative positions, the positions don't change to accommodate the truth - the truth is hidden to protect the positions.

The thing that amazes me the most about Trump is that he's so ridiculously cartoonish.

Who'd've thought that the most determined assault on American democracy would come from somebody who appears to be straight out of an Austin Powers movie?

...launched what he called a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters, which accused it of artificially manipulating the social network’s algorithms to achieve the contentious juxtapositions (while admitting that they had in fact occurred).

This is my favorite part of this whole story.

It's like the narcissist's prayer directly translated into a lawsuit.

As an old guy, I'd have to agree, though as a leftist turned anarchist, I don't give much of a fuck.

I think back though on the Republicans of my youth, and it really was a notably different party.

It's sort of weird to phrase it like this, but they were assholes with principles. I mean - they were shallow, bigoted assholes then too, but it was more common then for them to still be like the old '50s All-American cliche - patriotic, proud, moral, hard-working, honest... conservative in the old sense of the word. I didn't agree with them at all but at least they had a relatively coherent, if shallow and ignorant, ideology that they generally actually lived by.

Somehow though, especially over the last 20 years or so, they've morphed into this bizarre and startlingly toxic mix of psychopaths, hypocrites and grifters. They have no principles at all really - just things and people that they hate - and it's not even vaguely about trying to accomplish things that they sincerely (if mistakenly) think will make the world a better place, but just about fucking over everyone else. And even themselves, if they can colorably believe that by doing so they'll manage to fuck someone else over even more.

I sincerely believe it's a sort of collective mental illness, and truth be told, I think it can only lead to the collapse of western civilization, and the US in particular. There's nothing really that can stop it. It's effectively a closed loop in which greedy psychopaths fuck things up for their own profit and privilege, ignorant psychopaths look for someone to blame for the fact that things are fucked up, power-hungry psychopaths point them at some vulnerable fringe group and tell them that it's all their fault, then while everyone's distracted, the greedy psychopaths fuck things up even more. And 'round and 'round it goes, like a turd circling a toilet bowl. And there's only one way that can end.

Of course he was - I'm sure it was understood and accounted for when he was hired that his job was to promote DeSantis to the Nazis, and if/when some shit hit the fan, he would be very publicly fired.

I'm sure it works just like police brutality firings, and he'll just get hired by a neighboring campaign.

I would imagine a bare handful of people install them.

There's some number of people who are so angry and stupid that the mere sight of something like an option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage, so for them, mods like this are essentially QOL improvements.

More's the pity...

Traffic narcotics.

And not only will you make everyone's lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you're often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you'll be right.

That's the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you're wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you're wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won't be. You'll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.

If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you're wrong, then you're instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you'll actually be right. And if you don't get it that time, that's fine - just freely admit that you're wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.

So you'll not only make everyone's lives more pleasant - you'll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?

Not that it makes any real difference, but I wonder how many of them are so stupid and/or blinded by ideological bias that they voted that way because they sincerely believed that the election was invalid and how many of them voted that way because they're cowards with no principles or integrity who were trying to suck up to Trump and his army of violent morons.

At this point, that's one of the only things that provides even a hint of interest about an American right-wing politician - wondering if they're an actual delusional psychopath or if they're just LARPing as one to get votes and/or not get death threats.

Again, not that it makes any real difference...