Kbin recently popped up if you want an alternative to Lemmy, but it’s still in early beta

the admins of lemmy.ml are tankies and encourage this sort of propaganda posting. i’d highly recommend you move instances if this bothers you; sopuli.xyz and beehaw.org are both good instances

it’s a Gemini link. download a Gemini browser or use the web proxy link in the body instead

even if all the enshittification with ads, API access, and the app were all fixed, there’s one huge flaw with it that cannot be fixed, because it’s central to how Reddit works: karma. karma is gained when you get upvotes, and subreddit admins can gate the subreddits they administrate off to people with less karma than a certain threshold. most subreddits are gated this way. in addition, karma is displayed publicly, and people lend more weight to people with more karma than people with less. because of those two design choices, there’s very little in-depth and niche discussion on Reddit. everyone’s pandering to the lowest common denominator for internet points. i’d laugh, but as i mentioned before, you have to have internet points if you want to participate in certain communities

that’s just my leftie side talking. i’m not inherently opposed to the idea of businesses, since money as a unit of exchange will exist for as long as there is an economic system, but for-profit businesses should be small and relegated to a secondary role in life. there’s a lot of debate around what should be the way that we all get food, water, a home, medical care, etc. (the primary split is people who believe in top-down governmental assistance vs bottom-up peer support networks) but every leftist agrees that the corporations that control our lives should be stamped out.

i guess a large corporation can be defined roughly as a business where the owners do not run it directly. an important part of leftist thought is the divisions between the working class (or the “proletariat” if you want to get fancy) and the owning class (or the “bourgeoisie”). the working class does all the work, and the owning class merely takes the value that the working class produces. a business that’s large enough to the point where the owners are able to just leave it running and leech money off of it without doing any real work is a large corporation in my book.

when businesses get that size, they tend to forget their mission and instead focus on only profit. and they’ll do anything to get more profit, like:

• fuck the environment
• expose their workers to hazardous conditions to cut corners
• steal the creative work of individuals and pass it off as their own

one needs only to look at the Gilded Age for proof of my point. nothing has fundamentally changed between then and now, except that the government is doing things (and even then, not enough).

a lot of problems we face as a society today are the results of big corporations being big corporations. inflation? shareholders being greedy. climate change? corporations forgoing environment-protecting measures because they would cost something. cost of living crisis? you guessed it — corporations trying to squeeze every bit of money out of the working class. and corporations will keep doing this over and over again. as long as they exist, they will dig the hole deeper and deeper because there might be gold at the bottom.

unfortunately, nobody can agree on the best way to hurt big corporations, but fortunately there are a lot of options. they range from electing socialists to office so they can exert governmental control over big corporations, to striking, to outright class warfare. unsurprisingly the practicality of all the different options is mixed, and in any case we are nowhere near where we need to be to put any of them into action.

even though they say they won’t delete YouTube videos, we should get on archiving videos that matter to us anyway. who knows if they’ll keep their word

hence the other issues intertwined with it. if big corpos are going to do that, we must abolish big corpos

i’m gonna be totally honest, i forgot Musicbrainz existed lmao

but i do care about the preservation of our history and culture, and i’ll make an effort to contribute to these archives/indexes once i’m less buried in college work. are there any other indexing efforts that need help at the moment?

indexing efforts? 👀

i’ve thought about this quite a bit, and i’ve come to a similar conclusion. abolishing copyright wouldn’t do much good if we didn’t also guarantee everything one needs to live to everyone. of course, the artist often doesn’t make enough to live on anyway, but making sure that one’s needs are taken care of would free one from the obligation of having a time-consuming job, and free up time for things one wants to do, like create art. i think abolishing copyright is an inherently leftist cause because of all the other issues that are intertwined with it, like paywalls and earning a living

what do you think of a hypothetical law that would allow reproduction and modification of work and selling it, but only at cost and one would have to include credit to the original author?

i would add two additional stipulations to that: copyright restriction should not be automatic, and should be renewed every year. one would have to pay a fee for copyright restriction (without the fee, restrictions would default to a much more permissive CC BY-SA–like system) and the fee must be paid every year the restrictions are renewed

that way, eventually the cost of keeping the material restricted will outweigh the profits, and the license holders will stop paying. it automatically enters the more permissive set of restrictions, and it gains a new life among sharers and remixers

I really like lemmy and it’s link aggregatorness but Calckey’s lack of a character limit makes it a viable alternative.

you can have both :P

every community on Lemmy is followable on other fediverse platforms. this one is @fediverse@lemmy.ml, and you can follow it and receive new posts to here just like any other account you follow! you won’t be able to up/downvote, but you can post here by mentioning @fediverse@lemmy.ml in your post. the first line of your post will be the title, and everything after that will be the body

looking at Reddit, HN, Lemmy, and lotide, it seems like there’s a definite link aggregatorness that these sites/networks share that other sites/networks don’t have. each post is structured in the same way: title, link (to an external website, to an uploaded piece of media, to itself), optional text. the feed is a simple list of posts, with no content displayed besides the title, poster, community it was posted to, and maybe a small preview. people can influence the order in which these posts appear through up and down votes. each community is semi-independently run and focused on a specific topic. comments are invariably displayed as a tree, and are subject to the same vote system as the posts

the content doesn’t necessarily have to be links to external sites, but the interface is optimized for those and uploaded media and plain text posts are treated the same as external links

now compare this to Calckey, Akkoma, Mastodon et al. the interface is built around text posts, displaying them in their entirety. even if the post is only a link, or has media attached, it is treated the same as a text post ux-wise. no structure is imposed on the posts, so people can just submit them into the aether, rather than picking a community to post to first. posts are displayed in reverse chronological order, and there is no mechanism to influence what order the posts appear to others

