I apparently have always used Twitter wrong since I mostly just lurk and people I follow don't get into flamewars or whatever they're called. It's kinda unrecognizable for me how you describe Twitter.
Mastodon on the other hand is just pretty dead for me. I haven't found that much interesting stuff and I don't really know where to look.
From my perspective, they function pretty similarly. I don't see the toxicity you're talking about. Quote tweeting is handy because it's not used to put down others but just, you know, sharing and adding something to the original tweet.
I hear this one too and honestly, it does negatively effect them, they just don’t see it because it feels like it’s always been there. But give them ad-block for a week and then take it away…
Libgen is great for popular books, but the above guide is amazing for finding basically anything else. I’ve often needed to load up IRC to find more obscure books.
I was. Then deleted the whole shebang. I rather write idiot comments than be in charge of anything, especially my own personal blog. I’m not interested in any particular niche that you can come chat about tbh. I am, but not really. I just like using lemmy as a journal lol same way I used reddit. But I do appreciate something when I see it. I love the small self starter vibe, and I can sort by all and interact with everything and entertain myself.
Ars Technica recently published an article very critical of Mastodon. The main takeaway is the argument that Mastodon won’t scale well to a large userbase, as the more instances there are, the bigger the server burden to everyone. And as most users are against corporate funded instances (they’d defederate from any that emerge), it may be unsustainable mid/long-term.
I wonder if these scaling-issues apply to Lemmy too? The instances make copies of posts/comments from other instances. They copy images too? And videos? If so, I imagine a future where only the bigger and wealthiest instances will survive.
And concerning moderation tools, I know they’ll improve with time. But how can a federated system like Lemmy do certain tasks that Reddit’s Pushshift enabled? Example: bots detecting and deleting re-posts, spam, bad actors across multiple communities, etc.
I didn't really follow the recent "drama" (for lack of a better term), but I'm glad it came about because it created a lot of buzz on hackernews about reddit alternatives which got me to check out the Fediverse (kbin/lemmy), and a few other alternatives. I really like the look and feel of Discuit, but it's inevitable for it to become essentially another digg v4/reddit 2.0 clone because apart from a nice UI and the creator/owner not being a dick, it's still a centralised forum that will limit or censor discussion at the whims of the owner in the end. I don't want that.
I had to think for a minute, I didn’t realise how many of the console’s stand-out titles are Japanese. Crash Bandicoot: Warped, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, and Driver are my picks.
Funny you checked protondb for the previous ones, but not BG3 itself. It’s out in early access, people have been playing the early acts for a while now.
have you tried changing back to the other keyboard, there is usually a button in the bottom left. a lot of emoji shorthands are actually keyboard features.
It was so very fun to use third-party apps for Reddit until the last day. Today will be the new dawn for kbin and Lemmy apps. Reddit before, now Threadiverse.
dunno about native, but I played the early access version on my steamdeck and didn’t have any issues. (didn’t go super far into the game, but it definitely runs solid under proton)
Edit: please note that I made at least one mistake here (as well as some kind of boneheaded comments later). FPTP, even in the US, does not require a 50% majority, just more votes than anyone else (a “plurality”). It can still benefit parties to get to 50%, since it makes their winning more likely, and so in the absence of any drawbacks, most successful parties will still aim for it, but it isn’t strictly necessary, as has been sometimes demonstrated in the UK. Thanks to squaresinger for linking a YouTube video that mentions this below. /Edit
I just want to share my thoughts on this. It started as a response to one comment, but I realized that there’s a lot more that can (and I think should) be said, so here goes.
First, for those who don’t know, FPTP stands for First Past The Post, meaning a system where everyone votes for a single candidate and whoever gets more than 50% (i.e. “past the post”) wins the entire election (the losers get nothing). For many Americans, this might be so familiar that one would wonder how it could be any different (in a small-d democratic system), but there are in fact many alternatives: ranked voting, proportional representation, Condorcet method, etc.
They all have strengths and weaknesses, but for FPTP, and other similar systems, there’s a result in political science called Duverger’s law that says FPTP-like rules tend to cause a two-party system, essentially because because even if you don’t team up with a larger party you may disagree with on many issues, to get a majority, others will, and then they’ll win and you’ll get nothing. And since getting significantly more than 50% consumes party resources that might better be used elsewhere, but gives no reward, 50% (plus a small “safety margin”) is what all the successful parties will eventually aim for, and thus you get two roughly equally-successful parties. Tiny swings in voting then lead to massive differences in outcomes, which threatens the stability and security of everyone (even America’s “enemies”).
So saying “just vote for third parties” (like I see some calling for here) is tone-deaf at best, or part of a cynical ploy to fracture the opponent’s party at worst. Even if a “third party” does win, the best that can be hoped for under FPTP is they just end up replacing one of the two parties, becoming one of the two parties in the “new” two-party system. And the two existing parties have likely spent far more time and effort researching ways to stop even that from happening than any of us ever will.
If we, as Americans, or others with a stake in what America decides to do, want to change this (and I personally do), then we need far more fundamental changes to how the system works. Just choosing a candidate we like (whether they have any chance of winning or not) won’t cut it. I don’t know what’s the best voting system to use, but I know I’d like to scrap the Electoral College, for a couple reasons:
Even though one might argue that Congress and the Supreme Court are more essential to reform, it’s hard to deny that the President has a very large leadership role today.
One might argue that relying on a convoluted/Byzantine method for choosing the President makes it harder to manipulate, and that’s probably true, but the two parties have shown that it being difficult is not a deterrent to them doing so: in fact, they likely both benefit from it by keeping smaller parties that can’t afford to do it out.
It reminds me of the fallacy in computer security of “security through obscurity”: if it’s possible to break into the system, and large numbers of people can benefit substantially from it, then someone eventually will, no matter how hard we make it to exploit. We need to change the system, not only so that it is prohibitively difficult for anyone to exploit the system, but also to get rid of a lot of the corruption that makes most people want to exploit it in the first place.
All of this is much easier said than done, I know, but we need to explain clearly to the public why “quick fixes” won’t work, before we can convince them of the need for more fundamental changes. We still need to work on figuring out the details of the best changes, but unless we can show people the reality of the deep structural problems that acually exist, why they exist, and how we know we’re right about what we’re saying, we’ll never convince most people to change anything.
You are totally right. The problem isn't zqthat such a change from within the system can only happen from a position of immense power. So to actually fix these bugs you need to
Have enough power to change the constitution
Have gotten that power through the current system
Be so dedicated to change the system that you are willing to risk all that power for the change, because any meaningful change means that the systems that brought you to power won't work in that way anymore.
Now, to make matters more difficult, representative democraties usually spread that power over hundreds or thousands of people. So not only you need to fit the bill above, but also the top few hundred politicians in your country need to agree to potentially losing their power.
So what tends to happen is the opposite: Politicians amass power and make it harder and harder to replace them, until a war/civil war/revolution happens and the next crowd tries to make it better.
The US has had centuries to concentrate power, contrary to many European nations that were re-founded after wars in the last century.
So unless the US as we know it collapses, there won't be significant change to the better for the political system.
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