Walt J. Rimmer

I also noticed that both here on Lemmy and over on Reddit that there's been a push of pro-Russian talking points and a huge push towards Islamaphobia for the past few days, starting just before the attacks this weekend.

I understand there's going to be some natural anger over the attack, but the amount of accounts I've seen, especially noticeable here on Lemmy because we just don't have as many users, who are saying things like, "This is just what Muslims are like," and, "Western countries accept these kinds of people, so expect them to do the same there," and other racist bullshit talking points. They've also been painting the ongoing conflict as unquestionably one-sided in Israel's favor.

It's depressing but kind of to be expected that there's a psyops campaign going on trying to get people outraged at not just Hamas, not just Palestine, but all of Islam right now while simultaneously trying to paint Ukrainian surrender and pro-Russian propaganda. This horrible act of terror was either in part planned by Russia or at the very least is seen as an easy opportunity to try and weaken Western support of repelling their invasion of Ukraine. Just spending a little time in the wrong circles on social media should make that obvious.

Wait, wait, wait... The average middle-class voter who is struggling to get by is starting to turn away from the Tories and their leader's suggestion is to reduce taxes on the wealthiest people? Not to improve services or perhaps address the issues that drove former conservative party voters to Labour. No. Cutting the taxes of the elite, further reducing funding for services that the majority of voters use or rely on is the obvious answer.

They can ask, and even sue, for the property back but it’s not a guarantee that they’ll win.

They're guaranteed to win if the person they're suing can't afford to live for years embroiled in litigation.

Even if he goes to prison, which if he's convicted there's a good chance he gets something more similar to house arrest due to his position as a former president, he is 100% not going to be in general population. I believe he's guilty and hope that if the trial proves that that he's convicted. But people imagining him in the chow line in an orange jumpsuit are fooling themselves.

I don't really know how you can threaten someone when you need them more than they need you.

If you leave town, where are you going to go? The city doesn't need you. If you're not making what you want/need here, go ahead, leave, the city won't be hurt by it. You will, though. Because you'll have to pack up your business, set it up somewhere else, and hope that they do the things you want them to. It'll be expensive for you, won't mean a thing to the city.

So how is it a threat?

While I'm not quite that blunt, I do tend to take a utilitarian approach to institutions. When I went to school, I went there to attend classes, learn, work, the like. When I went to a job, I went there to work. I don't really know how to approach people; the few times I've tried I've only made people uncomfortable, and mostly I just sit on my own and focus on what I'm "supposed" to be doing.

This left me burning out with depression and failing out of university, unable to find a job and being some kind of unhirable that I don't know why or how to fix as I've spent three years looking for anything that will hire me with no takers, and I have absolutely no friends. I'm a man in my thirties with almost no work experience, no marketable skills, no connections, living off the kindness of family, and just ever-growing gaps in an almost empty resume.

Don't be like that triceratops. And for the love of fuck, don't be like me!

Look at what happened to Gary Bowser. Dude basically ran PR on a website, but because he was the guy who they were actually able to find and get a hold of easily, he's now on the hook for millions of dollars of damages that he didn't cause to Nintendo.

I am disappointed in this because I think that there is such a thing as ethical piracy and protest piracy and that they're important. But I also know that those things aren't going to be stopped or even significantly hindered by one instance deciding not to host their content. And I understand the fear that comes with stories about how rights holders have gone after whoever the fuck they can when they've got a burr up their ass about something.

Should the admins of Lemmy.World be held liable for a community simply discussing piracy and not actively practicing it on the site? No. Would they be? We don't know. It's possible. And that's what makes it scary. People who commit digital crimes often get hit with disproportionately harsh punishments. They're sometimes treated like terrorists. It's insane. And yes, it's frightening.

Sadly, with recent events, all I can think about with this is how Linus Sebastion would go on the WAN Show and say things like, "You don't need a union unless you have bad management, and I never want my employees to need a union."

I thought Lemmy was supposed to be the best free speech alternative

I don't think there's any useful definition of a "good" free speech website. Because everyone's going to disagree on the criteria of what makes one good. Myself, I like more moderation, but I like that moderation to be held accountable in an attempt to keep the moderation higher quality and honest. Some people see free speech as no moderation, total anarchy, and I hate that, I've seen some websites that tried that, it turned into hate speech and revenge porn and other terrible things very quickly.