it’s usable as a PWA (i hear it’s pretty snappy), and they’re working on their own mobile app

they have a comparison of fedi social media software on the main page. according to that table, Calckey has all the features of Foundkey plus migration, enhanced search and thread handling, and partial Masto API compatibility

never trust a “programmer” who says ChatGPT is your friend

oh gods, not another ChatGPT thing

link broken

the central thesis is that the free software movement was colonized. in order for the free software movement to win, they had to compromise their values and become corporate-friendly. the Free Software Foundation itself faded into irrelevance and obscurity because of their ideological purity

it just goes to show that it’s important to check your AIs for rot regularly! /ref

for future reference, you can check if a Mastodon profile is verified by if one of the links in the profile shows up green with a checkmark. an official NPR Mastodon account would have a link to npr.org at the top that would be green (instead of purple) with a green checkmark next to it.

here’s what the Texas Observer’s verified “contact us” link looks like:

i’m not saying RMS is wrong at all. all i’m saying is that if the FSF wants to reach more people, a certain amount of pragmatism is required. RMS, his ideology aside, has a tarnished reputation. the FSF should keep his ideals of course, but have a new champion, one who more people can identify with and who doesn’t have all the baggage that RMS has

it’s not about his thinking, it’s about his public image and how it reflects on the FSF. he’s controversial, and a controversial leader is exactly not what the FSF needs

here’s the problem: Twitter is still relevant, and still a big part of today’s society. we should still pay attention to it. sadly, something is no less important because it’s run by an irrational billionaire; arguably, it’s even more important because of that. we should pay attention

it provides a bit of a different interface which some people might prefer. it’s very Twitter migrant-friendly since it’s made by the same developers as the popular Tweetbot

oh, come on. do they have to drag “web3” into everything?

That most of the time it’s a karma-grubbing rat race. Posts cater to the lowest common denominator, stir the pot, or both. This is of course made worse by the fact that some subreddits can block people without a certain amount of karma joining, and the algorithm does not give newer posts a fair chance at being seen.

go with Akkoma instead. there are more features and it’s actively maintained, in contrast to Pleroma where development is effectively stalled.

😬

i got transported to Sky: Children of the Light. looks like i’m in paradise now :P

i’m glad we agree!

total equality. children deserve the same rights as adults. parents should guide, not exercise dictatorial control. a parent that doesn’t respect the rights and autonomy of their child does not deserve to be a parent.

the internet, by its very nature, can never truly be regulated. the deep web is huge and out of the reach of the powers that be, and it’s not prohibitively difficult to keep yourself hidden. information is slippery, for better or for worse, and if people think something is worthwhile they will make sure it escapes regulation or censorship. but if you’re talking about the big companies, they can absolutely be regulated, you just have to strongarm them into complying

won’t work. strikes with a definite end date are never effective, since companies can just plan around it. if we’re going to strike effectively, we need to stick it out for months and plan to continue it for years.

ah, i see. specifically, i see that the only religion they use to back up their claims that religion is bad is Christianity. no mention of Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. anywhere. so uh let’s see here…that’s a Texas sharpshooter fallacy (some people who are bad are Christians, therefore Christianity is bad) combined with an induction fallacy (Christianity is bad, therefore all religions are bad)? so much for the logic they claim to live by

i’ve been called a debate bro before for asking for sources to back up claims of fact. is that a common debate bro tactic?

Fedora claims GIMP is sandboxed. If you click “High” next to “Permissions”, you see a little exclamation mark saying it has “File system” permissions.

it’s a Fedora problem, not a Flatpak problem (this is GNOME Software on Pop OS 22.04)

seriously though, i found the essay…wanting. it was far too focused on the problems, which is of course fine if you don’t have solutions to them, but the author does have solutions (presented at the very end). the tone is excessively pessimistic, which would turn a lot of readers off from reading these legitimate grievances

since y’all can’t read, here’s the whole offenses list:

• Imminent harm - Self-harm or suicide.
  • Someone is threatening to harm themselves in real life or talking about harming themselves in real life.
• Child sexual exploitation or abuse.
  • Someone is talking about or otherwise promoting indecent behavior involving children.
• Terrorism or violent extremism.
  • Someone is talking about, promoting, or threatening with acts of terrorism or violent extremism for political, religious, ideological, or other reasons.
• Hate speech.
  • Someone is attacking you or another player based on characteristics of their identity, like religion, race, or sexuality.
• Imminent harm - Threat to harm others.
  • Someone is threatening to harm you or someone else in real life.
• Non-consensual intimate imagery.
  • Someone is talking about, sharing, or otherwise promoting private and intimate images.
• Harassment or bullying.
  • Someone is shaming, attacking, or bullying you or someone else. This includes when someone is repeatedly trying to contact you or someone else without consent or posting private personal information about you or someone else without consent (“doxing”).
• Defamation, impersonation, false information.
  • Someone is damaging someone else’s reputation, pretending to be someone they’re not, or sharing false information with the aim to exploit or mislead others.
• Drugs or alcohol.
  • Someone is encouraging others to partake in illegal drug related activities or encouraging underage drinking.

see? nothing about profanity, and the drugs category isn’t nearly as widely applicable as sexy_peach makes it out to be. plus, you’re not banned from the game proper, you’re only banned from online play. you can still play your singleplayer worlds. and i know microsoft bad yadda yadda yadda but some people deserve to have their online privileges revoked. and the only people that are objecting to all this (that have read the announcement) are nazis and edgelords, precisely the kind of people that shouldn’t be playing online in the first place.

i only have two people blocked, at least one of which has been stirring shit in this thread. i should use the block button more, it seems like 99% of the toxicity on Lemmy comes from 1% of the people