I think you misread the headline: "[MasterCard] announced this week that it has instructed U.S. financial institutions to stop allowing customers to use its debit cards to purchase marijuana products at cannabis stores..."

I believed that like 5 years ago, when S42 was "releasing next year!" Wish I could get my money back.

If voting didn't matter the fascists wouldn't be trying so hard to prevent it.

I definitely don't want to excuse how ineffective a lot of Democrats have been, but not voting isn't how you change that behavior; getting more involved is.

I'm sure it's not news to you, but anytime you see someone trying to squash discussion or the like with terms like "snowflake", they're just projecting and letting you know that they're fragile.

I think your car metaphor is even more apt than you meant it, as over time both car manufacturers and mobile platforms have gotten more and more hostile to users actually being able to do maintenance or self service.

I'm definitely bad at striking conversations up with random people, so living somewhere that was walkable wasn't as magical for me as it seems to be for a lot of people here in the comments, but I will say it was definitely better. I got out more, saw people more, just generally felt like I was actually doing thing instead of just moving between my bed and office like now.

I can't help but feel like a lot of the "the internet was better back in the day" is rose colored glasses. Things were just as fragmented, but were even less welcoming to our groups, there was more questionable content that people were trying to trick you into viewing. It definitely wasn't all bad, but it feels like it's coming from the same impulse as every other "things were better back in my day."

To me it feels like the tantrum you see when someone who behaves badly is called out for it. They all almost immediately try to flip it around like they're the victims. Pretty much just thinking of it as a toddler throwing a tantrum and it'll make a lot more sense.

Yeah, reply to that week old post. Reddit trained a lot of people to think that if something is more than like an hour old, it's stale, but that's not how async communication works, especially on a comparatively small server.

Sure, you might run out of new topics, but that's not going to change with any of the proposals I've seen in this thread.

I don't think you know what a thought piece is. There is no analysis or opinion from the author.

Plus when people share their take on it, you just accuse them of parroting talking points. You have added nothing to this conversation past various forms of "you're wrong," with only insults to serve as counter points.

That said, if you want to try to explain to us why you feel a corporation taking away access to something that was bought is fair and just, I'm all ears and more than willing to have the discussion with you that you claim to want.

Hopefully things change for them so we can refederate, as there will be some small communities I miss on those instances. That saud I think saving the mods, admins and community greatly outweighs the impact to me.

I feel like you didn't read the opinion piece at all, and just ran with your feelings from the title. In the first two paragraphs the author talks about how I agreed with the strong initial response to the terrorist attack. It's the wonton targeting of civilians and looking the other way as language of genocide is being used that the author, and every else that I know that isn't blindly pro one side or the other takes.

I don't even think that it's so much a lack of decency in most people, so much as the capitalist society we live in that falsely promotes the idea that it's a zero sum game and that inherently drives people into a crab mentality.

I gave up when they randomly jumped topics and I couldn't tell how they were related. And just generally felt like this essay could have been heavily edited to get it's point across.

In general I like the EFF and the ACLU, but I do think that it's not uncommon for them to end up on the "wrong" side because they extrapolate too far or are being dogmatic when most things have and require nuance.

Here's the synopsis from the site (since it's a podcast I don't feel bad posting this here):

In this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with members of Safe Redlands Schools (SRS), a group of antifascist moms who have come together to push back against far-Right and fascist groups attempting to advance an authoritarian agenda in the Southern California area, specifically in local school districts.

During our discussion, we talk about how these groups, which include far-Right street gangs like the Proud Boys, grew out of far-Right conspiracy theories and reaction to COVID-19 lockdowns, pivoting quickly to opposing “Critical Race Theory” and embracing a politics of gender fascism. As far-Right militants set their sites on the schools boards as a new terrain of confrontation, violence erupted at various meetings, with parents and their children often caught in the middle between politicians, out of town grifters, and their followers in violent far-Right organizations.

Members of SRS map out how they have built a network of concerned parents across their region, the wide variety of organizing that they engage in within their communities against the far-Right, and why they made the important decision to openly label themselves as “anti-fascist.”

I heard it was pretty much twitter with even less moderation, but it's a smaller so you're slightly less likely to run into open neo nazis, but only slightly. I only have hearsay to go on, as it never really interested me, but most of the people I know that went to it have stayed.

