Monkey With A Shell

I’ve read of a couple small places. Was a coffee shop in the cities around here where they guy running it for 20+ years wanted to get out and the staff decided that rather than a new owner they would raise funds to buy it. Sort of run like a direct democracy with some rules based on seniority and such.

Like most anything P2P scale, consistency, and adoption are huge factors.

Don’t know about social media, but sites exist in systems like this: https://zeronet.io/

Quite welcome, I’m sure the great worker’s uprising will come one day and we shall all be forced to use the glorious app known as WeChat.

You’re trying too hard man, after about 2 rounds it became obvious that China way =good, 'Murica way=bad and that’s the bottom line.

Said I can, not that I do. Not that I should expect the .ml CCP shills to understand anything outside of the tankie sphere.

I can literally go on the calendar, add a location which will interface with the maps app, which can give me reviews, menus, directions, etc. Add people from my contacts, who use any type of email and cal they like (not limited to WhatsApp users) and have an email sent off with an ICS file to add to their calendar of choice. Provide a drive attachment in the same calendar invite if there was something to discuss with this meetup…

Feeding all my info to a Chinese app isn’t going to somehow improve that. My larger interest is in breaking up the aggregation of data by a single entity.

Same thing you can do in the Google app ecosystem, but in that case we say ‘hey maybe I don’t want this company to know everything about me, my plans, and what I like’.

Here’s the funny thing with that. We watched things like Bill Nye and Captain Planet as kids. We’ve been aware of the evidence of science and the needs to change our society since a very young age. For many years we where told ‘use plastic so they don’t cut down trees’ only to realize later that was wrong. All through it we where telling the parent and the grandparents that things needed to change and the future wasn’t looking great.

Not one fuck was given.

So when it came time to be the parents and the mundane middle life drones many simply said hold onto what scraps you can and hope for the future, but in the meantime I just want to sit down for a bit. It’s draining as hell to spend decades of your life being ignored, it’s not a wonder we get called the forgotten generation.

We’re just chilling watching the show…

I sit at the tail end of it, or as I’ve seen it described ‘xenials’, wishing things would start to make sense again one day.

Blockchain! NFT! Toss in fediverse of course and you can make up all the should we build it buzzwords in one…

The very nature of the fedi is personal ownership and communal development. Attempting to stuff commercial platforms into it is contrary to the whole premise.

In my org a lot of it can come down to having someone to demand fixes from. If something becomes a critical component of the workflows there has to be someone with an enforceable SLA held over them to get things fixed when needed.

A big part of it is Americans at large object to any kind of coercive governance however it manifests. I can’t in good faith say that nations like China or N Korea that exercise such tight control over the public media and messaging are a net good to their population. Cooperative social goals for universal housing, healthcare, a decent standard of living are good, but we have a huge portion of ‘bootstraps’ minded folks that get in the way. In the meantime we get this piecemeal patchwork that we have that over time has lent itself to rights for minorities of various stripes that eventually get adopted as the norm. Right now we’re sitting at a spot where the pendulum of progress is being pushed hard back right, how to stop that is the tough question.

See I don’t mind a decent conversation with them either. I actually hold a lot of ‘leftist’ views myself. What gets to be troublesome is when people come in with a perspective that what passes for liberal in the US is violently evil. Our system is very flawed, easily viewed by the way the electoral college allows for a person with less of the popular vote to win. However, it’s what exists and without some massive uprising changes are going to be slow at best.

Look at the chaos that came from the George Floyd murder. That went on for a few months and little of major note changed. Or the occupy Wall Street that just kind of petered out to nothing. The media moves on to the next shiny thing and people lose interest. The most recent with the killing of a CEO was just a couple weeks ago and you can already feel the fervor for it slowing down.

People have good reason to want changes, and so many times ‘liberal’ and ‘leftist’ people have similar stated goals. It often feels that the liberals are being fought from both sides, one actively against them in principal and the other yelling for trying to work with the system as it exists.

You can follow tags for a while in Mastodon, that way you don’t have to follow a specific person but more a topic.

I’d expect if there was an equivalent of ‘gab’ or ‘truth social’ they would be defederated too. I can understand an action like that because people join these places specifically because it’s an echo chamber fitting their viewpoints and they’re allowed and even encouraged to be hostile to outsiders.

With the way the fedi is set up you can certainly set up multiple accounts, and I’m sure there are more than a couple from those instances cut off that create accounts elsewhere to have those conversations. The difference being that they’re expected to behave in a civil fashion rather than just screaming at others.

On my single-user instance I haven’t defederated anyone and only blocked a handful of outright spam/troll accounts and a couple who seem to have a single life purpose to push an agenda.

I’ll generally agree to all that. What I notice though is that far left instances (and I imagine far right as well, though I don’t think I’ve really seen any on Lemmy) are far quicker to delete and ban than a more centrist instance who are more prone to let the argument play out unless it gets outright hostile/personal. When that delete button is too easy to use you get where someone can’t have a proper discussion at all.

To reword using more proper terms for the system, ‘communities reside in instances’. A community called ‘news’ on .world’s instance is a far different thing than on hexbear for example.

An echochamber is just a trait of a given community where any dissenting views from the home instance mods are reported and deleted. At least those actions are visible via the modlogs on here so it stays transparent though.

The format is certainly more conducive to discussion. On the flip side though since communities reside in spaces and are moderated by individuals here, compared to the more ‘broadcast’ nature of using tags on Mastodon, you end up with some really bad echo chambers on Lemmy. Just a quick look at a basic news community between instances will show a massive slant depending who runs it. With Mastodon people talk more globally and the obnoxious ones just get blocked en-masse rather than so much being at a mod’s whim.

They used to have this thing called the Ionic Breeze from the ‘as seen on TV’ brand Sharper Image. Pretty sure they went bankrupt, something about shoddy products and creating excessive indoor ozone as I recall.