openpgp4fpr:8d54f85b414086d978e71df49f845578082de33d
- 46 Posts
- 56 Comments
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
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.
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
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 mean, email isn’t a huge priority for me. i do want to have a Matrix server and a media server though. i’d take your advice, but i’m fresh out of old laptops at the moment. i would get a System76 Meerkat if it wasn’t just a little overpowered for what i need. do you know of anything with a similar form factor and 4 gb RAM (or at least where i can look for something like that)?
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
there’s an interesting parallel between Epicureanism’s concept of ataraxia and Buddhism’s nirvana. they can both be described as non-reactive states of mind; absolute immovable serenity is an aspect of both.
that said, i don’t mean to equivocate the two beyond that particular point. i will admit i am biased towards Buddhism, but Epicureanism’s goal of aponia — freedom from physical pain — seems like an impossible goal to me. (one could argue that ataraxia is too, but to me aponia is most certainly unattainable because, well, shit happens and you’ll get hurt sometime.)
anyway, all this is to say that both Buddhism and Epicureanism have ambitious goals. whether one is better than the other is a thorny question at best; but to me at least, Buddhism is more approachable
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
this hits the nail on the head. so many articles i read about the internet and copyright ignore the very nature of information as a slippery, infinitely replicating thing. like water but without conservation of mass. other pieces i’ve read talk about piracy as if nothing has changed, but i’m glad that this article candidly confronts the fact that it’s inevitable with the rise of the internet
i mean, the article is about how we in the US focus exclusively on helmets as a silver bullet for bike safety. they’re not as effective as people in the US make them out to be, even though they are effective in some situations.
Would I be supposed to leave it hanging from my bike, exposed to the rain and theft? Or carry it with me into the shops and bars and keep an eye on it?
don’t worry, nobody in the US has solved that problem either. some people leave it on their handlebars, others put it in their backfit, others stow it away in a bag and carry it with them.
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.
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
Kbin recently popped up if you want an alternative to Lemmy, but it’s still in early beta