Well, time to fill my life with meaningless debauchery, because it's not like there's a future to plan for.

My question isn't what the law says they can do but what they're actually willing to do.

While Georgia has said that Trump is going to get a mugshot, his three other arrests have decided not to do the mugshot, not to do the perp walk, not to this, not to that. He's getting special treatment, and we don't realistically know where that's going to end. And with current law, former presidents get lifetime protection of the secret service, so there is a practicality question for if Trump is locked up.

I'm hoping that the trials bring out the truth, right now I believe the truth to be that he's guilty, and I hope that if he keeps violating the terms of the courts, which he seems deadset on doing, that he's put in jail for that while the trials are ongoing. But I don't necessarily think they will do that even if, on paper, they can.

I don't know shit about guns, so someone, please tell me, is this at all practical? Like, is this a surprisingly usable combination or a ridiculous pairing?

He didn't call us idiots. He called us unempathetic. And I'd say that's been a fair assessment of a lot of the internet. I know that when I was on Reddit, I'd read a lot of comments that were filled with entitlement, people feeling they were owed something especially if that something was free, and very little empathy. For how much Redditors (and now that many of us have fled to Lemmy to build a new social media life, Lemmings) like to criticize the, "They're just lazy, I'm really struggling," mindset, they sure do like to ask for free things but complain if people treat them the same way.

I can almost understand the Personal Liberties Libertarian, which I think is what the philosophy was originally supposed to be about. But we often see Corpo-National Libertarians or Totally-Not-An-Anarchist-I-Swear Libertarians, and both of those are baffling to me.

The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system.

Yeah, but... Lots of things come to us from other solar systems given enough time. Just naturally. Is it alien? Yes! But that's nothing special. Is it technology? I mean. Probably not. This is almost certainly a non-story. If the headline read something like, "Harvard professor studying extra-solar fragments," it would be just as interesting to anyone who actually cares. But that group is very niche. As it is, the headline we get is eye-catching but stupid and malicious.

As a Unitedstatesian myself, while I like to keep informed of important events, even I like to get a break from the constant stream of the same news or meme or whatever being shared a dozen times, or in the case of today's mugshot, 70+ times.

I agree with you. But it's important to still point out and want to fix problems even in the "better party." We can't simply be accepting of "be less bad." We need to always strive to improve. And weakening the connections between Wall Street and Washington is a big progressive goal that the old guard of Democrats have directly opposed.

You joke, but I've seen those kinds of arguments, especially online.

Some time back, someone argued that global warming was a self-solving problem because the oceans reflect light and heat energy back out into space, so as the earth warms and the oceans rise, the ability to reflect that heat will increase and we could even go back into an ice age because of it.

That is, of course, not really how it's going to go. Massive ecological collapse and possible human extinction would occur due to the initial warming, first off, even before you get to the arguments about... Everything else at the crux of that.

For a long time, one of the talking points of climate change denial wasn't that it wasn't happening but that it was normal for us to go through heating and cooling cycles, so just deal with it and wait it out, we survived the last ice age so we can survive this heat wave, right? But again, that's mostly bullshit.

I miss Cantor's more experimental stuff like this. His work with Tally Hall is a lot of fun, and Not a Trampoline is a favored album of mine. Like many, I originally found him because he blew up on YouTube a couple of times, with his biggest being this Shia LaBeouf video. Nowadays, though, he's got a steady income making children's music in a collaboration with a couple of other artists, and I can respect wanting that stability in your life. But... Man, do I miss his experimental style.

I mean, it is a thing. I'm not saying that you'll agree that it's a right thing or that it's justifiable. I understand arguments against it. But it's more along the lines of Peter Sunde's stuff. Piracy which fights for freedom of information, against things like corporate secrets and abuses, things like that. One of the examples of ethical piracy has been using piracy to share news and media with blackout countries, nations that are banned from getting any media that isn't state approved. I would call that kind of piracy ethical piracy.

Protest piracy is where you pirate something in protest of the people who would otherwise be making a profit off of it. There's a reason why that's not under the same umbrella. People can call pirating Adobe products what they want, but it's not at the same level of trying to effect social change as ethical piracy reaches for.

