We’re getting closer every day.

What thing are you referring to?

Yes, it’s unfortunate it didn’t have a positive effect long term due to being coopted. :(

As people are going to continue to use twitter style websites until they fall out of fashion, I figure its best if that twitter-like is at least not controlled by people who can go rogue and do severe damage to society, such as what happened with twitter.

We realistically can’t ban them, we can only mitigate the bad. Personally I don’t use twitter style social media, only Lemmy.

The drop in replacement is Sublinks, though it hasn’t gotten any commits since augest, so it might be a while.

The most promising potential replacement is Piefed, which is already operational. It’s ahead of Lemmy in some ways, and rougher in others, but the Dev is a chill dude :)

Also @dennis@midwest.social

In a parallel universe, I would like to witness an official sarcastic response.

‘U.S. eager to witness Russia’s awesome destructive power in person after Oppenhiemer success. Government announces free UV glasses for safe viewing. Populace hopeful for a swift end to capitalism after nuclear winter’

Enshittification is specifically how something inevitably gets worse and more anti-user due to pressures from capitalism/shareholders/profit incentive.

Rot, at least in my mind, is not that specific. It could mean the codebase is not well maintained and slowly failing, as an example.

It’s mainly about how Kojima’s themes and stories in the Metal Gear series are deeply influenced by his own childhood trauma of losing his Father at a young age, and how he resented his father for leaving a void in him after his death. The series evolution tends to reflect his own evolving feelings about his dad, revenge, and forgiveness.

It’s unlikely it’ll go back in the bottle, and that style of social media is capable of facilitating positive social change (Arab spring as one example) that may not have been possible without it.

There’s a quote from Eric S. Raymond about the issue of getting people to switch to something better (in this case the OS Plan 9) if there’s already something that’s fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.

it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and it’s not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that’s primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.

Hmm… That could be an issue, you’re right.

If it does get that bad, we’d gave to act more defensively by only federating with instances that have reviewed sign-ups and have received an endorsement on fediseer.

That would result in a more isolated experience, but if that’s the only way to combat it, then we’ll have to shift with the needs of the moment to keep it mostly humans we’re interacting with, and to make the moderation workload manageable.

The Fediseer project from @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com helps prevent bot farms from proliferating, as new servers require an endorsement from an already trusted instance to become ‘legit’. And they can be marked as untrustworthy as well, causing them to be defederated fairly quickly, limiting its reach.

We also have a MUCH higher moderator to user ratio compared to corpo sites, with a range between 100 to 2,500 users per mod depending on instance, Vs. 250,000 users per mod on sites like twitter, so we can more adequately spot and deal with spam on the network.

Absolutely incredible breakdown of the problem. In addition to twitter, I strongly suspect Reddit is infested with a similar increase in bot accounts, which would explain how a sub I used to moderate there has some of the highest page visits its ever had, yet its actual user engagement hasn’t changed at all, or even gone down.

Corporate websites, who have a financial incentive to allow the bots, have become completely unusable. The difference in interaction on Lemmy is incredibly stark, which goes to show that the fediverse seems to be far more resilient against bots since we can defederate from an instance that gets taken over, like cutting off an infected limb to stop the spread.

While I agree with her message regarding embracing joy and looking toward building things up and following a vision (I’m a solarpunk after all), I have some reservations with some of her other points, which ring a little too closely with new-age spiritualism for me, such as when she mentions that capitalist pharma discredited herbal medicines and alternative indigenous healing methods in order to push profit. Which, while true in some cases, shouldn’t dismiss how the scientific method has also shown how many traditional alternative medicines and practices can be nothing more than a placebo or even outright harmful.

Yes, modern medicine is a soulless and equally harmful profit machine, but the scientific method is simply a tool that can be used for either collective good or for harmful profit. It is not an evil in itself, but the system around it which incentivizes that evil.

I uh… I wouldn’t mind if they sent some of that struggle to my country, I think I could bear it.

The letter is suggesting that the vote counting machines were compromised, adding fake digital votes to the total after it had counted all of the real physicsl ballot votes. The letter suggests that a hand count of the physical voted would show the manipulation, because the extra digital votes would not show up in the physical ballots.

I’m not experienced enough to know for sure if those claims would truly hold water, but to my layman mind, it sure does sound like a compelling case to at least do a hand count.

Andor especially so, and in the best ways!

Wish it wasn’t so relevant tho.

Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes is a supremely good book to start with for an absolute beginner, and I would recommend it over Automate the boring stuff (that would be a great followup though!).

It assumes absolutely no prior knowledge, explains concepts extremely clearly, never presents too much to overwhelm and frustrate beginners, and includes a good range of projects that should interest any perspective programmer.

You’re welcome! :D

Trump, picking a Fox news host to run the military

“How could this be any worse?”

That motherfucker: takes off shirt

Narrator: “It got worse.”