ThatOneKirbyMain2568

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 7 months ago

But Eigel isn’t alone in his condemnation of the bill. Another Republican, Missouri State Senator Sandy Crawford, claimed the incest and rape provision shouldn’t pass because “God is perfect.”

“God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows that to happen, bad things happen,” Crawford said. “I’m not gonna be able to support the amendments because I am very pro-life.”

You can't help but appreciate the sheer amount of cognitive dissonance you gotta have to say, "God is perfect," and "…for some reason He allows … bad things [to] happen." How delusional can you be to say that raped children giving birth is part of some perfect, divine plan?

Social conservatism is a complete joke.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 8 months ago

I think there are a few culprits here.

• Not everything wants to be an everything app. While everything in the fediverse uses ActivityPub, that doesn't mean everything has to aim to be interoperable. I wrote a lengthy rant about this here, but essentially, it's important to have things with a more specific, restricted purpose if we want the fediverse to be accessible. If someone just wants a thread aggreegator (i.e., just Reddit's style of media), they shouldn't be forced to grapple with microblogging features more fit for a Twitter-like. There are some platforms that aim to combine different media types—Kbin/Mbin has both thread aggregation and microblogging, and I've heard that Friendica tries to work well with everything. Even so, if someone wants federated Reddit, they should be able to have federated Reddit, and Lemmy aims to provide that. The same way that Pixelfed (an image-sharing platform like Instagram) doesn't need to incorporate Reddit-style threads or Twitter-style microblogs, Lemmy doesn't have to do it all.
• Federation is still in the works. Something to keep in mind is that most of these platforms are early in development and still working out a lot of bugs. Kbin (the platform I use) is an obvious example due to its currently incredibly spotty microblog federation (tho I've heard that Mbin has implemented fixes to fare better in this regard). We have to be patient while all the kinks are worked out. As much as we all wish it didn't, software development takes time—a lot of it.
• Admins can sometimes be a bit trigger-happy with defederation. I don't think the fediverse has quite grasped that defederation is essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation tools, cutting off interaction with all users of an instance. While there are times where this is justified (even preemptively, such with Threads imo), there are times where the nuke has been threatened over a quarrel between admins or disagreements about other defederations. Hopefully, this will cool down as the fediverse matures, but we'll have to see how that pans out (especially with Threads federation growing ever nearer).

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 8 months ago

Oof, that's never fun. When I'm typing a long comment, I always spam copy it so that I can paste it back if I end up losing it. On PC, you can even use Windows+V to pull up a clipboard history, which has come in handy more than once.

Anywho, glad my reply was helpful! There are a lot of ways to interact with the content on the fediverse, and it seems like you're well on your way to finding one that works best for you. Hope you enjoy it here!

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 8 months ago

They've been mostly resolved in my experience. Kbin.social has been working great.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 9 months ago

You forgot Rule 1 of the fediverse: Kbin does not exist.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 OP , 9 months ago

Nah, just some teen making very inefficient use of his time

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 OP , 9 months ago

Of course, these platforms have only federated a handful of accounts, so the "chaos" right now is in the reaction and discourse. However, I don't think it's unjustified.

I've outlined my main issues with Threads federation here, and while I'm not as sold on preemptive defederation as I was when I made the post, I still find it reasonable to be concerned about about for-profit companies controlling a vast majority of the content, especially when (A) the users making that content may be unaware that they're on the fediverse to begin with and (B) companies like Meta have a terrible track record and would have incentive to grab a ton of users by defederating if they're able (though with so many other parties joining in, whether they'll be able to pull something off like that is becoming more questionable, hence me being less sure of the need to defederate).

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 OP , 9 months ago

That's because I'm not fully sure on how people should act in respect to this Threads situation (which is what got me thinking about all of this in the first place). In the recent past, I was all "defederate defederate defederate defederate," but now considering that multiple large platforms (like Flipboard) will be joining in, it's less likely that one company will control a majority of activity. Of course, you don't need a majority for there to be a problem — just a large enough portion for other instances to have issues defederating due to the amount of content they'd lose — but a mere large portion and not a supermajority may not be reason to defederate. Of course, there are other things to consider as well, and I'll probably make yet another wall of text with my new thoughts on how instances should handle this in the near future. For now, this thread is for me to share the ideals that I think people on the fediverse should prioritize and for others to discuss what they think on the matter.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 OP , 9 months ago

Let me try to explain a bit better.

Let's take an instance called Instance A. Instance A is currently on the fediverse, which we'll say is pretty evenly distributed. No instance has a large enough portion of users whereby others would have problems with activity loss if they defederated, which is good. If any instance starts doing things that Instance A doesn't agree with, they can defederate, and less activity won't be much of a concern with defederating from that single instance.

