Schadrach

Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.

Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?

Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.

If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?

There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…

Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.

The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.

Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?

Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.

Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?

Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.

But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.

I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)

I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.

But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.

Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.

It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.

Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.

Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon?

…but they did, and were broadly prevented from growing organically. See Parler and Gab.

Gab actually changed it’s underlying backend twice. They started with their own thing, Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship. Most Mastodon servers promptly defederated them for being right wingers, and several of the major Mastodon clients built in client level mandatory blacklists causing their client to refuse to connect to Gab (in some cases Gab was the entire blacklist) - you can see which ones because they have some older store reviews about “refusing to connect to the largest Mastodon instance” because for a time that was Gab. Later on, they moved to something involving crypto somehow, I’m not really sure about the details.

Parler appeared, got big fast, got kneecapped by Google, Apple and Amazon and by the time they recovered had lost most of any momentum they ever had.

They even produced their own Reddit-alike, spread across several .win domains - that was a thing that happened in response to the biggest Trumper community getting banned from Reddit. That original community migrated to TheDonald.win and later rebranded as Patriots.win.

Truth Social is basically what Gab/Parler wanted to be, but big Tech doesn’t want to fight against Trump because he’s exactly the kind of petty asshole to fuck them over for considering it. Truth Social is of course Mastodon under the hood with federation disabled.

But if we presume fediverse apps are a protocol rather than a proprietary product (which is usually how they are sold to users, making analogies to things like email or the web as compared to a proprietary system) why would you need to reinvent the wheel? No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.

Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use,

Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.

Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.

It’s not.

When something is marked up and marketed specifically to men, it’s proof how insecure men are.

When something is marked up and marketed specifically to women, then women are victims and we call it the pink tax.

Headline was inaccurate - they didn’t bomb a place for a gender reveal. Instead they bombed a place that produced blue smoke for some other reason and joked about how it resembling a gender reveal. That’s…not better but it’s an important distinction - one is blowing shit up to announce it’s a boy and the other is blowing shit up to blow shit up and then joking about the color of the smoke.

You’d have to be an asshole not oppose country based on settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing

…and yet, being anti-Israel was considered a far-right neo-Nazi position not that long ago. It became acceptable again from the start of the current flare up (the current fighting isn’t something new, it’s been going on and off for decades). Before that, anti-Israel meant anti-Jew meant obviously Nazi. It’s wild how when things change so many people will just quietly drop the old narrative and pretend it never existed. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia and all that.

The reality is that the US supports Israel, has for a long time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It’s not because of being pro-Jew or wanting to ethnically cleanse Arabs, it’s because they’re our only real ally in the Middle East and thus we’ll remain safely on their good side unless and until we get a strategically more useful ally in the Middle East. Then keeping them happy becomes less important.

You could very easily do something like that with HERO System or FUDGE.

Last time I played HERO System our party included both a literal fallen angel and a small walking tank driven by an AI among the player characters.

Or do some kind of Apocalypse World/Dungeon World hybrid.

let us jack off to the weird shit we want to jack off too

That’s been grounds for defederating some Lemmy instances in the past.

(Ignore the name, they mean anti-neozionists and are willing to shame Jews who protest against Israels actions as well, they even have a tag for them)

An ideology declaring itself to be the representation of a demographic and accusing members of that demographic who don’t believe what they are supposed to (aka in line with the ideology) of hating themselves?

What do they call it, internalized antisemitism?

Basically every other ideology that considers itself to be representing some demographic does basically the same thing.

Trump/Musk (they’re joined at the hip AFAIC, except Trump is definately the bottom, despite his diaper issues)

Didn’t Musk’s son tell Trump he wasn’t the real president? You know the one who started showing up publicly right after the Luigi thing, who we should probably just nickname Kevlar?

Now I’m hearing that they are banning people for UPVOTES!

Only upvotes involving Mario’s brother, so far. Presumably the “issue” being that he has too much support and the time between posting and it being moderated away it’s getting enough votes to still have significant visibility which is what they’re trying to avoid.

The great part about federation is that there isn’t a central control, and so they can in fact have their own instances, and either your instance can block their instance or you as a user can block their instance and you never have to see them or deal with them.

When it comes to controversial subs, the general rule is if you have really dedicated mods who are super careful to never break a rule themselves you can generally keep it up.

Those mods not breaking any rules individually is important because otherwise the admins will invoke their backup plan for dealing with a sub they don’t like but isn’t breaking any rules - keeping the mods under a microscope and looking for any excuse to ban them and immediately ban the sub for being unmoderated, refuse to give it to new mods, and ban any replacement sub for recreating a banned sub.

They could just ban the sub because they don’t like it, but that kind of seeming capriciousness tends to get a bad reaction from the userbase, which is why they look for an excuse to justify the ban.

My parents told me that I’d understand how the world works when I get older, but I just hate it more and more.

That’s how you know you’re understanding it.

The big difference being that in the US you do not have a constitutional right to pop corn.

And, since it’s a subliminal process, it’s extremely difficult to make a concious decision to not buy products you’ve seen or heard ads of.

Instead, I make a conscious decision to not buy products I remember seeing or hearing ads of. If you’re using subtle product placement to subliminally manipulate me in a way I don’t notice, good for you. If it’s obvious enough I remember you doing it then I will not buy your product unless it is already the best deal available (aka the cheapest per unit or best quality per price, excepting products I have had a bad experience with).

Dishwashers have the same issue.

Newer dishwashers cycle the same water through repeatedly during the wash cycle, only bringing in fresh a few times during the process. Old ones from before they were concerned about water efficiency would just pull in fresh water and drain out dirty water instead of cycling the same water through repeatedly during each phase of the process.

Because they only run clean water it takes less runtime on the older dishwashers but they’re also constantly pulling in fresh water. It’s also why newer dishwashers require more cleaning out filters - they don’t just drain to the drain, so they need to care that the water draining won’t gum up the sprayers and such because it’s going to go back through. The point is that they use much less total water to get the job done.

CFC’s are great at coolimg things as long as you do not care about having an ozone layer.

They’re even fine if you care about the ozone layer so long as you never ever let any leak. Until the coolant leaks the CFCs are cycling in a closed system in which they can’t do any damage. The problem is that “not letting any leak” is harder than it sounds, and the newer coolants just don’t do the job as well.

It’s like how asbestos tiles are fine until they get damaged, and then they fuck the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to breathe in a tiny bit of it.

The President and Legislature are elected at the federal level. All the various major executive branch figures below that are appointed by the President, and at best require the Senate to approve them. Most aren’t as ridiculous in their picks as Trump, but he’s a narcissistic megalomaniacal buffoon so he has to ensure to himself that’s he’s surrounded with people who are well known and popular (hence why he seems to be mostly picking based on media experience rather than anything pertinent, save a couple of Project 2025 authors and Tulsi Gabbard) but that he can see himself as above and will stroke his ego by affirming that.

He appears to be picking people from one of three lists:

• Republicans with media experience (aka people he knows from TV or social media).
• Whoever wrote the relevant section of Project 2025.
• People accused of being Russian assets (mostly just Tulsi Gabbard at this point, but there’s a reason she’s going to be in charge of foreign intelligence and it’s not for our benefit).