I have got to stop oversharing. I just deleted a three-paragraph explanation of shit you didn't ask for. Sorry abut that. Anyway, it was a BS in Mathematics.

I mean... Yes?

For most websites to be functional, they need to be moderated. If you let anarchy reign, it's not some utopia like I've seen a shocking number of people online claim that it would be. It ends up with a lot of racism, hate speech, doxxing, threatening violence, illegal content being posted, users being harassed, and other terrible things. Most people won't want to be part of a site like that because it isn't accepting or welcoming, it's a dumpster fire.

No one should have come into Lemmy.World and thought, "Huh, this is going to be true freedom! I'm going to start advertising selling cocaine!" Maybe they'd want to, but the site isn't just anything goes. They're trying to run it on the open web and draw in a stable community. To be clear, I'm understanding but unhappy about the decision to ban communities about piracy. But criticizing a website by saying, "I thought you said anyone could come in, so why do you have rules, HUH?" That's bullshit!

Yeah. If this hadn't been banned already in Canada, it makes me wonder what other laws I just assumed were common in Western republics and democracies actually aren't.

Does the bill specify who they're going to be paying the money to, though? Because an infrastructure bill saying we're going to spend a certain amount of money on these projects can predict changes in certain industries, but being on a committee and saying, "We're going to hire this specific company with this huge government contract to do this work," can tell you exactly what company is about to have a huge boost to their value.

Of course, the unprompted violence against a people must be the first thing to be addressed. But this new policy does nothing to actually help in that fight while doing harm to the peace which one would hope would happen afterward. There have been nations in perpetual states of war, and it's rather horrible. No one should want this to become one.

That was more my point. This is a fascinating thing to study! It's new and from very far away and observations around it are odd! That's all exciting! But that's all exciting without having to force in, "ALIENS CONFIRMED???" into the conversation around it.

I guess they're trying to insinuate that there's a conflict of interest because he worked for a government agency and Wikileaks leaked documents pertaining to that government agency.

But, like... That would be like saying no judge could oversee the case of someone who attacked a courthouse because they work for the same legal system. That would be a real loophole in the law if by breaking the right ones, you just couldn't be tried anymore.

Early adopters of almost anything tend to be niche. These Threadiverse sites are looking to pick up where pseudo-message boards like Digg and Reddit left off without being extremist havens like Voat and other bullshit. So let's look at who the early adopters of those sites were. Because... They're not that dissimilar to the demographics that you're describing. Reddit didn't start out as the kind of place that just anyone went to. It tended to be tech heads in their mid-twenties or older, gamers, and chronically online people. They tended heavily to be male. And there tended to be some... Really unfortunate widely-shared opinions.

As Reddit grew, it changed. But it took time. It took there being content on Reddit to appeal to a wider set of people. And that's going to be the case here. It needs to reach a first sustainable mass where enough content is being created to engage and keep the users who first joined it. But that userbase is going to be rather similar. There are always going to be subgroups that are different, but for the most part, the same kinds of people are going to be the early adopters. Creating a breadth of content that will appeal to more and attract a wider variety of users over time will help people feel more comfortable with it.

And, yes. The Fediverse is kind of weird to most people. I was in an argument the other day where someone was insisting that saying you saw something on Limmy or KBin was wrong, you saw it on the Fediverse, and could everyone just stop being wrong please. That kind of pedantic culture is only going to make adoption even slower than it already is. Because most people, they like to go to a site and create a login to look at that content. The Fediverse isn't really that complicated, but it takes a little jump in how you think about websites to go from something like Twitter or Facebook to something like Lemmy or Mastadon. But people were kind of confused about the leap from message boards to social media like MySpace and Facebook as first too. They came around. It took time. It took exposure to the content. It took people using it and sharing it.

So, yes. The Fediverse is mostly a monoculture right now, focused on the people most likely to make the most of out it: Tech heads with some time on their hands for hobbies. The kind of people who either might make their own Fediverse instance or who would know the people that would. Those tech heads aren't exclusively Linux users, they're not exclusively over the age of thirty, and tech heads aren't exclusively the user base, but yes, we're going to start out seeing an imbalance. That's normal. That's to be expected. What's going to be concerning is if five years from now we have the same or a worse imbalance. That will mean that the Fediverse is stagnant or shrinking instead of growing. That will be a time to rethink some strategies for sure. But for right now, all we can do is be active, share the site with other people, and try to get it to spread to more diverse demographics.

