No - they're blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse through threads.

They're entirely welcome to access the fediverse through any of the countless instances that are not owned by grotesquely destructive megacorporations.

Funny thing - the last time I saw a promising forum destroyed, the beginning of the end was when people got all in a panic about some purported external threat and started demanding a "united front" to combat it. Then they started calling for retribution against anyone who didn't join them. Then they just kept fanning the flames of hostility against anyone on the forum that they decided wasn't sufficiently devoted to their cause, and the forum ended up tearing itself apart from within.

Because it's never let me down.

I started using it pretty much from the beginning and have never had a reason to stop. When Chrome came along, I thought the whole idea of using a browser made by Google was obviously awful, so I just kept using Firefox. And I'm still using it.

That's not uncommon in trades - plumbing, construction, auto mechanics and the like.

There are tricks and techniques that one can learn over time to make things easier or more efficient, but they're often complex enough or require enough skill and experience that if you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to unnecessarily screw things up trying. So new people are taught the standard, safe, dependable way of doing things, even if that's not the way the old hands do it.

Edit to add: in a moral context rather than a practical one, I don't think it ever is appropriate. IMO, the first requirement for any moral stance is that one abide by it oneself, and unless and until one has managed to accomplish that most basic of tasks, one has no standing by which to even meaningfully comment on other people's behavior.

To borrow the new age term, an old soul.

There are just people who possess a sort of cynically detached understanding of the world and people. They aren't fired by largely pointless passion or desire, they're intelligent and perceptive enough to generally understand things and emotionally mature enough to generally accept them and they have a way of just sort of gliding through life, maintaining a relatively even keel instead of getting distracted and disconcerted by irrelevancies.

Every single person I've ever known who was like that has been or is special to me.

I sure as hell hope not.

To me, that's like looking around a great little cafe with terrific food and saying, "Do you think this could ever become McDonalds?"

Why would I want that?

Statelessness is held to be necessary because, in the simplest terms, power corrupts.

If we institutionalize authority - if we create a structure in which authority is vested and positions within that structure that are held by specific individuals - then sooner or later (and history has shown that with communism it's generally sooner) self-serving fuckwads will capture those positions, then bend them to serve their own interests and the interests of their cronies and patrons, to the detriment of everyone else.

And yes - there are practical problems with not having institutionalized authority.

But the thinking of those who advocate for statelessness is that those problems can be, and would be, solved if people had the opportunity. But first we have to get the self-serving fuckwads out of the way, and the only way to do that is to not have institutionalized authority in the first place.

A link on Reddit.

It was immediately after spez's fatuous AMA. I wasn't specifically planning to leave Reddit, but I had never really been satisfied there, so I was open to the idea. And I ran across a link to join-lemmy.org, so I followed it, just to see what it was about. I had no idea then that following that link would end up being the last thing I did on Reddit, but that's the way it worked out.

I sincerely believe that if any aliens are observing us, they've concluded that we actually value and reward insanity and loathe and punish sanity.

And they wouldn't be entirely wrong...

Tremors. It's just pretty much flawless.

It doesn't matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.

You say that you're "well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy," but apparently you really haven't thought it through.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed "we" can do anything.

The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.

We're dumb animals, not much different from other dumb animals.

If squirrels had news media, they could have a story that says, "Thousands of squirrels are lining up to try to cross busy streets in front of cars."

And some number of squirrels would read that and think, "What the hell is wrong with them?"

Invisibility is the defining characteristic of Generation X.

When Douglas Coupland popularized the term in his novel of the same name, that was an awful lot of the point. Generation X was the generation that just sort of fell through the cracks, lost in the shadow of the baby boomers.

Over the years, we've just adapted to it, and really, at this point, it's sort of nice to be forgotten. We can just sit on the sidelines, munching on popcorn, offering up a bit of snidely cynical commentary and reminiscing about great music, great times and great hair.

Or maybe... just maybe... this is backwards and the notable thing is that statistics have been cited in support of a claim that the economy is improving, despite the fact that at least half of Americans believe that it isn't.

No surprise there. He's a middle-aged teenage edgelord - what else would he do other than play video games and shitpost on used-to-be-twitter?

