Itty53

Ah yes, Facebook, where all the users on activity hub are from.

Wait. That’s not correct at all.

Just because it happened a once or even twice does not mean it can’t succeed despite that. Facebook doesn’t have some core of active users using there activity hub protocol that they can unplug and snuff out the protocol for. Also every implementation like Lemmy and kbin and even mastodon have custom implementation allowing additional features beyond just what the protocol itself has.

At this rate mastadon, lemmy and Kbin themselves are more likely to hinder the growth of activity hub as FOSS. They’re the ones implementing bunches of features the others have to either keep up with or defederate from. But a hundred walled gardens is still better than the one.

There’s also a lot to say about the mindset of the users. Reddit still exists. Twitter does too. So does Facebook, etc etc etc. The users here chose this over those. These are distinct differences that make the argument of the article a bit weightless. The warning isn’t weightless, and people need to be adamant that new users use different instances in order to block all this from being effective. But again, the fact that that article is shared over and over here shows the mindset of the users. We can’t stop them from federation. Protocols are protocols. That’s the point.

Ask yourself these questions…

How long until http protocol is monetized?

How long until POP, IMAP and SMTP (collectively referred to as ‘email’) is monetized?

How long before torrents are monetized?

The answer is, quite nearly from the start you could … but anyone can still do everything you could with those protocols by themselves, for free, without any strings. Still people monetized all those things early.

Because those are all just protocol, or a digitized agreement on rules of communicating fixed sets of information. Sets like an email, or a website, or a collection of files. No one owns any of these rules they just exist and any two computers can agree on them and use that to exchange information.

Fediverse is a protocol. Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, and the others are all just programs talking the same protocols. No one allowed any of them to do so, they just agreed to. All the entities that make up the fediverse agreed to the same thing, so all of them can talk to each other, in theory. In practice each one can choose which others it wants to talk to. Just like you can build an email client that just will not send emails to Gmail. It’s not because it can’t but because it doesn’t want to.

When someone says a thing and you deliberately interpret anger where there was none (especially after they’ve said it, “I’m not angry”) and insist they “calm down” rather than addressing any valid criticism or complaint they actually bring up, that’s quite gaslighty. It’s intentionally presenting a false reality and insisting I adhere to it “or he’s just wild, he won’t calm down”.

Or “he’s just a troll not worthy of consideration” as you put it. Which is definitively dehumanizing as well, but you don’t see me whining about it. It is ironic though. Me calling childish arguments childish, whoa! You calling someone a troll, that’s perfectly reasonable. You calm down.

It’s not strictly the same as gaslighting but that’s why I said “gaslighty”. But go off about the hypothetical strangers I belittled, please, whatever gets you going down there.

It’s pretty fucking immature (and gaslighty) to respond to valid criticism with “chill out bro”.

Go ahead and ban me, you don’t need to make passive-aggressive threats. You can just power-trip away. Don’t forget to leave a comment that reads “user was banned” so everyone knows how calm and collected you are with your ban hammer.

And I’ll say it again. *Deep breath, peaceful mind, thoughtful spirit*: That user is an entitled child who made a stupid argument.

I’m calm as shit man. Relaxing on a Sunday. It’s just that I’m not wrong. He is self-entitled. He wants game developers to spend their money publishing DVDs for the one-off collectors – nevermind the environment, nevermind that they’re going to be downloading day 1 updates the size of the game anyway, nevermind all of the ridiculous arguments about “oh poor me, they won’t let me easily copy and distribute their product to my friends”. Nope – “I’m a collector, and game developers are awful people for not giving me my CD and this should be illegal and society should make laws to satisfy my collector quirk.”

Are you fucking for real. Go back and read this fuckin’ thread, dude, that’s what people are fucking saying. “Make laws against this”.

That’s self-entitlement defined. It’s not a charge, it’s an observation made by an adult living in a society of law regarding another publicly made comment. I offered scrutiny from the apparently rare perspective of being a grown up.

And this is very much a childish argument. Like whining your dinner at the restaurant didn’t come in a colorful box with a toy inside, or that the book you have to read has no pictures in it. They’re not even complaining about the product, they’re complaining about the package it’s delivered in. Literally the same as saying “that meal is gonna suck because it didn’t come in a McDonalds box”. Six year olds think like that.

Gamers are the most entitled group of brats on the planet and this is just one tiny example it. Literally demanding useless plastic trash, not even a toy or anything you look at - no, just a useless blu-ray disc that the hardware all but ignores anyway.

And again - I’m calm as shit. Don’t make the mistake of thinking a few paragraphs means I’m angry. That’s just being lazy, you can read. Hell, you can even read criticism. And if you can’t, get the hell off social media.

There are no solutions to climate change that are contingent on a particular party being in power in a single nation when the problem isn’t confined to a single nation. Making the environment about Democrats over Republicans is wildly dangerous because it breeds contentment: people think they did their part in electing the “right” person and stop giving a damn. Politics isn’t going to offer a solution to climate change, but they’ll certainly tell you they’ve got em.

