I'm not here for a drawn out debate. I think Israel's settlement program is a major reason why there is no peace and I would find Israel a lot easier to defend if they weren't doing it. It is only one piece of the puzzle though.

I mean the whole reason why you are confused is that this is the most complex conflict in the world and here (like everywhere else) you are going to get responses in both directions. I suggest you read what each side has to say for itself: for unconditional pro-Israeli propaganda I suggest https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/ and for unconditional pro-Palestinian propaganda I suggest https://mondoweiss.net/ – read both of these and decide for yourself what arguments on both sides you believe more.

I do not think there are any truly good guys in the conflict; but I do think that Israel is worse and tend to side with the Palestinians. This is mainly because Israel is the side with vastly more power and I think it's up to the powerful, the oppressor, to try to treat the people they have power over with dignity and try to give up the power they have.

Of course, even that argument of mine has a counter-argument! You can (and should!) read it here: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-parameters-of-discussion-michael.html

The thing is that I actually mostly agree with you, but I do not think that the other side is entirely illegitimate.

I kept seeing more and more things in Cyrillic especially because of the war in Ukraine, so gradually learned more and more of it online, now I know at least all the letters used in Russian. Now I can read Cyrillic, although only very slowly, basically I do it like an elementary school child.

I live in Austria for context, no neighboring countries with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Reading the Cyrillic alphabet.

It's not anywhere near as hard as it seems and there are so many times you encounter it.

That last paragraph doesn't work in a secret ballot system.

What language is "Fiorenza"? The city you mean is called Firenze in Italian.

exactly me, I tried to get into Twitter a few times in the late 2000s and 2010s, but never could really see the use of it; nowadays I am a regular reader of Mastodon

Reddit meanwhile I have been active on (sometimes more, sometimes less, on different accounts) since 2014, so I can't post a top-level answer here. I still enjoy forum-style communities like on Lemmy more than I enjoy microblogs, so post a lot more here than on Mastodon, but I read both regularly.

John Perry Barlow was right

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Try to establish a proper western-style liberal democratic system and culture in Russia. They have a constitution that is nominally liberal democratic, but they are so used to authoritarian rule that they can't really manage to keep it that way.

The more time passes, the more information can already be found on the web (including forum threads) and the less need there is to post new threads to these kinds of forums.

1988 and see the Berlin Wall (from the west obviously), travel through ghost metro stations

A full sentence (including a question) ought to, at the very least, have a verb in it.

I have never heard or read that name before, so I think absolutely nothing about that person. I am going to look it up after saving this comment.

Can be either, neither is technically impossible. As another comment said, you can try for yourself what still works when your phone isn't connected to the Internet.

mainly I would give him a hug and tell him he's a good and worthy person because that is what he needs the most

KDE Plasma because I can make it look, feel and work mostly like Windows. I have to use Windows at work and don't want to have to think too hard about differences between computers I use at work vs. at home.

What is the difference between USA and USB?

One connects to all your devices and accesses your data, the other is a hardware standard.

Why is a "conservative cell carrier" even a thing…that has to exist… or exists… nah you know I don't actually wanna know…

Microsoft names many things stupidly.

Messages that people post on Stack Exchange sites are literally licensed CC-BY-SA, the whole point of which is to enable them to be shared and used by anyone for any purpose. One of the purposes of such a license is to make sure knowledge is preserved by allowing everyone to make and share copies.

You think you're going to get a better answer by asking that here rather than by reading the Wikipedia article or a media company's summary of what Hamas is?!

As neutrally as possible:

Hamas is an organization in the area of historical Palestine. It has been governing the Gaza Strip, a small piece of land between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, since 2007.

Ever since then, Israel has been blockading the Gaza Strip. Every few years, eg. in 2014 and 2021 and now again, Hamas fires rockets at Israel or otherwise attacks it, to which Israel responds with airstrikes.

Palestinian narrative: Israel is a settler colonial state that has taken away Palestinian land and is imprisoning Gazans in Gaza. Fighting against that is legitimate resistance against oppression. Israel's goal is ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Israeli narrative: Israel is a safe haven for the historically oppressed Jewish people. Arabs have plenty of other countries for themselves. The aim of Hamas is to eliminate the Jewish state and maybe even the Jewish people. Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties in its airstrikes against Gaza.

The actual truth: There is no such thing as the actual truth. There is a reason why this is the most difficult conflict in the world.

inb4 people with strong opinions on both sides tell me their opinion is obviously right and the above is nowhere near neutral

I have never understood why so many people find the structure of Twitter/Mastodon more appealing than that of Reddit/Lemmy.

I like it when I read other people's thoughts on a matter, then react to them by adding relevant thoughts of my own and hoping people will react to mine too. Like on a traditional discussion forum (or for even older people, newsgroup or mailing list). That is what Reddit/Lemmy does reasonably well, although not quite as well as those traditional discussion forums.

On Twitter/Mastodon I have to have original thoughts of my own to be able to post anything at all, and even if I do have some, no one will read them if they aren't already following me.

You know, until recently I thought that the golden days of Internet activism were over and we were mostly living in times where it was ridiculously easy to get things censored on the Internet.

Then something as stupid as this gets this amount of attention because of Internet users having way too much time and energy to spread it. WTF

Adobe Flash Player was deprecated some years ago, so there is no longer any functioning official software that can play Flash games. The modern equivalent are mobile games.

The reason why reimplementing it is a worthy thing to do is to preserve old software, same reason why console emulators exist.

Nowadays it is possible to set up many services in such a way that you authenticate in a different way from a password, for example with an app on a smartphone. Such services can't ask you for your password until you have told them what account you want to log into because it might turn out you have to give them something other than a password.

The Vice President's only constitutional power is to break ties in the Senate, which is not a very relevant power.

If you think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were good for the world then I don't know what to tell you.

Does the average voter just not care at all about anything actually important? What is even going on here?

2004: The Internet will lead to a utopian society without gatekeepers, without censorship, where we get our information from each other and primary sources, not media companies!

2024: The Internet is based on algorithmic attention. Those who control the algorithms control what parts of the immeasurably large pile of data will get attention and which not. Yet they are protected by the same intermediary liability laws as if they were traditional web forums, blog hosters, wikis with no personalized algorithm (for which those laws are very good and necessary).

Linus Torvalds is a "full-blown woke communist"? Citation needed.

I have been a FOSS enthusiast since my preteen or early teenage years (mid-to-late 2000s), yet I am not in any sense a communist.

"how to kill orphaned children in Java"

what do you mean Java is also the name of an island

That is literally what browser bookmarks are meant for.

Firefox/LibreWolf

Stallman was right

I wonder what state FOSS replacements for Adobe software would be in if a significant percentage of Adobe users used their subscription money to donate to FOSS replacements instead.

How were you "not able to post anything"? If you noticed you weren't able to post anything (e.g. got an error message), that was (by definition) probably not shadow banning.

Buying lots of identical pairs of socks massively reduces the amount of time you need to find matching pairs after drying them.

The Internet used to be a common resource and information system.

Now it is a propaganda warzone.

It appears I am getting bored with the entire Internet.

When we had web forums with thread bumping, I got an endless stream of interesting and entertaining things to react to despite there being relatively few users.

That isn't shadow banning, it sounds more like a server (performance?) issue on your instance.