Because that doesn't let them shake their fist and tell the youths to get off their lawn.

The idea is more to ensure that the labor class is to tired and sick to fight for their rights.

I think the disconnect here is that others are saying "they aren't supporting us," and your response is pretty much "lol, abandon what you're doing and go back to the corporations." A totally fair take, but how you're delivering it comes across as missing their point.

Also "it works on windows" is a terrible rebuttal in a discussion where you first say "it works fine on x11"

Pretty much already there on some subs.

Loose is not the same and open. The two that have been defederated had open, which means that the problematic users could easily avoid all of the limited moderation tools that are currently in place on Lemmy.

You're unusual. Most people say "both sides" as an attempt to shut down discussion or as another flavor of "what aboutism".

You can always put your phone down. I also get the pressure to return a text/dm right away, but as far as I can tell no one that I actually want to talk to expects that immediate response.

No, you can ask one of the communities to effectively shut down and migrate to the other, but I don't think that is really worthwhile or needed.

Unfortunately there really are only hammers at the moment. You can't just defederate a community, but even if you could that wouldn't help here.

It's not that the two instances were hosting objectionable content, it was that they had a slew of users come to Beehaw to try and disrupt the community, and continue to do things like ban evasion.

It's not as "glamorous" as coding often is seen as, but what almost every open source project needs is better documentation. It's also something that can help you be productive as you're learning a codebase.

The way I was taught to think of Harbor Freight is to buy a tool you aren't sure you'll need from them. If you use it until it breaks you know that it's something you need/will use and you should spend the money to get a quality version. If you don't use it until it breaks then you're just out a little bit of money.

Thankfully I haven't run into issues with Nest, but if I wasn't a renter I wouldn't want them in my home.

It's less than half, as can be seen by popular vote counts. Still higher than it should be, but if it wasn't for voter suppression (as laid out in the article) the right would have significantly less power than it currently does.

I did this about a year ago and haven't looked back. The only thing that's sometimes a problem is if a game has anti cheat stuff that's super Windows specific, but I wouldn't want to run those things anyway.

It's very unlikely that big instances will start blocking small ones. It can certainly happen, but I think most people running Lemmy instances are more likely to want to federate. If they don't they'll probably run one of the forks that explicitly disable it, so you'll never know that they exist from your instance.

Honestly, I don't think more of the same is going to help you feel less burned out. Obviously your couple of sentences doesn't give me a lot of insight into your life, but you do not seem to enjoy your job, and that is going to color your whole perception on anything related to it. I think I'd honestly recommend you start looking for work you actually enjoy, but if that isn't possible I recommend unplugging as much as possible for awhile. That's the only way I've ever had the spark come back for me. Starting side projects always lose their luster after a session or two and just started to feel like another source of stress for me.

Yeah, as annoying as it is, unless you're using messaging software that has been externally audited for security, you should probably assume admins/owners can read your messages.

I don't think I've seen either of those in a decade? Maybe it's because Firefox is my daily driver so it isn't trying to install months worth of updates at a time.

The no federation is recent (and due to the antiDDoS measures as mentioned in the post). I've engaged with some communities on their and talk with some people from it. I personally haven't checked it out, but a lot of what I've heard is that it's an easier onboarding experience.

Unfortunately there isn't a finer grained tool. You can ban users, but if the instance they're from has open sign ups the banned user can just create a new account and return to harassing people on the server. This is the reason that Beehaw defederated with the two earlier this week. They tried everything they could before then, but the tools just aren't there yet to not punish the whole instance if the instance's admin isn't willing to meet part way.

Please don't rely on ChatGPT to give you real answers. Often it's right, but just as often it makes everything up. It does this because it does not know what truth/facts are, but instead knows what an answer should look like.

I also found that I would often see the same people again and again, so it got to the point where maybe we wouldn't really talk, but we'd nod/wave at each other and just generally felt like I was part of a community.

The ACLU tends to rabidly support anything that labels itself as free speech, even if it actually stifles it. Most importantly, to me, their continued support for Citizens United.

But maybe that's the only real case and it's just loomed so large in my mind for the chilling impact "corporations get free speech, and their dollars count as that" has had on the US political landscape.

I got Cassette Beasts specifically for my deck, though everything else I got should work, though the controls might be rough.