ondoyant

No, because wealth isn't who you are, it is what you do. You own a business, you run a company, you are an investor, you are a politician. Every method of acquiring or keeping personal wealth beyond the physical things in your house, the physical possessions you bought with your money and the money itself, relies on your ability to own something that other people use. You inherit a company, you rent out property, you become an investor. All these things rely on you maintaining ownership over information, property, and systems. That isn't a passive choice. That is supporting the enrichment and maintenance of systems which currently represent the largest danger to living things on this earth in the last few thousand years, ecocidal and homocidal systems of oppression which represent a grave threat to countless species on earth, and contribute to the death and illness of millions of human beings. Being as wealthy as a billionare represents the hoarding of such a massive quantity of resources that actual human beings are starving to death or living in desolate poverty in the modern era. The failure to put our vast resources towards alleviating human suffering, ending poverty, ending disease, ending hunger, ending war, ending climate change, are the direct result of a system like this, which concentrates so much wealth in the hands of so few. No. Wealth tells me a lot about who somebody is as a person. A wealth like Elon Mush or Jeff Bezos is the direct result of horrific exploitation, bigotry, and cruelty whose impact can be felt on the scale of nations. Billions are diverted into the pockets of individual men, instead of towards the common good. People starve as Jeff Bezos flies a dildo into space. People die of preventable illness while Elon Musk buys a piece of the internet millions of people use to talk to each other. And they own enough of the world that they can steer public policy.

Even if you don't agree with me here, this is why people want Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to die, because they are the beneficiaries of a system which grants them massive undemocratic influence on the fate of billions of people. We all have to care about this fuckers, because the infrastructure they control shapes the course of our lives. Tell me, who would you trust with that amount of power? Why should any of us tolerate this kind of control over our lives? How are we served by systems which fail to prevent the deterioration of our biosphere, the health and safety of our loved ones, and the privacy of our lives? Maybe you don't believe that men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are this way, or you believe that there is no other way for the world to work, but others think differently. Who believe that wealth on the scale of a billionaire is itself a danger to our lives, that such power should belong to nobody. That if we are faced with the opportunity to save lives, make people happier, healthier, and safer, refusing to put our resources towards that goal is by itself an injustice. Naw, fuck Jeff Bezos. Fuck Elon Musk. The world would literally be better off without people like them.

haha. right, sure. wealth is an immutable characteristic. you have like, literally no understanding of history or politics, do you? i can understand not agreeing, but to make a statement like this you have to have fundamental misunderstandings about what ideas like "race", "religion" and "ethnicity" even mean. thanks for that. really funny comment.

like, maybe that's true, but i'm unsure if we have enough data to back that up as the main explanation for why people are hesitant to changing platforms, or if they are. maybe people have been brainwashed into staying on Facebook or whatever else, or maybe it was the first of its kind, and all its competition has been subsumed into it by monopolistic business practices, and people haven't had any alternatives for a long time. maybe institutions and systems are very difficult to stop once they get going.

i dunno, i'm really just not convinced by arguments like this. its taken quite a bit of time for our understanding of social media and its impact to become evident, and movements like the fediverse are building up steam for a reason. its seems more likely to me that you and i are simply early to the party.

my position isn't "we are forcing normal people to understand scary programming things". that would imply i think that people can't understand this stuff. its "we are engaged in communities where the structure and function of internet infrastructure is a topic of concern, and most people aren't". they aren't being exposed to challenges to corporate infrastructure. they aren't engaging with critiques of for-profit industry. but that is changing. people are more aware of the ills of social media platforms today than five years ago. hopefully, that trend will continue. i think that the only problem really is that more people don't know there are other options.

you learn enough about the victims of capital, you start to hate the people who own it. killing them wouldn't solve anything, but i'd still throw a party if they beefed it.

both these chucklefucks would kill you for a dollar. just sayin'.

it wouldn't hurt tho.

i try to push back against this notion when i see it: misanthropy is not the proper response here. people aren't sheep, they aren't stupid, they just aren't living in the same context as we are. for a lot of people (and a lot of older people especially), the politics of the internet are a black box, not because they're too stupid to comprehend this stuff, but because its simply out of scope for what they want to achieve online. there's tons of things to care about, and while the internet is a pretty important thing to care about in modern life in my opinion, lots of people simply don't live enough of their lives online to give a shit.

i dunno, i just get kinda pissed off with the whole "sheeple" bullshit. not everybody has your priorities, and not everybody knows what you know. that doesn't make them bad people, or stupid people, or subservient people, it just makes them people.

i mean, "dumb cake" isn't a particularly useful comment about something. why can't people try to read into things? nothing means nothing, somebody made a weird gender reveal cake where girls are frilly bows and boys are police officers. that says something about whoever wanted the cake.

