• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I’ve been to many protests, and oddly enough i enjoy the feeling of freedom. Normal traffic rules don’t apply and there are no cars, suddely you can walk in the middle of the street which is normally a forbidden space. You can dance, you can shoot fireworks in the middle of town, you can do loads of things that you normally can’t.

    Normally there’s a nebulous sense that this space doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to landlords and the state maybe? You don’t feel a sense of ownership. But when it’s being taken over by people in an unorganized way, now it feels like this space belongs to you.

    And yes i’m french lmao



  • It used to be that women couldn’t open their own bank accounts. Depending on how far back you go, they couldn’t even own property. In this context, women really needed to get married if they wanted to do anything. For this and many other reasons, the bar was lower, men could get married with less effort. Nowadays women can do anything and the only reason for them to want a man is if they want to, so you actually have to put in effort now.

    Also, gender roles are changing and there’s no clarity as to what being a man is supposed to mean in 2025. If it’s not protecting and providing, if it’s not dying in war, then the purpose of men is undefined as of now, and there’s a tendency to want to return to the older gender roles.

    And late capitalism is stressful, and men aren’t going to college as much these days. There’s lots of reasons but this is what i can remember in five minutes

    Further listening material


  • I have a passing familiarity with the politics of a couple countries, and they all fit this pattern: their constitutions say nothing of a two-party system, they don’t even say anything about parties at all. People just choose to create political parties, and then those parties coalesce into two major parties.

    The reason that this happens is because people, from voters to every level of politician, look at the rules of the game and make tactical decisions; their tactical decisions cause a two-party system to emerge.

    The USA is a really extreme case of this; in Europe there are more parties, and they even very occasionally come to power. Current french president Macron broke a decades-long streak of two-party governance in his country.

    Further viewing material:

    What is tactical voting

    Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting

    The Alternative Vote Explained

    My takeaway from this is that there are things that can be done to improve the voting system, as suggested in these videos; but i don’t even like representative democracy at all, i think there’s better solutions in direct democracy (referendums and such). Representative democracy was designed to put elites in charge, voting was initially reserved for land-owning nobility. Extending voting rights to more people doesn’t change what the system is designed to do.








  • Enjoy being the only one posting.

    Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable; the fewer users it has, the less useful it is. Reddit has more users than Lemmy. It’s that simple. People won’t start switching until everybody else switches.

    Bluesky is only barely starting to compete with Twitter, and that’s after Twitter drastically worsened. Lemmy is a long, long way from competing with Reddit.

    To me, it’s a matter of time. The structural advantages of the fediverse mean that it’s more stable on the long run; what i mean by that is, for-profit Reddit will get worse while Lemmy remains good, leading users to migrate here, so Lemmy will eventually outlive Reddit. And then along the way there will be a few big moments where Reddit really fucks up and a wave of people washes up on Lemmy. This is already happening, i’m pretty sure all of us here made our accounts after the Reddit API changes.


  • So i agree that the second Trump administration is going to suck in most every way possible, like the first one but worse because they’re prepared this time.

    BUT

    I think people overrate a government’s ability to influence the conditions in a given country. I think a country is made what it is by history, geography, technology, sociology, ideology, economics, and the accumulation of small decisions over centuries.

    If the Trump administration wants to end democracy in the US, or if a hypothetical based administration were to attempt a switch to ranked choice voting, both ideals would be impossible to implement because our ideals are limited by practical reality. Both would fail regardless of being good or bad changes, because radical change is really hard when the conditions aren’t met for it, especially when it’s opposed by the rest of the country. If the country just isn’t ready to transition to fascism right now, there’s not much that Trump can do to make it.

    We talk a lot about how powerful people changed the world, but i think far more often they’re just the embodiment of a societal trend, and they couldn’t change the world if they weren’t. Change isn’t done by powerful people but deeper movements in humanity, with powerful people riding them like a wave.

    As to where the deeper movements in humanity are leading us right now, i refuse to guess, trying to predict the future is the best way to look like an idiot



  • The owner of my laundromat claims that it’s cheaper to do your laundry there than at home. At first i thought “of course a laundromat owner would say that”, but then he argued that his machines are more efficient than the ones we buy and that they are collectively heated.

    I still think he’s fulll of shit because he only argued about energy costs, not including his rent taxes or profit; but it did get me thinking that it would be cheaper and more efficient to wash our clothes collectively.




  • Allright knuckleheads, here’s what you do:

    1. Follow people who’s content you’re interested in

    2. Browse Following and not For You

    3. That’s litterally it

    I get so peeved when people browse algorithmic feeds and then complain that they see bad content. You fools. You cretins. I’ll have you know that i actually have a pleasant experience on Twitter AND THAT’S NOT A JOKE, i genuinely have a good time on a bad website purely because i stay away from the For You feed. It’s literally that simple. The only time i get conservative propaganda is when someone i follow quote tweets it with a snarky response.

    I’ve had someone assume i was a nazi because i’m still on Twitter and i got a little (too) mad at them because we clearly don’t share the same reality. They browsed For You and quite rightfully left the site never to return, and they don’t understand how i’m able to stay; no shit, i’m able to stay because i don’t browse Following.

    Now the thing is, this is how i’ve always used the internet, from the start i’ve built my follows list with this browsing habit in mind so i only follow like 200 people with the specific purpose of seeing their content; but for a lot of users, following is more like pressing “like” on a profile, and they end up following 5000 accounts. In that case you’re gonna get way too much content sprayed at you and pruning your follows list is going to take forever. I don’t know what to do in that situation tbh



  • The best explanation i’ve seen is this:

    Places that put children under the authority of adults (schools, camps, etc) are appealing for child predators; but where most will kick them out when/if found, the Catholic Church makes it easier for them to stay in.

    This is because of a religious belief that God judges men for their sins, eventually rehabilitates them, and the job of mere mortals is to forgive and forget.

    I really like this explanation because it doesn’t flatter my atheist sentiment and provides a very neat and rational cause-and-effect relation, it’s a thing that’s specific about the Church compared to other institutions.

    Priests also take a vow of chastity, in people’s minds they’re supposed to be above sexual desire; and they have an extra aura of authority compared to the average teacher or summer camp instructor. Both of these things makes it harder for children and parents to question them.

    And once they do question them, the Church gets a similar behavior to other institutions where they’ll try to protect their reputation by burying the case. I’m not sure which positions are supposed to be held for life, i assume most of them, and so that makes firing someone (or whatever the right word is in this context) a bigger deal.

    Thems my attempted explanations


  • You’re coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don’t think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it’s designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).

    My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.

    Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It’s not even a business at all, i’m not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.

    Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we’re seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.