@sun Right, and what's so frustrating about it is raises the question of if the American people deserve this oppression because, bluntly, they tolerate it. And as you point out, they demand it. They show active resistance to actually getting off their corporate reservations; they'll gladly get on another corporate reservation. But where they go, must be a corporate reservation. Have you noticed that these people have an almost magical ability to suss out if something is an evil corporation or not, and will ONLY work with them if they are?
@sun Yeah, I sympathize with that completely. It's just, I feel disillusioned with fedi, and I don't think the issue is the software itself. I think normies are actually nigger cattle, they're hylics, NPCs, whatever term you want to use.
I went to BasedCon and was on a panel about digital vs print books, and as you might know, I have a light printing press in my garage. They let me on the panel for that reason, expecting me to be an anti-digital ideologue, but the truth is, I'm more like an anti-censorship and pro-creativity ideologue.
One thing I noticed about everybody on that panel, and everybody attending it, is that they were basically institutionalized. The argument for ebooks revolved around Kindle. It was Kindle this, Kindle that, and how Amazon can take away your books by revoking access to them. When I brought up publishing DRM-free books, they looked at me like I had three heads.
Conversely, the print media side of it was all the same stuff: what if you can't find an outfit to print your books, what if you get charged too much, and so on. When I raised: "Why not acquire the equipment to make our own books from scratch and build a parallel economy." They also looked at me like I had three heads.
Now consider, the people at BasedCon are all rightoids, conservatives, mostly religious people. They're off the reservation politically. Quite frankly, these people are oppressed; they aren't free to express themselves and tons of effort by the state and the private sector are levied to try to preclude them from doing so. Yet they still insisted, for some reason, on using these institutions, institutions that openly hated them.
And to loop back to this, so too is the case with social media. Functionally, fedi is a federated Twitter clone. People can argue that it's something else, but really, that's how people view it, and that's how people use it. But the thing is, people don't actually want to get off Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever. They want those "platforms" to reform and cater to them. Unrealistic as that might be, this is the hill people are dying on. It's decided already. They won't get off the reservation and start from scratch. Instead, they will turn the reservation into some kind of attrition war until they find themselves ina literal gulag.
@mar77i To be clear, I think "being a beneficiary" entails having access paved roads, effective hospitals, an education system that doesn't hate you, etc. Working some job to get these things is totally acceptable, it's just that working the job has to actually get me those things.
@sun I realize that I'm interjecting a technical discussion with a social problem, but hear me out:
None of this matters, because nobody actually uses fedi, especially right wing fedi, outside of techbro anime Nazis who are ideologically invested in never touching grass. Fediverse growth has completely petered out, and any hope one might have that it could one day replace giants like Twitter is basically nil. Worse, a good chunk of these techbro anime Nazis think this is somehow a good thing because it "filters" "normies." I used to compare fedi to email, but this side of fedi is so small that we might as well just dispense with "hellthreads" and revert back to email groups.
In January of 2020, I wrote "The Fediverse Is The Future," and this is me basically admitting that I was wrong. It's not the future. It's not the present, either. It's not even the past. It's a failed experiment, a FOSS sperg mongoloid babby with fetal (h|c)opium syndrome.
@p I kind of want to attribute it to better versioning, but your explanation might make more sense. I had a few experiences where a Python library didn't change, but it relied on some C++ library that did, and the package manager that the Python library use didn't specify which version of the C++ library to get like it's done in `Gemfile.lock` or `requirements.txt`. But that's just an anecdote and the details of it escape me because it was like 7 years ago now.
@di They discuss everything, actually. That's the thing that mainstream "platforms" have on fedi (and I'm including Matrix in that): as long as you aren't discussing explicitly political stuff you're fine. I think I got banned not for talking about political stuff, but for fedposting, to be clear.
Now, let's compare this to rightoid fedi, where the target audience begins and ends at tech-bro anime Nazis with Asperger's. If you want to discuss anything outside of that wheelhouse for more than a few minutes, you're fucked.
And also, few people actually join fedi at this point. It's all just alts of alts of alts. There's a reason I walked away from it even though I left my instance up.