I think people saying that stuff are serious about advocating for political violence. I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t make things worse. Violence is a core element of fascist ideology, there’s clear utility in using the attention it brings for recruiting, the trauma it inflicts for hazing, the experience for training. I remember when I saw a particular famous clip of a nazi speaking in public and being punched in the face by a masked assailant, I had never even heard his name before then, but after that clip was all over the internet that changed for a lot of people, and it definitely didn’t get him to shut up. Maybe there’s situations where people need to be defended, or there is need for someone acting as a bouncer, but I suspect in many cases it’s some combination of useful idiots giving them what they want, or extremists on the other side who share their goals of agitating for armed revolution giving them what they want.

this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities

There is no chance it goes that way, how is talking to people outside even an option for someone used to just being on the internet? Even if the content gets worse, the basic mechanisms to keep people scrolling still function, while the physical and social infrastructure necessary for in person community building is nonexistent.

I count 32 total shots, this seems like a potentially fatal game

I don’t have an issue with reasonable moderation, but I object to the idea that every pattern of moderation should just be accepted and that censorship isn’t a problem worth worrying about.

Reddit doesn’t have a modlog, so most of the removed comments are lost forever and there is no accountability for them, but a few of them can be seen through Reveddit, and the ones I see are not off topic or ideological rants. For instance the first one I see is

Are they going to shoot up the wrong car with innocent ladies in it again looking for this guy? Edit: Guess they managed to take him down without hitting any civilians, I guess good job for only killing the bad guy

Obviously referring to the Chris Dorner shootings which would be very relevant here, in a very reasonable way. I think it’s fair to assume that r/news moderators simply don’t want that guy mentioned at all.

It used to be a better place for arguments

I think it’s actually a serious problem if the most prominent places for discussion are heavily censored

I bet you could do it with ring signatures

a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular set of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the set’s members’ keys was used to produce the signature

Implying that it was worse and has gotten better, or will get better to the point where data hoarding is unnecessary. I guess it would be nice if things turned out that well.

So it is a way for Lemmy instances to let people log in with their Reddit accounts? Neat

I think the hate it gets is undeserved, Skibidi Toilet is objectively an impressive achievement of 3d animation and minimal surrealist storytelling, it’s obvious that the person who made it has been doing this for a long time and is very skilled. People are just dismissive because the main target audience is children and not them.

Youtube’s actual website usually doesn’t even work for me anymore. The page takes a really long time to load and often gets stuck and doesn’t load at all.

Being addicted to the internet

One unified interface I’ve been enjoying is Stability Matrix, which lets you conveniently switch between different image generation frontends without having duplicates of the model files.

Text generation: LM Studio seems the most user friendly IMO

Voice transcription: I’ve been using AllTalk TTS, was a little frustrating to set up but works

you can’t withdraw it from their ecosystem

They changed that a while ago

So, you’re saying that if I use Coinbase, I could withdraw the keys and have full custody over it after I buy it? Then where’s the custodial catch that I always hear about with Coinbase?

Yes. Idk what specific criticisms you’re referring to but probably just related to how it is a centralized exchange, which does have some genuine drawbacks like reduced privacy, for instance they don’t sell Monero or other privacy coins. The reason I also mentioned Kraken is that it is the only fiat gateway exchange that does sell Monero, with other ones if you want to be private you would have to first buy some non-private crypto, then send to a crypto to crypto exchange to buy a privacy coin and go from there. Also there are a lot of people that just buy crypto on Coinbase and never withdraw it, so for them it’s custodial all the way.

If you are comfortable with PayPal you can buy crypto from them afaik, though I am fairly sure you will have to provide additional KYC info than name and credit card, most of the cryptocurrency community obviously hates KYC and there would absolutely be centralized non-KYC options for buying crypto if it wasn’t blatantly illegal to offer that.

isn’t Coinbase custodial? I will not use custodial exchanges

That’s totally fair but consider that if your intention is to purchase crypto and immediately withdraw it to a personal wallet, there are zero practical drawbacks to an exchange being custodial because they are only holding your crypto in custody for the brief period of time between when you click the buy button and when you click the withdraw button. A DEX with escrow is going to be less custodial than that, but I would call it still a little bit custodial, since even if the escrow person doesn’t have the option to take your crypto for themselves they could still potentially collude with the seller and send it back to them, which means there is a brief window when the crypto you have purchased is not truly under your personal control. You can have a crypto to crypto dex be perfectly non-custodial (ie. Uniswap), but you can’t have a fiat to crypto exchange be perfectly non-custodial.

The reason they need it is because of the law making it illegal for them not to collect it, though that doesn’t make it any less of a barrier that they have no choice. I would say at this point Coinbase and Kraken are at least as reputable as something like PayPal/Venmo (which I think you can actually also buy crypto from); iirc Coinbase is a publicly traded corporation, has various licenses with governments to operate, is handling custody for major financial institutions now that some crypto ETFs have been approved, it’s not like the early days of crypto where even the biggest exchanges had little real claim to legitimacy.

As for difficulty of using DEX for non KYC trades, I have heard a lot of anecdotes about that confirming your experience that it does not work well. However I would keep an eye on it, there’s significant recent changes with the shutdown of LocalMonero, the launch of Haveno, progress in the development of atomic swaps. I expect that it’s going to improve significantly in usability for the average person, so long as there aren’t major efforts by governments to criminalize it.

It’s annoying but you have to do that kind of stuff to open a bank account or get a new credit card too

No, I used Monero, transactions aren’t visible. You are right that blockchains are public and there is a lot of mineable data in cryptocurrency generally, but the point is that it is possible to have a system of digital payments with all the privacy properties of physical cash.

I kind of wouldn’t want a government spying on me with this either, but it would be somewhat of an improvement over both the government and companies spying on me with it.

Cash works, but not for online purchases. I pay for a VPN subscription anonymously with a cryptocurrency wallet app, it’s at least as convenient as using PayPal, and unlike PayPal I can be sure there isn’t a middleman collecting/selling my transaction data for ads or whatever else. This is a solution that works and exists right now. I know a lot of people really don’t like cryptocurrency, but I’d also be ok with some other system that satisfies the same requirements.

To solve the problem instead by regulating payment providers, to begin with you would have to convince governments that are largely in the pockets of these companies to act against them. You would have to get these people to craft a set of laws telling them, “hey, this information you’ve collected that is on the computers you own and control, don’t look at it ok? Also don’t do anything with it unless we say it’s ok.” and then, somehow, actually enforce that. It’s taking a system basically made to centrally collect and control information, and hoping that people with an obvious interest in using it for that purpose will play along with retrofitting it to prevent privacy violations. To me this seems like planning for failure when you can instead just use a system that doesn’t involve trusting a company with this info to begin with.