Just decent quality content for various topics which aren't politics or tech. For the good of increasing the size of Lemmy, I think everyone ought to find a couple things they're interested in as hobbies and just dare to make content about them.

Lots of niche communities have the problem where no one posts because no one posts. At some point, you have to just pull the ripcord and start the darn thing, even if it takes a while.

Lots of good points in this thread, but I'd like to offer that even if everyone on hexbear were terrible annoying people, I'm an adult who can block content for myself.

Defederating is good for when an instance is hosting illegal content and you need to keep it off our servers, or if an instance is spamming stuff with bots and abusing the fediverse, but when it comes to content I do or don't want to see, I want to make that decision myself.

Counterpoint: watching little green checkmarks appear when my PR passes a pipeline step gives me dopamine

Conceptually? I'm all for it. Why wouldn't I be.

In practice, we live in a capitalist society and I don't want an arm that makes me watch an advertisement before I open a bag of chips.

Well...

1. Target once used small amounts of shopping data to accurately predict women were pregnant before they themselves knew.

2. A Nebraska PD got data from Facebook to prove a woman had an abortion recently and prosecuted her.

3. you don't know what will become illegal

So, even small amounts of data can predict lots of things about your life. The government has a track record of using that data to prosecute you. And you cannot trust the Government will always align with your morals (assuming it even does right now).

And that doesn't even consider other entities & organizations in the world.

What if an insurance company wants uses public data about you to deny you coverage? What if someone is searching for people in the area with ideal houses to rob and you're on vacation? What if they use a deepfake of a loved one to scam you? Steal your identity and ruin your credit? What if they make and sell deepfake porn made of you or a loved one? What if they create meticulously engineered political psyop campaigns hand-tailored to exploit your psychology? What if this list of "what ifs" could go on nearly forever, and some "what ifs" aren't even things we're capable of knowing about?

Because that last one is absolutely true, all the rest of those are true for someone, and at least one of them is probably true for you already.

Ok, but what if you don't care?...well someone else in your life does. And even if they have impeccable data privacy habits, if enough of their friends and family don't, then they're just a single missing puzzle piece, and everyone can still see their shape.

Not to mention, you contribute to a pool of data that's used to perform these kinds of analyses on society at large, meaning you contribute in some part to each and every instance of malicious data use towards anyone, anywhere.

Is that a good enough reason to care?

That doesn't make any sense though. Communism isn't when you "give power to the state." It's a word used to describe a specific economic system that China does not have. The word that best describes what I think you're getting at is "authoritarian." Words mean things, and if a thing doesn't fit the definition of a word, then it isn't that word.

Honest question, how can we ever get out of this? Is it just human nature for most of the population to not have critical thinking skills? Is it possible to reach a world where the majority of people have even just a little empathy?

It's just so sad. It's so clear to anyone even kinda paying attention that we possess the technical capacity as a society to meet everyone's needs and eliminate so much human-caused suffering at the detriment to absolutely nobody. We could be working toward a society where everyone has community, safety, security, opportunity. We could do so much if all we did was kind of give a shit about each other.

But no. Let's elect the guy who mocked a disabled reporter, encourages white supremacy, committed treason, etc.

Donald Trump is just a guy. A shitty guy, but just a guy. He's not what is ruining the world, but the fact that so many Americans want to vote for that shitty guy as president shows that a massive portion of the population is also just some shitty person, and fuck if that doesn't just burn up all my hope for this world.

Ok but even more super-honestly, the bitching about the bitching about the bitching about the bitching is worse. Why did you make this comment? Why not just downvote that asshat's content about that other asshat's content and move on? It doesn't contribute, so why comment to complain about complaints about complaints about complaints?

We should not do this as any more times probably....also google en passant.

Literally everything. I hate living under a system where my options are

1. repeatedly consume products which cause death and the destruction of our environment
2. move out into the woods and live as an isolated hermit
3. die

I'm...I'm just so tired.

I think we should only defederated instances that are actively harming this instances community in a way that cannot be handled any other way.

We all have personal block buttons that can be used to handle communities and individuals we don't want to see, and we have other less extreme tools at our disposal to handle a lot of things like this.

Tbf Mozilla needs money to keep doing good work, and I don't mind "paying" for Firefox like that when the only alternatives are "paying" by letting Google track and sell my personal data.