Rottcodd

Sort of.

More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius

And I have the same reaction I have to most of these types of things - I wonder what it tastes like, and wish I could try it.

I’ve never understood why these things trigger such uproar. It’s not like it’s poison or some sort of bodily secretion or something - it’s just a somewhat unusual but entirely edible ingredient. And it could be good. So what’s the problem?

And not only will you make everyone’s lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you’re often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you’ll be right.

That’s the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you’re wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you’re wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won’t be. You’ll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.

If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you’re wrong, then you’re instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you’ll actually be right. And if you don’t get it that time, that’s fine - just freely admit that you’re wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.

So you’ll not only make everyone’s lives more pleasant - you’ll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?

Exploitation is inherent to any system in which there is an established hierarchy, which necessarily includes any and all systems in which there is institutionalized authority, entirely regardless of the economic system in place.

Leaving institutionalized authority in place and merely switching from a capitalist to a socialist system only changes the specific hoops the exploiters have to jump through to gain and maintain privilege - instead of gaining wealth and using it to buy political power, they have to, and do, gain political power and use it to commandeer wealth.

If you want to fight exploitation, you need to go all the way to the real source and fight the institutionalization of authority.

Any time anyone has the power to rule, you axiomatically have a ruling class.

Lately it seems that all too much of my life is spent alternately laughing at things that are so ludicrous that only a blithering moron would fall for them and dejectedly remembering that the world is stuffed to the brim with blithering morons.

The problem isn’t communism per se, but communism forcibly imposed.

More precisely, the problem is that communism is the superior system to the degree that it’s egalitarian - that it eliminates the ruling class and instead treats all citizens equally - and the forcible imposition of communism immediately destroys that, since it presumes that those carrying out the forcible imposition rightfully possess the authority to do so, and thereby simply establishes them as a new ruling class.

Communism should be the goal, but in order to actually fulfill its potential, it MUST be voluntarily adopted by the people rather than forcibly imposed.

Of course they did. That’s the next step in the perpetual war assembly line.

IMO, many (most?) people quite simply don’t think about things. They just have some dogmatic positions they’ve taken for some reasons, and they regurgitate them as necessary.

And that’s a lot of the reason that they so often and so brazenly misinterpret things other people say. They’re not actually reading to comprehend - they’re reading just to get enough of a feel for it to classify it, so that they’ll have some (potentially quite wrong) idea of which bit of rhetoric to trot out in response to it.

Almost never.

I used to have it a fair amount, and medicate myself to avoid it a fair amount as well, and then just about exactly 20 years ago, in the span of about three days, I started feeling sick, got more and more sick, went to the doctor and discovered I had cancer, and had emergency surgery. Then I went through about six months of really awful chemotherapy.

I definitely wouldn’t recommend having cancer as a cure for existential dread, but it worked for me.

Actually, I’ve found just the opposite - I’ve been more likely to spend more time on lemmy/kbin over the last couple of months than I spent on Reddit in years.

It got to the point that I’d just pop onto Reddit, look around, see the same basic variety of botspam, astroturfing and concern trolling, and go do something else. It wasn’t even worth posting anything, since any response I got was almost certainly going to be from a bot or a human-who-might-as-well-be-a-bot, and it was going to be the same thing either way - just some shallow bit of stock rhetoric that at best might be sort of tangentially related to what I actually said.

But then I came here and rediscovered the pleasure of reading posts written by actual people who actually think about what they’re saying, who will actually read and think about what I actually say in response, then write a response that they’ve actually thought about.

And that was it - I was hooked in a way I hadn’t been for years on Reddit.

That said, it’s nowhere near as good now as it was a few months ago, and I have been less active recently. The last big migration in particular, after the API changes went into place, led to both more bots and more humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots, and the quality here went sharply downhill.

It’s still better than Reddit though. And it’s been improving again of late.

I wish she could’ve seen that.

It depends on the instance - I have multiple accounts.

Kbin.social because I like the kbin software better than the lemmy software, and because Ernest is awesome.

Lemmy.world because it’s definitive (when it’s up).

Lemmy.one because it requires people to not be assholes.

Lemmy.ninja because the admins somehow manage to be both diligent and goofy, and because ninjas are cool.

If I have reason to believe that someone is so tech-illiterate that they’d be unable to deal with a 7z, I just use something else instead - likely zip.

I use IZArc, so it’s all the same to me.

The only thing I’ll potentially sort of miss is the cynical comedy of the absolutely godawful shit they recommend when they don’t have a watch history to base anything on.

I’ve long been partial to orange tabbies and standard issue cats, but my current one - a stray that just showed up one day and moved in - is a tuxedo, and that just might be my new favorite.

The prettiest one I’ve had was a Siamese/tabby cross (also known as a lynx-point Siamese), She had classic Siamese markings and blue eyes, but instead of solid color points, her dark patches were gray tabby stripes.

Megamind

Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Not Another Teen Movie

Those third party search tools already exist. I expect that apps will begin linking to them or even including their own version of the same function.

And really, it’s vanishingly unlikely that somebody so dull-witted that they couldn’t even find the most notable instance on a given topic if it wasn’t already on their instance’s All is going to end up on such an obscure instance in the first place.

Again, I don’t think it’s a usability problem at all - I think it’s just people expecting the fediverse to be essentially identical to the monolithic corporate social media to which they’re accustomed, then faulting it for not being so.

Right, but exactly because that’s a thing that people value, the “problem” will be solved organically. Community searches already default to sorting by activity, so over time, one community will come to be seen as the de facto “main” community for that topic. Just as is the case on other forums, except over time and by consensus instead of from the start and by decree.

We may be thinking of different populations of users.

Yes and no.

Much of that bit I excised from the last response concerned the users you’re specifying. It is true that I wasn’t initially considering them, so you’re right as farcas that goes, but…

The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.

a lot of the reason I ended up excising that part is that it was an overall shift in the topic. Yes - as I noted, I can see how that “friction” could be considered a problem. But personally, I think it’s a good thing.

But again, that’s really a different topic.

And as a bit of an aside, it’s taking every ounce of my willpower to not translate that admirably diplomatic passage you wrote into less generous terms…