But now, let's take Instance B. Instance B is planning to implement ActivityPub and join the fediverse, and when it does so, it will control 80% of the activity. In other words, it has as much activity as the rest of the fediverse combined.

However, Instance B isn't particularly trustworthy. They don't value the open web like the rest of the fediverse does, their moderation is extremely poor, and they haven't cared for general well being in the past if it meant raising profits.

Here, Instance A and instances like it have two options: defederate immediately, or wait and see.

• If it defederates immediately, Instance A will see some users move to other parts of the fediverse because they're excited about the 5x increase in activity from Instance B. They probably won't go to Instance B now, but maybe Instance C or D. However, a lot of people will be fine. After all, activity is staying the way it is, and Instance B is untrustworthy anyway.
• If it waits and sees, this allows people on Instance A to enjoy and get used to the 5x increase in activity. Not bad so far.

However, let's say Instance B starts having moderation issues (e.g., widespread hate speech and more-than-usual spam) as everyone reasonably predicted. Instance A now wants to defederate.

• If it defederated before, no problem! Nothing needs to be done.
• If it didn't and wants to start defederation now, good luck. Now, everyone on Instance A has gotten used to the 5x activity on Instance B, and you're going to have an extremely difficult time convincing them to cut the activity they see and the users they follow by 80%. Way more people will leave Instance A if it defederates now than if it had just defederated early on.

In other words, if people on Instance A come to rely on Instance B for the activity they're used to, way more people will join the camp of "I'm leaving if you defederate with Instance B" then if Instance A just defederated from the get-go.

Let's take another example. Instance B wants to try to grab a bunch of users, so after some time, they stop federating at all.

• If Instance A defederated, the people there are fine. They never saw stuff from Instance B anyway.
• If Instance A didn't defederate, then 80% of the content that people are used to will suddenly be gone. Most of the accounts they follow will be disconnected, and activity will fall a ton. These users on Instance A will have two options: stay, with a horrendous drop in activity and no posts from the accounts they're most interested in; or just go to Instance B.
  In either case, Instance B will be fine. Most interaction was between Instance B users, so this won't be that much of a deal. But for users on other instances that are used to seeing stuff from B, it'd be catastrophic.

In short, defederating immediately has much smaller consequences than trying to defederate when whoever you want to defederate from controls most of the activity that your users see.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 9 months ago

the comments on the satirical tiktok are absolutely hilarious

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 9 months ago

Do you plan to do this with Firefox?
Yes and it will be named Poopenfartenfox.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 9 months ago

Breaking news: Fossil fuel company CEO who was somehow allowed to run an international climate change summit says that fossil fuels aren't bad. Everyone is befuddled as to how such a thing could have happened.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 9 months ago

Can't believe they're making an Elon Muskrat movie

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 OP , 9 months ago

I think if most people genuinely liked these features, you'd see people say that more when they're being discussed. What's more likely (and what I see way more often) is the second thing you mentioned: that most people don't really care and just go on with life. But if most users don't care, it again begs the question of why waste time making these changes at all. It seems like it's just to keep the UI design team busy more than anything.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 OP , 9 months ago

Yeah, they made a complete 3D Snoo. You can see it here. I think it's fine for the most part. It's just that the open smile that they used for the logo just doesn't work that well imo.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 9 months ago

I guess it's not the worst thing in the world, but who exactly did they think would prefer this? The logo it had was great — no need to change it.

At this point, I'm certain that platforms like Reddit and Discord just undergo random UI changes to keep the UI designers actually doing something.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

On the whole, Kbin and the wider fediverse have been great! I feel that I've been able to engage a lot more meaningfully with others here, though that's likely due to it being relatively small. Likewise, I've been posting a lot more to help this place grow, which has been great.

The whole decentralization aspect is particularly great. From Kbin, I can view threads from other Lemmy & Kbin instances as well as microblogs from Mastodon instances, and it's great to be able to view all of those in one place with Kbin's UI.

All of that being said, there are definitely some growing pains, primarily related to activity. Outside of general communities on big Lemmy instances, people don't post much. This is the case with any social media site — way more people are willing to view or even engage with content than to post it — but I can't help but wish that some of the people voting and commenting on posts would also make some of their own and contribute to magazines. Often, this is due to people just not having ideas for what to post (speaking from experience), but I think a lot of it is people just not thinking to post that cool thing they saw somewhere else or on another magazine.

There are also a lot features that have yet to be implemented on Kbin. Microblog federation is very poor, there isn't a built-in subscriptions panel, the image UI in post creation provides no visual feedback, you can't follow tags as useful as it would be, moderation is still limited unless you're the owner and have access to the magazine panel, etc. Of course, Ernest et al. can only work so quickly, and the progress that has been made so far is great — for example, the crossposting UI is awesome and has helped me discover more magazines — but the lack of features does still impact the experience regardless of what can be done about it.