Two favorites that come to mind:

Contact

Baby Driver

Wait... there are people who hate ska?

Why? For that matter, how? What's to hate?

Granted, I'm GenX, so my concept of ska is rooted in the 80s, but I can't imagine that it's changed much since then.

Wait a minute... is this one of those deals where it's trendy in some peer group to broadcast a hatred for something? Like anyone who wants to hang with the cool kids has to verify that they too hate ska?

Which would be sort of like pineapple on pizza now that I think about it, so might well be the whole point here...

I don't know that it does, but I can see how it could.

One way that neurodivergence can manifest is as a relative inability to simply assume things - a relatively outsized need for clear evidence on which to base a conclusion. And religion is notably devoid of actual evidence.

Meta can already scrape everything from every fediverse instance. Hell - if you wanted to and were willing to invest the time and effort, you could scrape everything from every fediverse instance.

By definition, everything that you post online is accessible to other people. The devices through which those other people view the content you posted are able to make copies of whatever they view. So literally anyone with a computer and an internet connection can already "take" whatever you post.

There's only one way in all the world to protect your information, and that's to not post it in the first place. The instant you post it, anyone who cares enough to do it can "take" it, and there's NOTHING you can do to stop them.

If Meta cares about your information, they'll go ahead and collect it anyway, with or without Threads or federation with Threads.

I don't bother with the right-wing propaganda networks so I don't know, but I can't imagine how they might spin this to blame Biden when his administration hasn't even been involved in the process.

The whole thing hinges on a purely internal conflict not just within Congress, but in the House specifically. How does that even colorably come to be blamed on an entirely separate branch?

I don't doubt that the propaganda outlets and the grifters will simply lie, and conjure up some entirely different account of things that won't match up at all with the plain objective reality of the whole thing stalling because a group of hard right House members are demanding concessions and refusing to vote in favor of a budget that doesn't include them, but I can't even imagine what it will be, since it will have to be essentially completely false, from start to finish.

Unfortunately, I also don't doubt that some significant part of the Republican base will believe whatever it is, since they've been so thoroughly indoctrinated and made so subject to their emotions that they literally can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy.

I have no intention of joining Threads, or of being a part of any instance that's federated with them.

And that's entirely beside the point. I'm not arguing the merits (or lack thereof) of Threads or of federation with them.

I'm simply relaying the fact that I've already seen a forum destroyed by the sort of internal strife you're fomenting.

And it should be noted that with your response, you're still following the script exactly, by jumping to the conclusion that because I criticized your call for a "united front," I must be on the side of the enemy.

You need to take your meds.

Over the short term (in an historical sense), that's certainly the case.

I just mentioned on another post that I liken it to individual growth. Just as individuals can and often do mature to the point that they no longer need or desire a mommy and daddy, so too can our species as a whole mature. And I believe that, if we don't destroy ourselves along the way, we not only can but will.

But even if we don't destroy ourselves along the way, yes - that's still many, many, MANY generations away.

The one time I did that, I just switched my inbox from "Unread" to "All." Problem solved.

Off the top of my head...

The Presidents of the United States of America - The Presidents of the United States of America

Stan Ridgway - The Big Heat

The Rainmakers - Flirting with the Universe

XTC - Black Sea

Morphine - Good

Bloodhound Gang - Hooray for Boobies

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Rattlesnakes

The Mattoid - Great Lovers

Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage

Was (Not Was) - What Up Dog?

...or something like that...

I don't really go out of my way. It's more like an ingrained habit.

Most notably, I've never bought a single thing from Amazon. I don't even have an account with them. That's not an ethical decision though - it sort of works out that way, but really it's just a gut-level reaction. The whole idea just repulses me - just looking at a page from their site is somehow gross and creepy.

By the same token, there's a long list of businesses I've either never gone to or at least haven't in the last twenty or so years - Walmart, McDonalds, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, Kroger, Subway, Jack in the Box, etc., etc. Basically, if they're big enough to run national level advertising, they are eliminated from my consideration. And again, it's not really a conscious choice - they just gross me out. It's like the instant I set foot in a place like that, I can feel it corroding my soul.

