uabstraction

4 percent of the browser market is still well over a hundred million users.

Google leverages their monopoly search position to push people towards Chrome, using messages that, to lay people, imply a lot of websites won't work correctly unless they install Chrome. This is the most charitable reading, assuming they don't deliberately impede compatibility with third party browsers.

Good

You used to be able to do this, but e-mail has been required for some time.

Over on Lemmy, it is the instance operator's choice whether or not to require e-mail, but most instances currently do as a measure to mitigate bot signups.

In theory the regulators, as part of the government, serve the will of the people. But the state under capitalism serves no one but the massive corporations which these regulators are meant to govern. So we end up with fossil fuel guys running the EPA and Verizon lawyers running the FCC.

There is no one to regulate the regulators because the state in its entirety is isolated from accountability to the public.

The capitalist class on the other hand is famously innocent of thuggery. It's not like the established socioeconomic relations in Korea were incubated under a military dictatorship or anything.

You either approach it from the social perspective, or the utilitarian perspective. From the social perspective, the goal is building a community. To build a community, people need to be held accountable for antisocial behavior. The technology is secondary.

Most of the times leftist communities split off from mainstream platforms, it is because the platforms either enable rampant antisocial behavior, limit the community's autonomy in deciding how to deal with it, or its just plain censorship.

The libertarians see it as a utilitarian problem. Banning any content or behavior is beyond the pale, and they try to build out their technology to ensure this "marketplace of ideas" prevails. They consider themselves rugged individualists, so the goal of building a community is an afterthought.

It's a mistake to think echo chambers are a phenomenon which only take place on the political extremes. Reddit itself is an echo chamber of tepid liberal orthodoxy and American exceptionalism, moderated by a former member of the Atlantic Council. A fish doesn't recognize the water it swims in.

Redditors might call a place like Hexbear an echo chamber for instance, but it wasn't the members of Hexbear who chose to isolate themselves. Reddit made that decision by banning them.

Counterpoint: If you are a member of an oppressed group and the leaders of your community punish people for calling you slurs, it makes it pretty obvious that they do, in fact, have your interests on their mind.

The point of federation is autonomy. Communities can decide on their own how they would like to conduct themselves, instead of having Steve Huffman or Mark Zuckerburg write the rules for them. Several alternative social media websites, including instances of Lemmy, have actually sprung up explicitly because of censorship they experienced on the hegemonic corporate platforms.

Hexbear for instance was born from the ashes of r/ChapoTrapHouse, one of the most active (per capita) communities on Reddit. The Reddit staff pulled the plug in the midst of a generational political crisis and mass civil unrest and didn't even have the nerve to cite a single, specific infraction. And now, the community is free to discuss subversive political topics without having to worry about advertiser boycotts applying pressure to have their community shut down.

This idea that free speech starts and ends with the ability to use slurs is among the most idiotic brainworms which persists among libertarians. Nobody in power gives a fuck if you spend your time spitting on people who have even less power than you do. They only care if you can articulate a political program which threatens their ability to rule.

It's actually a great feature. It sorts out the edgelords very quickly, while taking 10 minutes to disable for any administrator with a modicum of technical prowess. If removing a regex string from the code is too much work for you, you shouldn't be trusted holding account credentials, email addresses, and private messages of an entire community in the first place.

While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community.

A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole."

The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes).

Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.

If not being able to say the N-word impedes your ability to articulate your political worldview, you should probably reflect on that.

Ideology is when you disagree with the status quo, and the more you disagree with the status quo, the more ideological you are. And when you disagree with the status quo a whole lot, that's dogma.

If you want leftists to engage with you in good faith, you simply need to ask the right questions. Questions that demonstrate a baseline of familiarity with the history and theory being interrogated.

The Left isn't averse to debate. The Left is averse to repeating the same tired arguments about iPhones and authority and "human nature" until the heat death of the universe. Things that have been addressed in great detail for over a century.

There is actually a lively debate taking place. It just typically doesn't take the form of Zizek vs. Peterson SuperBowl style spectacles. It takes place in literature, and in meetings among organizers trying to actually accomplish their goals. People like that don't give a flying fuck what John Stossel or Ben Shapiro have to say. This mainstream "debate culture" is so far detached from the actual struggles taking place.

Wait. You mean those "Heckin adorable Police Pupperino" threads that inevitably pop up on r/DogsWithJobs and r/Pics without fail every time the cops lynch another Black man?

This criticism could just as easily apply to Reddit. The entire thing is an echochamber of American civic religion and they ban any subversive communities. Their director of content policy was plucked straight out of the Atlantic Council for f sake.