Tell me you’re okay with being lied to in order to be made afraid, tell me you’re okay with science being misrepresented for political brownie points, and I’ll tell you you’re no better than a grubby politician yourself, because that’s all that standpoint serves. Political brownie points. It’s “ends justify the means” logic. “Its fine to fear monger and lie and misrepresent facts as long as you’re doing so on support of the right ideology” is wildly stupid and dangerous reasoning.

You have a problem with packaging. The product is the software. Software. Soft. Media is irrelevant. You may as well be insisting games be provided on floppy disks for your own contentedness.

It isn’t false advertising. You’re just self-entitled and want companies to cater to you specifically and not the masses. Gamers are really the most entitled group of folks on the planet. You may as well demand Netflix provide VHS copies of every new show they make. Same stupid argument. If you don’t like your arguments being called stupid, don’t publicize your stupid arguments.

Because brick and mortar retail isn’t entirely dead. Impulse buys, Christmas gifts, etc etc etc etc. All the reasons to have a product for sale in a store. The product was never the CD or DVD or floppy disks, and gamers who make a fuss about it are just crotchety for the sake of it. There’s no reason to print physical media. I haven’t even owned an optical drive in my pc for well over a decade. Still bought some “physical copies” of games that were just codes. I’m not upset.

You’re old grandpa, go back inside and stop yelling at The Cloud.

Given the climate (pun) of politics at the time he was alive and playing that role, and given that hindsight has taught us An Inconvenient Truth was more political than it was based in science, and given that Crichton’s argument was that environmentalism had to be apolitical in order to ever be effective … yeah I’m not a climate change denier but neither was Crichton.

Crichton was a Democrat. And he was right, Al Gore’s movie was about fear-driven politics, not actionable goals and plans.

Go look at how climate scientists described that movie. “The basic truth and it’s inconvenience remains” one researcher was quoted saying. Tacitly admitting everything beyond the basic truth of the film was inaccurate. Go on, check out what retrospectives have to say about it. There’s a lot of em.

Again, Crichton was right, and he was absolutely not in denial of climate change. He was against using social problems with scientific solutions as political ammunition in the fear cannons.

Bottom line is any time someone insists a complex problem has a solution as simple and clear cut as “vote Democrat”, they’re wrong. More wrong than they are right, especially given any timeline longer than 4 years. And that’s exactly what you’re doing here. “Crichton deviated from the party line on the environment ergo he’s just a ‘denier’”. There’s far more nuance in this life than that.

Fun fact, Michael Crichton (that one) coined that, Gell-Mann amnesia after Murray Gell-Mann, who had nothing to do with it.

Actually Prigozhin is arguably waaayyyy worse. Putin is a ruthless warlord just like Prigozhin, yes. They have equally virulent ideologies, yep.

But Putin is a politician first and Prigozhin is 100% not. Say what you want of Putin but deep down he still gives a shit about projecting certain images of control, law, etc – he still values the opinion of certain international communities. He is still the leader of a government, not just a battalion or an army.

Prigozhin doesn’t give a shit about any of that, he is a simple and ruthless warlord without any pretense of governance at all, who only understands force and who has no qualms about being open in his toxic ideologies.

I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely Prigozhin actually accomplishes any of his own goals towards Russia because he isn’t a politician and he’s just a thug, but I also think it’s equally unlikely Putin’s Russia recovers from this. Wagner was Putin’s pitbull. They were virtually the entirety of professional real soldiers Russia had under its command. No more pit bull changes things dramatically. We can easily expect a social “downgrade” of Russia’s status as superpower in the eyes of other nations. That leaves some big doors open for China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and of course, the United States.

We may be on the cusp of a second break up of the USSR, further breaking Russia down into disparate nationstates. That possibility offers a lot of problems on its own. It’s no longer a question of “rogue warlord gains control of russian nukes”, now its “russian nukes don’t exist, now those nukes belong to 15 new whatever-istan nations, each without any pre-existing relationships or treaties”. That’s scarier. Doubly so because in that big muck of former Russian states, Wagner could still be around in the middle of it with the biggest dick on the block. He’d predictably go Atilla, march through every one of them and conscript every dude over 16 to fight. And history tells us over and over just how those situations end: global-scale wars. Conqueror types never stop, they just keep conquering until they get stopped.

I just can’t fathom buying a luxury car and coping with “well it works and gets me where I need to go”. If I’m spending that kinda change on a car, and also paying for its services in ongoing fashion apart from the car payment itself … it better do more than just “get me there”.

That dude 100% deserved it. Not for anything he said but for being a tech career guy and wiring his house up so hard he couldn’t open it without Alexa. He wouldn’t have been able to open it without wifi either.

“Fairly decent” is a bit of a stretch. Panels come up, features sold to you that won’t work and will endanger your life. “Fairly” standard for luxury rides amiright?

“Decent”. Hmph.

No he didn’t. The context was “as a US citizen” per the post. You gave him a 6th grade civics lesson about how bills turn into laws a-la school house rock before even sort of addressing the question. The next step would’ve been explaining what laws even are.

That’s a little condescending, assuming a citizen of a nation doesn’t know how their own laws are created. It isn’t a LOT condescending but it is a little.