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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Some people, like Elon Musk, want us to believe that social networks are a “digital town square”, but imo that’s a pretty poor metaphor. Social networks are more similar to “digital pubs”. They are places where you go to meet, chat and share with your people. Of course it is a public place, and anyone can listen to your conversations, and in principle, even join. But social networks, as pubs, and as any other human interaction, are governed by (mostly unwritten) social contracts, codes of conduct and etiquette. You are not supposed to join a conversation uninvited, and if you are invited, you are supposed to treat the others with respect.

    However, these groups systematically and purposely violate the social contracts, they hijack spaces and conversation where they were not invited and insult, harass and harm anyone who doesn’t think like them or simply if they find it funny. They are the drunkards that instigate bar fights. And as in real life, the owners don’t want disruptive elements in their pubs.

    At this point, the Internet is 40 years old, and mass-adoption happened more than 20 years ago. Most of us have been part of many communities before lemmy and/or kbin. And the disruptive elements are always the same. There are many groups of people with different opinions on religion, social issues, economical policies, etc, and yet only the far-right insists on the on-line persecution of their opponents. And their strategy works as long as the apologist support them.

    This isn’t a matter of echo chambers. You can hear many different voices on lemmy/kbin. The only requirement to have you voice heard is basic respect, and that is something that the far-right refuses to do.





  • I don’t usually go to through other people’s comment history, but this one is a goldmine

    “It made sense back when everyone was, more or less, on board with the program of western civilization. We may not all have been Christian back then, but almost all of us were, and everyone supported Judeo-Christian values without question. Homosexuals were regularly taken outside and beaten to a pulp, so it was extremely rare for anyone to think such behavior was acceptable. At this point we need to ask ourselves what the purpose of freedom is. Are we a free people so we can exercise perverted pleasures of the flesh, the slaughter of innocent babies, and genital mutilation of children without their parents knowledge? If you answer “yes”, you just might be repeating the whisper of a demon.”

    “woke neo-marxism claims that any normal person is bad. That means its practitioners openly discriminate against conservative white Christian men, especially if they practice heterosexual behavior in a traditional marriage.”

    “Ironically, secession is about the most American thing we could do at this point”




  • [Google got] into open source software and it seems those survived the experience

    Not really. Google is responsible for the open source browser Chromium, which is the base for Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. They dominate the browser market, and they use their position to implement features outside the web standard. Their competitors (mainly Firefox) are not able to implement the non-standard features, driving them out of the market. Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.

    Google got into the Linux space

    Technically, both Android and Chromebok are Linux-based. But Google has done everything possible so that they aren’t part of the “Linux space”, to the point that Android uses a fork of version 3.x of the Linux kernel (regular Linux is now at version 6.x).





  • I don’t think Facebook really cares about attracting the current Mastodon/Fediverse users to their new social network. I think they have chosen ActivityPub for two reasons:

    1. They want a product to compete against Twitter. And with Musk rapid enshittificating it, they need to act quick. ActivityPub is open source and proven to work, so Facebook has less work to do, and can release their new product sooner.

    2. The main downfall of Twitter is advertisers leaving the site because they don’t want their ads next to hateful comments that are now allowed under the new management. But this is a problem that can be neatly solved with defederation! Each advertiser can have their own instance (instance-as-a-service provided by Facebook), and they have more granularity in decided in which parts of the network they want to participate, and which parts to defederate. Sure, we the original denizens of the Fediverse will defederate from anything Meta, specially from ad instances. But most of the users of this new Meta-fediverse will remain in their Meta-approved instances, oblivious to the world outside them.