There was a wave of Pirate Parties about a decade ago, but they never gained even as much traction as the Greens. Onerous enforcement of intellectual property is just one of the many issues we face with the Internet today, next to the colossal monopolization of social media platforms, internet service providers, and browser vendors. Not to mention severe invasions of privacy driven primarily by global imperialism (alphabet soup intelligence agencies) and surveillance capitalism (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit et. all).

The Internet is undergoing the same process of enclosure and capital accumulation as the rest of the world we live in. This is the fate it is consigned to, as long as people are unwilling to question the economic assumptions we take for granted. All of these decisions which negatively impact the Internet are made for one of two reasons: Accumulating capital, or protecting capital that has already been accumulated. Therefore, a broad anti-capitalist front is the only way something in opposition to this will have any teeth.

There is simply no way for a political movement focused on a specific niche issue like like net neutrality or free exchange of information to stand on its own, or make the state face any consequences for malfeasance. For the same reason we don't have a significant political party of librarians, even though it would really kick ass if we did.

Another great thing about the Slashdot moderation system was the "overrated" and "underrated" tags. A comment could get moderated as "-1 Flamebait" then get moderated as "+1 Underrated" all the way up to "+5 Flamebait". My personal favourite quirk of the system.

I haven't been around Tildes in a while, but they are doing the right thing when it comes to producing an alternative to Reddit - which is focusing on building a community rather than focusing on building a platform. After all, if you find Reddit to be terminally flawed, you will not solve those problems simply by duplicating Reddit.

The Tildes founders looked at Reddit, then what happened to Voat and identified the problem as a social one, not a technical one. The problem with Reddit and Voat lies between the keyboard and the chair. This is why they focus on the quality and good faith of the discourse, instead of metrics like growth or mass appeal. They aren't aiming to be a clearing house for all means of social interaction in the way that commercial social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are.

There is no justifiable reason why one person's vote should be worth more than another.

I'm quite partial to the Bongcloud opening myself.

http://www.chessmastery.com/bongcloud.pdf

Moderating discussion forums is not censorship.

McConnell has no ideology besides accumulating power.

Why is there no privacy focused Facebook or Google?

The tongue-in-cheek answer to this is that they all eventually get bought by Facebook or Google. Anything that poses a threat to Facebook or Google will fold for the right price, as a simple matter of serving the fiduciary interest of the investors.

The only platforms which can hold out are the ones explicitly designed to resist centralization. They have no pitch to make to investors, no funds for promotion, but the technology is there. Mastodon and Matrix are proof.

The technology is dead simple. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are nothing but glorified shiny message boards. WhatsApp, Discord, and Skype are nothing but glorified shiny VoIP apps. The only thing that makes them special is the branding

Nonsense. In many cases, vendor lock-in and the network effect present a substantial hurtle to living free of these companies. Sure you can quit Facebook, but they'll still build an internal profile about you. You can also tell your mobile carrier to go f* themselves and get a ham radio - but unless all of your friends and colleagues do the same thing you'll just be talking to Major Tom up in his tin can.

Freeing yourself from the grasp of these companies is hard enough for the tech savvy. For laymen it is virtually impossible.

Bingo

It doesn't exist yet, but when Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast* wraps up the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution is the next stop. I'm really looking forward to it. Duncan does an incredible job of tying together the precursors, politics, social situation, and military campaigns into a coherent serial narrative.

* https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/

Not exactly. Disabling the borrow checker is an internal implementation detail of the locking types, but it happens opaquely to the code using the locks.

The locking types make assurances with regards to the lifetimes of their parameters / contents / return values and these are still enforced by the compiler.

Oh please! Apple may not represent the same privacy clusterfuck that Google does, but that doesn't make them good. They still are absolutely abhorrent with regards to vendor lock-in and planned obsolescence.

Many public ones are

Big companies don't have to have regional subsidiaries any more. [...] In the US, government hasn't really gotten into this in a big way.

It is a mistake to assume that the solution which works in industry is equally applicable in government. Businesses and governments are very different institutions. They have different missions, different stakeholders, different legal obligations, and different responsibilities.

Surely, things would be more efficient if we just had one large uniform, monolithic state institution, but a (small R) republican state cannot exist without extensive delegation. It is only though the process of delegating power to states, counties and municipalities, that we can even attempt to execute the will of the people.

This all comes with tons of redundant infrastructure - thousands of city councils, mayors, police departments, courts, and school systems. 50 governors, 50 state cabinets, 50 independent boards of elections, 50 different state legislatures - but each community has its own needs and its own ambitions, and nobody knows those needs better than the community itself.