As long as no Fed instance attempts to monetize content, these people will have no power. So subscribe to them, engage to them all you want, but absolutely shun any Fed instance that does anything but accept donations to keep the lights on. Money will always enshittify platforms and their content. Always.

Edit: FYI, any real people who want to discuss things with me, don’t let your post sound like it came from a rage engagement bot.

I don’t know if it’s because I use old.lemmy or what but I have no idea wtf this meme is about.

The Ensoniq ASR-10. Fuck, that thing is heavy.

Remember when sites would make bad decisions and then just, you know… fucking die? Reddit’s entire existence is owed to Digg imploding like the Titan submarine.

Notice how that doesn’t happen anymore? No matter how egregious their infractions, no movements away from Twitter or Facebook - no matter how deeply they are infiltrated/compromised by runaway fascism/capitalism - nothing has an impact. No backlash, no matter how huge - is strong enough to shutter these sites and make them stop being money-printing operations.

It’s almost like there is an infinite money glitch going on and no matter what, if you’re in the “in” crowd, your shit gets to stay around no matter how much everybody thinks it smells like shit.

Hm.

It’s not like Reddit stopped existing. Lemmy will (hopefully) never be Reddit. That means that some itches Reddit will still have to scratch.

Frankly, whatever secret sauce it is that makes social media popular is also what drives them to be such shit and be so shit for society. I like Lemmy way more than I like Reddit, and even though I have to go back to Reddit from time to time to fill the needs of my niche interests (which can get no traction where there are not mobs of participants in the greater whole) I never ever look at my interactions there and go “I wish Lemmy was more like this.”

It’s a conundrum.

Back when it was first revealed in 2019 Musk hadn’t yet morphed into his final chud form and the thing was to be priced at $39k. I thought it looked cool and the price was right, I honestly would have considered buying one given the federal subsidies.

Here we are, 5 years later and Musk is yet another of Putin’s puppets actively helping Trump and the online legions of morons destroy the country and the Cybertruck is now $80k with no upgrades, $100k with.

I was never in love with it, but at this point buying it is a lot like buying a red MAGA hat. It pegs you as a particular type of dumbass, particularly given its reputation for terrible quality control. The kind of dumbass that spends six figures to trigger the libs.

There likely needs to be a very public message sent out to these billionaires along the lines of “stay in your lane… or else.” The kind of incontrovertible message that everyone will understand when they see it. But it’s probable that they’ve already got a similar (albeit conflicting) message from some other… billionaires that specialize in that art whose name ends in “estration.”

Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.

I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”

I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.

July 4, 2012. The day the Higgs Boson was discovered. Everything since has done nothing but get stranger and stranger. I won’t even say it’s all just gone to shit. It’s just to me, everything since has been… increasingly unreal.

It’s all the same on lemmy.world, I had a comment deleted yesterday in /c/showerthoughts. Reason given: “Lots of generalizing going on.”

I was not the OP, just a commenter, but the thread title was Religious people are the original “gamers…”. My now-deleted post just said I thought it was a mostly apt metaphor except that gamers don’t think their games are real. That’s it.

So some mod is butthurt because, I don’t know… Jesus or whatever and I get my comment deleted like I did something wrong, which I didn’t. I didn’t violate any rules nor the code of conduct. It’s all the same, new boss same as the old boss.

Edit: fucking coward, too - signs his delete using automod. Typical.

Why would this be a wake up call for the music industry? This shows they are operating at peak efficiency!

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

For anyone interested in some light fiction on the subject, may I direct you to On the Beach by Neville Shute.

Wasn’t the right poised to take it all in a landslide only just… checks notes - yesterday?

He’s actually worse than a broken clock. Even twice a day when he manages to be right, he’s wrong - because he’s so phenomenally stupid.

So I understand the ultra-rich’s way of doing business now is to never realize gains but rather take loans against a percentage of their unrealized gains (backed of course, by the unrealized gains themselves) and spend that money rather than ever make any income. Does anybody know of any good ideas to handle that type of scenario?

Smith was speaking shortly before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits China on Wednesday. He’s expected to warn Chinese officials not to provide aid to Russia.

Or else they’re going to get a very stern talking to.

But he will always love his grandchildren, because surely they won’t ever espouse opinions he doesn’t like… right???

I marvel that Putin plays with fire like this. Yeah, sure, a Nazi America would make Russia so much safer…