So when I'm looking for somewhere to shop or eat or whatever, just like anyone else does, there are specific places I don't consider at all. And all major corporations are on that list.

So what's left over - what I choose from - is local or regional, not because I go out of my way to choose them, but just because they're the only ones I'm willing to choose in the first place

And the sort of surprising thing, even to me sometimes, is that I'm by no means starved for choices. There's a world of alternatives out there.

As is generally the case, only a relative few have enough power to actually do something meaningful, and as the winners of the countless battles that had to be fought as they crawled their way up whichever hierarchy to the top of which they now cling, they tend to be ruthless, self-serving, dishonest, amoral and entirely heartless, hiding behind a convincing-enough veneer of principles and integrity.

So as is generally the case, the world can be roughly divided into those who could do something but won't. those who would do something but can't, and those who aren't paying attention, for whatever reason.

Yeah - I read that article yesterday.

While I agree that the panic is tiresome, I wouldn't call that a "grounded" article. It struck me as entirely predictable PR fluff from the "CEO" of Mastodon, which is to say, the specific person who stands to profit the most from any sort of deal with Meta.

The strength of the fediverse is its freedom, and specifically each individual's freedom to create an instance or join any instance they prefer. So my plan is to simply exercise my freedom as I see fit, and without submitting to the rhetoric either of people who are trying to convince me to panic or trying to convince me to welcome Meta with open arms.

I think it was a two-stage thing: first, he got off the leash, then second, he spiraled off into a fantasy world.

There's evidence that Musk has always been volatile and capricious and short-sighted, and that he's had handlers at his companies who specifically acted to limit the things he was told to try to keep him somewhat rational and to filter and recast the drivel that spilled out of his mouth anyway into policies that were at least not obviously harmful.

When he took over Twitter though, there were no handlers already in place, he didn't take any with him, snd they didn't have the opportunity to appoint any. So he was off the leash, and we got the first clear look at unfiltered Elon.

And it's just been in a self-reinforcing loop since then. He undoubtedly always believed that he was making nothing but sound decisions, but that was an easier belief to maintain when he was surrounded by handlers that filtered out his dumbassery. Now that he's off the leash, his dumbassery is front and center, but he still believes that he's making sound decisions. The disconnect between his fantasy and the reality is thus growing all the time, so he has a progressively poorer chance of making sound decisions, but grows ever more convinced that he is, and 'round and 'round it goes.

I expect that it's going to end in the complete collapse of his sanity.

Really.

3,000 - Oblivion

That's spread over 40 or so characters, and dating all the way back to 2006.

!manga@kbin.social

It's pretty much a lost cause, at least for now, but I keep posting anyway. And it's not like it's an imposition - I check in on Mangadex a few times a day anyway, to catch up on my follows and maybe browse the new updates, so I just post discussion threads for the stuff I like and would like to discuss.

Years ago, I used to post a lot on the Reddit manga sub. It was always much more active, but my tastes in manga are obscure enough that most of what I was following didn't get posted otherwise. But then the sub grew to the point that there were more enthusiastic posters even posting that, so I stopped.

That's made it sort of awkward on kbin though, since I'm still just posting the sort of obscure stuff I like. In order to grow the community, it would be better to post more popular series, but that just seems sort of dishonest to me. It seems to me that if I'm not even reading a series myself, I have no business posting it.

So it goes...

I think he's a weak and pathetic piece of shit with a raging inferiority complex, and that it just so happens that the line of self-aggrandizing bullshit that he spins in his desperate attempts to compensate for his overwhelming sense of inferiority is attractive to other desperately insecure losers.

There's a line in Nicholas Roeg's movie Insignificance that has stayed with me for decades now.

There's an obvious Einstein expy just called "The Professor." At one point, he's asked why he's so cautious about his claims - why he habitually says things like, "I think that..." or "The theory is that..." or "One might argue that..."

His response is, "If I say 'I know,' I stop thinking."

That, IMO, points to the primary answer to your question - don't try to remove self-doubt. Nourish it. Revel in it. Because it's the thing that will keep you thinking, and the more you think, the more likely you are to get to actual truth.

This is still nagging at me - there's more I want to say. So, another response.

