I actually believe one day we’ll need lawyers and courts for complex virtual reality worlds.

I reject your definition and substitute my own. But I won’t tell you!

No just free association. But having no alternatives to legitimate needs, like participating in our civilization’s free speech discourse through the internet, free association doesn’t help. So before the fediverse you were “forced” to associate with reddit/facebook/twitter or have little association at all.

I’m not sure how anarchism would work for a social media platform. Everyone is a mod? Everyone can post anything and can delete anything? 😀

I believe generally as a philosophy anarchism only makes sense as all authority should be challenged and needs to be justified or be abolished. The amount of authority justified and needed might be relative to the level of “enlightenment” of the participants.

I just want to say that I’d absolutely love a dog that is genetically engineered to eat vegan food. Not just be able to survive off it but actually like it. But still retain it’s instinct as a guard dog / social hunter.

The actual superhero/blockbuster/action/thriller propaganda is that problems are always caused by a few bad apples. But there is no spoiling the bunch. Once the newspaper and honorable elder governmentals get wind of it all is return to the good old status quo.

That is the real problem - that we learned to not question the rules of the system that lead to negative outcomes. That rules and conditions that make negative outcomes all but inevitable.

Of course debating the financing of institutions and bylaws that impact socioeconomic policies would make for an awfully dull superhero movie!

And they name is tragedeih

But does it have unicode emojis?

😀 😁 😂 😃 😄 😅 😆 😇 😈 🕧 🕯️ 🕰️ 🕳️ 🕴️ 🕵️ 🕶️ 🕷️ 🕸️ 🕹️ 🕺 🖇️ 🖊️ 🖋️ 🖌️ 🖍️ 🖐️ 🖕 🖖 🖤 🖥️ 🖨️ 🖱️ 🖲️ 🖼️ 🗂️ 🗃️ 🗄️ 🗑️ 🗒️ 🗓️ 🗜️ 🗝️ 🗞️ 🗡️ 🗣️ 🗨️ 🗯️ 🗳️ 🗺️ 🗻 🗼 🗽 🗾 🗿

Hmm it specifically seems to be missing emojis

The trouble is that they do need to compete with people who do pursue power (or wealth) relentlessly. So there are hard calculations. Those who don’t play don’t get power and won’t change anything. Those who do want to chance things and want other things than just power are at a (big) disadvantage. Even with the best of intention, the game plays you.

I believe the solution would be something like more rules or systems in place to focus on this kind of pursuit and call it out and dissuade it. Like develop social tools to change the rules of the game. No clue how though. Maybe AGI.

Yeah thinking about this, individual servers for specialized topics seems like the way to go. I guess it depends on the type of community. Vegan is large enough but still a specialized community that yeah doesn’t need size. It’s specialized but not a niche.

But other niche communities, e.g. av1, jpegxl or velomobile, are too niche to work without more people. I think.

But it would still be good if you could at least set a community to automatically “forward” to a new instance. And maybe that a community could “export” the posts from existing instance to a new instance. Then you could move or merge. I believe something like that is needed.

Yeah true. But like @[email protected] write it’s also that confident behavior is rewarded. And narrow minded focus on profit is more efficient than being focused on other things. And they need to compete with others on this “game” who pursue the calculus of power. So humility is a really hard sell to them. And media is not looking at politics or politicians in that way at all.

I sometimes feel this lack of emotional fortitude when thinking about reading a book, because books often break up your worldview and require you to adjust. There is a kind of intellectual pain of disillusionment.

No he’s not. But he’s also far from dumb.

‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ‘dumbness’, not a brute lack of processing power. Dumbness, for Musil, was ‘straightforward’, indeed almost ‘honourable’. Stupidity was something very different and much more dangerous: dangerous precisely because some of the smartest people, the least dumb, were often the most stupid.

Musk is far from genius level but above average intelligence. He does have knowledge about rockets on a non-engineering level which you can see e.g. in this video talking about his starfactory (EDIT: Yes watching him in his element is kinda painful, knowing he’s a fascist)

But he and others like him focus their thinking narrow mindedly on the pursuit of profit. Every decision is based on gaining wealth. THAT is by far the bigger problem.

Besides the focus of all education towards profit seeking, technical nerds also seem to “want to” see other fields like sociology or politics or history in a simple and easy to explain way. So they seek principles or the most simplistic social theories that don’t explain anything real. Musk certainly falls into that.

Except now where he seems to go completely off the rails. Possibly a symptom of narcissism ever since he became unpopular, he’s doubling down to find new validation for his fragile ego. So yeah in that sense he is not the best example.

My point was not just about Musk but about the idea of “finding the smartest people to rule”. Because to anybody who is above intelligence that sounds smart except - stupidity can be more dangerous in intelligent people.

But are you a culture warrior in the vegan vs meat industrial complex war?

Hmm. I guess theoretically you could soap up with warmer water before getting in the cold shower. So the shower is mostly just rinse.

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid | Psyche Ideas

Basically many people who have the raw processing power or “IQ” to understand and analyse things can still lack certain “mental infrastructure” or education to understand things. This is especially atrocious for narrow minded people who actively rejected new information that doesn’t fit into their mental comfort zone. Musk is definitely one of them.

This is the reason why we can’t have nice things.

Ok I’m just thinking out loud here…

Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.

There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.

And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don’t need downvotes since there wouldn’t be too many “controversial” topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn’t enough “tagging” on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post “funny/silly” or “unconstructive” or “misinformation” or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I’m wrong with this.

But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn’t support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can’t filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.

Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more “post-truth”, not just the fascists but the “leftists”, liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it’s bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they’ve been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to “heal”. But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don’t just mean the socialists lol).

And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the [email protected] community lost 75% of it’s users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.

So I think it’s not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.

Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂

Yeah it is thriving, what I meant is that to have a chance to replace reddit, lemmy needs to find some technical solutions (moving / migrating / merging of communities) and somehow stop fracturing into islands.

But maybe that age of the internet has passed and people are no longer willing because of trolls, bad faith actors, sock puppets, bots… and the increasing polarization of ideology and propaganda.

Wait, what? Where can I read more about that?

I tried like 4 different lemmy instances before settling on lemm.ee because it hasn’t defederated from the socialists or “tankies”. So I can participate.

This defederation fracturing lemmy really speaks to both self-censorship of allowable ideologies and also bad quality of admins and mods several servers.

If lemmy can’t somehow federate communities separately from instances I don’t see lemmy thriving.

Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?

Maybe it’s just me but it seems the synchronization of public opinion on reddit / lemmy with Empire seems to be getting worse. (EDIT: It seems to be getting more “convincing”)

Like there was some opposition from the “progressives” and “leftists” about the Juan Guaidó sham and you could argue about it without getting downvoted into oblivion, but now very few dare to talk about the latest attempt to capture Venezuela’s oil.

Yeah if you have nothing to hide, what is the problem with spying?!