Kbin is great, and I'm hoping that development continues at the current pace. Above all, I'm hoping that a few more people here decide to post a bit more regularly or at all.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

Well, looks like I'll just stick to using Invidious.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

Safety of the players? How do trans women playing cricket endanger cis women?

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

100%, but the hardness of a cricket ball doesn't change with who's using it. A really really hard ball moving really really fast is still a really really hard ball moving really really fast, so it's not like there's some significant difference in danger posed. And even if there was such a big danger posed by someone assigned-male-at-birth playing cricket, why would it still be perfectly fine for men's cricket?

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

Again, we're talking about throwing "essentially rocks" at speeds that are insanely fast no matter who's doing the throwing. When you're talking hard objects being thrown at such high speeds towards people in protective gear, the difference in danger (even if that danger is significant) is going to be minimal. If women "are far more likely to be exhausted" at the end of a match, they're more susceptible to really bad injuries from any cricket ball moving at such a high speed. A trans woman throwing the ball isn't going to pose much more risk, definitely not enough for safety to be a factor in banning trans women from women's cricket.

I think there's definitely a discussion to be had in regards to what's fair and how we approach fairness and sports in a world that's accepting of trans people. However, the moment you go out and pretend that there's some safety risk posed by trans women in sports, you unjustifiably paint them as threats to cis women, and that's completely unacceptable.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

Hmm, fair point. I can see how increased ball velocity and decreased reaction speed could make an injury more likely. Nevertheless, I still have these doubts:

• How much of a difference actually is there in reaction speed? I have a hard time believing that there's enough of a difference for a biological female be unable to dodge a throw where a biological male would.
• Going with the previous question, is this alleged difference in exhaustion actually observed to a great extent among professional cricket players?
• Are these safety factors really significant as to be part of a reason to ban transgender players? If a cis woman came around that bowled significantly faster than other cis women in the sport, would it be reasonable to want them banned from the sport or to portray them as a threat to other players?

Unless there really is some big safety concern, still seems absurd to ban people on these metrics and tell people that you're protecting the other players by doing it. With the evidence I'm aware of, it still seems minimal to me, and we've seen BS reasoning for banning trans women in other women's competitions (e.g., chess). While I can't say with confidence that there's no decent argument in support of a ban, I still don't think safety is part of it.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

In 1532, the geographer Jacob Ziegler of Bavaria proposed the theory that the creatures fell out of the sky during stormy weather and then died suddenly when the grass grew in spring.

lol, that's dumb

This description was contradicted by natural historian Ole Worm, …

well duh, of course people thought that was stupi—

… who accepted that lemmings could fall out of the sky, but claimed that they had been brought over by the wind rather than created by spontaneous generation.

oh

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 10 months ago

>:(

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 OP , 11 months ago

No, this is a different thing that was around for over a year but that a lot of people weren't aware of until recently. Iirc, they were these karma-based blockchain points that a subreddit could have. Don't remember much of the details

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 11 months ago

Apparently, this was actually a thing for over a year; it's just that a lot of us didn't know it existed until recently, when Reddit's recent bad decisions brought this one to light.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 1 year ago

Daily reminder that /kbin apparently doesn't exist and that the kbin.social in my username is just a hallucination.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 1 year ago

It's federated with Lemmy, yea, but it has a completely different layout with different features. I can straight up browse and interact with Mastodon from /kbin thanks to its microblog support, but you obviously wouldn't say /kbin is included in Mastodon. I think that the same goes for Lemmy.

Also, /kbin doesn't get a mention but beehaw (a Lemmy instance) does?

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 1 year ago

I think that this is just for r/place (and even then it's still scummy), but if the Reddit executives have shown us anything, it's that they don't act according to rational thought. I could easily see them keeping this pixel icon as the default, no matter how stupid that might be. Or they might keep coming up with things to make new icons for so you always have to pay if you just want the default original.

You really never know with Reddit.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 1 year ago

They'd probably just remove that (and would have a good argument for doing so). I suggest either not giving it traffic or drawing links to Reddit alternatives.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 1 year ago

This seems like the dumbest decision imaginable. Users are flocking to alternatives, many of those who haven't don't trust you, and you're trying to become profitable … so you delete the stuff people paid for without any sort of replacement. What a genius ideaǃ Making the platform less unique and giving the middle finger to the people who give you money in one go!

There's no way a human adult is running this company. It has to be a council of toddlers run by a keyboard-smashing orangutan. At this point, they might as well start encouraging bots and karma farming. Maybe even pay people to do it!

Wait, what did you just say? They might actually do that?

The circus never ends.

ThatOneKirbyMain2568 , 1 year ago

o/
want some fries?🍟