Any de-federated instance doesn’t have the money or resources to start DDOS attacks.

It's shockingly cheap and easy to DDOS people, especially if you know something that makes them exceptionally vulnerable as is mentioned in the post above. Small-time wanna-be hackers can put their allowance savings into getting a DDOS running just to be spiteful little shits.

Sure, could it be a corporate attack? Of course it could be. But could it also be some spiteful little fanboy who just wants to piss on people who want to do their own thing? Of course it could be that as well. And dismissing that as impossible is simply wrong.

Yeah, I mean, I know. I've heard it all before, I've tried to work on things, like, I'm an adult, I've been doing this for a long time, I know how it goes. I was putting my story up as a warning to others. I'm not looking for a savior.

I can't speak to their usage, but mine was a reference to this song.

Hahaha! Uh, they weren't great for a combination of factors, especially in my last year when I failed Real Analysis. Twice...

I've tried coding. Not very good at it. Scripting can be fun, but I'm just really, really crap at it. Took the 101/102 classes for CS as one of my science requirements. I actually took 101 twice because I had taken it in community college first and the credit didn't transfer. Three CS classes, never finished a final project. I couldn't ever get them close to working for some reason. Like, I got a C or better as a final grade without ever turning in a final project in each class, but still. My practical application of software engineering is, well, impractical.

As it is, a portfolio and networking (heh) tend to be the most important that I've heard from a lot of people when it comes to software engineering. I've tried to dabble, currently trying to battle my depression enough to actually work on making a point-and-click game in Adventure Games Studio. And my progress is just... Abysmal.

My biggest concern certainly isn't age groups. My biggest concern is interest groups. The initial influx from the Reddit protests created a lot of communities that will definitely become ghost towns. And there's going to need to be a process to clean that up eventually. The interests that are here right now are good for keeping the people already here. What's going to be interesting to watch is if broader appeal topics will start to grow or not. As I said, I expect a lot of die-off actually in the early days as people try out the Fediverse but then go back to what they were already used to.

Reddit had a lot of help from being a private company when they were growing. Anyone familiar with Reddit's history will know that it got propped up in part, eventually, by really high-quality celebrity events like the AMAs (Ask Me Anythings) coordinated with big names in multiple fields, though most popularly film and television. I worry that the Fediverse, as a decentralized entity, will never have something like that. Producers, movie marketers, agents, people like that are far less likely to take a call from someone running a Lemmy instance than they were from an outreach officer of a private company that had some weight behind it. Now, that's not the only way to grow, but... Damn it helps.

If Chicken can be a language, that can be a language!

And I don't mean the actually useful programming language. I mean the esolang one where the only valid character is Chicken.

Federal appeals are more difficult and more rare. The state charges he'll have an easier time appealing against, though. Lots of questions still up in the air about how all that will go, though. Unless he's barred from office, there's a chance he does become president again, which would make things incredibly complicated. There's also the question of him appealing to the Supreme Court and them simply overturning anything they can that's been brought against him. I find these unlikely, but they're possible. For the USA, this is the first time someone in that high of an office has gone to trial like this, and we're going to be having to make some answers on the spot.

I think it's more like saying, "I saw this on my phone," or, "I was on the computer and read," which are both entirely reasonable.

It's just stating what format you were using when you saw it. Like, "I was scrolling through Google News and read..." What you actually read was an article hosted on a different website, but you were using the platform of Google News to read it. It's the same kind of thing as saying, "I read on Lemmy," because you were browsing Lemmy when you read something.

It's not wrong to say that these things are on this site. I often specify Lemmy.World because that's the instance that I use and other Fediverse sites function slightly differently. That's one of the both great and annoying things about the Fediverse is how every instance is slightly different. I'll say, "I was on Lemmy.World and..." I don't know, saw a post, made a post, had trouble because mod controls are minimal over here, whatever. Saying, "On the Fediverse," is more generic. It's usually considered best convention to go with more SPECIFIC terms than generic. I consider using my Mastadon account and using my Lemmy account to be different, but they're both on the Fediverse. I would feel really weird talking about my Mastadon account in the same terms as my Lemmy.World one since I use the two platforms completely differently.