This particular theory is a pretty good illustration of the unfortunate ignorance of philosophy I mentioned, but an even better one is mentioned in the article - "the popular claim, advanced by philosopher Nick Bostrom and taken seriously by physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Chalmers, among others, that our reality is a simulation being run on a computer, as in The Matrix."

That's not just pseudoscience, but embarassingly ignorant. If these people had even the vaguest understanding of the idea, they'd recognize that it's about as far from science as it's possible to get.

The whole concept was first popularized by Descartes in the 17th century. He presented it as the possibility that one's perception of reality could be manipulated by an "evil demon," but the underlying concept was the same as "the Matrix."

But the thing is that it was never intended to be an actual theory of perception and consciousness - rather it was a thought experiment meant to illustrate the fact that it could be the case that our perceptions of reality are controlled by an evil demon (or are a computer simulation), and we could never know.

The exact point is that it's literally impossible to somehow step outside of our perceptions and our consciousness and analyze them, since any observations we might make are and can only be products of the very perceptions and consciousness we're trying to analyze. So they could be entirely right or entirely wrong or anything in between and we could never know, since they simply are and can only be whatever they are.

As far as that goes then, it not only falls astray of but pretty much explicitly illustrates the distinction between science and pseudoscience.

And if Tyson et al had even the faintest understanding of philosophy - if they weren't blinded by some ludicrously ignorant species of reductive physicalism - they'd already understand that, and recognize how foolish it is to treat the Matrix, or any other such idea, as a legitimate theory.

Digital, no contest.

I'm an old guy and I've been buying and reading books for most of my life. I own thousands of them, filling up shelves and stacked on tables and cluttering everything, and that's even with the bulk of them in boxes in my garage. I love them and I love being surrounded by them, but they're a chore and a burden.

And I have a collection of almost as many ebooks, all in a few GB on a tablet.

So ebooks win on space and convenience.

As far as the actual process of reading goes, they're pretty close to the same, but ebooks have a bit of an edge. I have no issues with a screen, so words on a screen or words on paper are pretty much the same. Physical pages though are bound along one edge and flexible and generally at least subtly curved, while a screen is perfectly flat and evenly lit. Also, on a physical page, I'm stuck with whatever typeface is there, while with an ebook, I can scale it to whatever I want or even change the font or colors or whatever. so ebooks win there too.

And while I'm reading an ebook, I can search the text for any term or character name or phrase, so I can refresh myself on things or find a particular passage or whatever without laboriously thumbing through the pages, and I can switch over to a browser anytime to get background for anything or just look up a word.

And when I finish or drop an ebook, I can just tap the back arrow to go to my shelf, or switch over to an app or browser and go online, and find another one.

So... yeah. I really don't think there's one single thing that physical books do better than ebooks, other than serving as decoration - filling space on shelves.

When I read the thread title, that's what I instantly thought of. I was about the same age and it was about the same situation, and I had the same reaction. And still do.

Yeah - I don't even really understand how all of that works. I see that people apparently sincerely believe, but I have no idea how - what it is that goes on inside their brains that allows them to make that leap to actually believing.

Yes - I know lots of childless genXers, including myself.

I think we were the first generation to see the bullshit fairly clearly, but we weren't even close to being in a position to do anything about it.

The earlier generations generally didn't see it, and the boomers only saw parts of it - they were too easily distracted by their own greed and self-indulgence. Stuck in the shadows as we were, and growing up right in the middle of it - in the world after the Kennedy/King assassinations and Vietnam and Watergate and OPEC and stagflation and Iran/Contra and on and on and on - we couldn't really miss it. But we've never had any real influence (other than our brief but notable time at the vanguard of music, art and fashion), so it mostly just left us sort of cynical and detached. It's fallen to the later generations to get fired up enough to maybe do something about it.

And yeah - my plan too has long been to mostly keep a low profile, try to share a bit of what hopefully amounts to wisdom, then slip off-stage before the inevitable shit hits the inevitable fan.

This'd likely a bit more than inconvenience, but honestly, to the degree that it would be more than that (or more accurately to the people to whom it would be more than that), I just don't give a shit.

Make it literally impossible to knowingly lie. Full stop.

Any argument for your freedom is an argument for everyone's freedom.