"Protests don't work" is a weird take on this. No political action is an unmitigated success, movements take time to build momentum. I dunno, try to cool it with the misanthropy. This has gotten a ton of media coverage, built the legitimacy of the fediverse, and forced Reddit to act to break a strike. Not to mention that every step of enshittification makes arguments against corporate controlled social media more compelling in the long term.

you can download it from all linux package managers i've tried. not sure if linux counts as malware or not.

That makes sense. Reddit is a fully featured product. The interesting thing about open source projects for me, is that they're slower to develop new features in the short term, but as more and more people come around, the breadth and scale of features can outpace commercial products, because anybody can contribute for any reason. To be honest, if you find the current state of things intolerable, maybe just wait a bit? As more people adopt and start contributing, things will get more polished. I'm almost certain the current defederation thing is just growing pains. As more tools get developed for people to customize their experience, as is the trend for open source, things will get better.

I mean, the people calling people tankies are usually anarchists. Not really the same people as cable news organizations lol. Most modern anarchists are highly critical of countries generally, and their own country specifically. At least from my experience, alot of mutual aid orgs and other explicitly anarchist movements in the US reject the premise that the land beneath their feet even BELONGS to the US government.

I guess I understand the backlash, but defederation IS blocking, its just community wide blocking. Some people don't want to have to manage whether they're exposed to certain content, they'd rather have their community do it for them. At least for me, beehaw has been pretty open about the conditions of why they defederated from certain instances (and why they are organizing development of more granular moderation tools, so they don't feel like they have to). Maybe you can argue they are motivated by a sinister desire to restrict access, but at least from my perspective that isn't a convincing argument. Certain communities want certain things, some may want unfettered access to everything the internet has to offer, but honestly? That ain't me. I have other accounts on other platforms for that. Sometimes I don't want to hear why the North Korean state is actually just responding to western aggression, or that trans people should die, or whatever else. Sometimes I do, I consume lots of media from people who I fundamentally disagree with, but that shit stresses me out sometimes. Do I think that lemmygrad is even primarily composed of people who think that way? No. But the admins of beehaw have been pretty clear about what they want out of their community, and as of right now, they don't have the tools to moderate the influx of people coming over from other instances and being trolls, or not behaving according to the standards they have in place.

Just as a last note, though, I think that alot of the discourse about why defederation is bad is kinda philosophically at odds with the goals of the Fediverse to begin with. Remember, defederation is part of the structure of the Fediverse for a reason, and its partly because it gives autonomy to communities to decide what it is they want to do. Centralized platforms where one authority dictates what is and isn't appropriate have been going through controversies about that for a WHILE now, and the solutions they come up with are often dogshit. The Fediverse makes these sorts of disagreements fundamentally MORE solvable than any preexisting platform, and with outcomes that mean the people affected have alternatives if they disagree with a decision. Honestly, I think this is a holdover from platforms like reddit, where admin decisions affect EVERYBODY and nobody really has a different place to go.

I think that you can think that YOU want to only block people and never defederate and also respect that other folks don't necessarily want the same thing. That's your choice. But if you join an instance that doesn't moderate its users and that instance can post without limitation on instances like beehaw, which do have moderation standards, defederation is like... the only way that we currently have to stop assholes from brigading or being weirdos. Lemmy isn't a public square, it isn't the "front page of the internet". Its like a community hall, or a political rally, or a convention center. Different instances have different standards, and some instances don't necessarily want to have an open hallway connecting their Pride Parade to a KKK rally. Or, in a more nuanced example, if you're hanging out with your friends somewhere, maybe you find someplace quiet and out of the way so you can chat privately. I just think giving people and communities more power in how they live their online lives, allowing them to do whatever they want, whenever they want? That's just objectively BETTER than some corporation forcing you to stay in the same room as everybody else.

I dunno. You can do what you want. But I just really don't think you need to be getting mad at other people somewhere else doing something you don't like. Like... too bad lol. It ain't your business. You can't do anything about it, and nobody should be able to do anything about it. Embrace the chaos. Find where you want to be.