I don’t know specifically about Mastercard and Visa, or other jurisdictions, but I recall in my country that financial institutions have responsibility too. Finance is a major part of child exploitation just like it is with other organized crime, and they have a decent amount of power to analyze and flag suspicious finance networks, and governments benefit from compelling them to look into money instead of simply accepting it.

Lots of the people involved in CSAM are stupider than you might think, surprisingly bad at privacy/security given that almost everyone including governments hates them.

Well, I tried looking up videos of this and found one more reason not to: someone brought a bucket of hot water to their car and slipped on the icy driveway, spilling it on their face.

Is it because of pedestrians, or just heavy car traffic? [edit: just read the road details, looks like it’s a one-way ‘living street’ with pedestrians, capped at 20 mph]

(just posting OSM link for anyone else like me avoiding Google) https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/13526138

For what it’s worth: something I haven’t seen come up (so while this is a pragmatic perspective, don’t pretend I’m dismissing the importance of your relationship and your values! I’m only adding this for variety and discussion)

People can change. Many won’t, but some do. [vid: former white supremacists describing their process of leaving] Whether you think your brother is willing or able to change is your call, and whether it’s worth the emotional and mental strain is your call. You aren’t obliged, but it’s worth considering.

People who have left these ideologies, from what I’ve heard, often come back to two main points - they had someone in their life who cared about them, but was also unwilling to tolerate their bullshit, and they had to want to leave it by themselves. Honestly, I see parallels with people recovering from serious drug addictions and cults like QAnon.

But, again, this isn’t easy and there’s no guarantee of them changing, so do not feel obliged to even try. Your health is more important, and there are plenty of other ways you can help change the world.

Some people who were in Special Ed report, like, major emotional trauma from it.

Is that with people also in Brazil? Because your experience sounds very different from the cases I’ve heard in some other countries where Special Ed students are isolated rather than given extra classes at the end of the school day.

for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.

I’ve been on somewhat niche sites which have lasted decades, with waves of people coming in whenever related sites screw up and trickles of people leaving when an alternative community becomes more popular. It’s a comfy, slow existence, which works for some communities, but not for ones like this which thrive on diversity and chattiness, rather than really well thought-out replies days apart from each other. On reddit-like sites, time penalizes how high a post goes (unlike a forum where years-long threads are very normal to see on a front page) so there is an inherent benefit in having consistent activity. That doesn’t imply boundless growth, but at least sustaining a decent level of activity. We’re not chasing ad revenue, growth for growth’s sake is not what we want or need.

But with that said, a community with no new visitors can only lose them. That can be a slow process, but it’s inevitable. Been there, done that. Again, doesn’t imply that pointless growth is a good thing.

Perhaps there’s a better term, because “communities” already means something else here. Last thing we need is another Discord-calling-groups-‘servers’ mess.

“Homes” could be alright? or even “towns”?

Personally, I suspect the bigger problem for their platform will be handling the contrasting values of Western social media norms against their own.

Even sinophobic reactionaries have been pointing out for years that “[Douyin] Chinese TikTok is Wholesome, American TikTok is Corrupting our Youths!” with product influencers/grifters, rampant sexualization up to and including pornography, etc., albeit the reactionaries are interpreting the difference from a conspiratorial moral-panic viewpoint claiming it’s weaponization by The Chinese Government to corrode Western society, rather than the difference being that the US TikTok is social media with liberalist freedoms combined with the capitalist pursuit of profit above society, and is in line with the content on Xitter, reddit and other familiar social media.

The point being, that people rise to the top of TikTok through sexual suggestion, flashing symbols of wealth and other normalized habits which I’ve heard are banned on Lil’RedBook (which sounds like a great decision!).

I am clearly not asking how this differs from other platforms. I’ve been here since 2022.

I still use Invidious and Piped for searches and looking at comments, but they are currently broken (as far as I’ve seen).

(Conditionally) journals, studies and some books. And, for that matter, most television, film and music.

Particularly when paying is not supporting the creator, only the publisher.

But that’s just it - it’s not a useful heuristic, it’s a delusional framework, even more than the geocentric model was. We were mapping the planets onto that, but that didn’t make it useful.

2. There appears to be a lack of “centrist”, non-political, or right-wing voices (and I don’t mean extreme MAGA-type views, but rather more moderate conservative positions).

I see plenty of them. They’re just mostly on other instances to me (like your home instance).

Furthermore, while it’s tempting to see the so-called ‘left’ and ‘right’ as equivalent mirrors needing to be balanced for diversity, the reality is far from it. After seeing Wolfballs in action (that instance died before the reddit API fiasco), I can tell you we don’t need to be balanced out by ‘white genocide’ discussions and more open anti-semitism. I know that’s not what you proposed, but it’s to illustrate that sometimes there isn’t value in arbitrary balancing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ on these websites.

is it a natural result of Lemmy’s community-driven nature?

It’s also a result of Lemmy’s history and appeal. When reddit went on sprees of deleting subreddits, the right-wing hate groups made their own reddit clones, anarchists typically went to Raddle, and when GenZedong and ChapoTrapHouse went down, they went to Lemmygrad.ml (as a result, it became the largest instance) and created Hexbear respectively. So there is a long history of larger communist communities from day one which was the status quo until the reddit API fiasco.

The Fediverse also tends to attract anarchists and other socialists by the appeal of its decentralized nature, along with a few right-libertarians who see it as an anti-censorship tool. So one could say there’s a bias there.

How might we encourage more diverse political perspectives while still maintaining a respectful and inclusive environment?

That’s tough, because you inherently limit which political perspectives you can encourage.

I’m glad you mentioned the open infrastructure projects. For example, I use some of the few remaining nitter/invidious/etc. servers.

As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions.

Definitely. I’m already spending much of my spare time doing this.

“Which FOSS projects have enough funding that we should donate elsewhere?” is more-or-less asking “Which FOSS projects are overfunded?”, making it almost the opposite of “Which worthwhile FOSS projects are underfunded?”

Plenty of projects I rely on are underfunded or adequately funded, and there are many thousands of underfunded projects. So I’ll have no shortage of projects to consider. By instead asking for the overfunded projects, I can simply cross them off my list of projects to donate to.

That’s a different question.

I don’t have one. It’s just a tiny single board computer and an HDD running reasonably stable scripts every few hours and a couple of small server programs. Nothing it’s doing is critical, so in the rare case when something breaks, it stays broken until I fix it.

I wish there was some more detail in the article. My two initial impressions are ‘how does the power get to Earth?’ and ‘Mr. Burns blocks out the sun’. (Obviously it won’t be that big)

For what it’s worth, I’m expecting the best examples to be niche. General sites are often too purposeless to do these things well.

Ravelry looks great, good example!