planish

There's a difference between "unpolished" and "can't keep what posts ought to be on the page straight". Like Ruby on Rails can get that right 100% of the time out of the box before you write any code, I don't know how Lemmy's web UI manages to do it wrong.

There's plenty of reasons not to try and keep things private! It is a lot easier for comments on Lemmy, for example, to be public, rather than trying to make the discussion threads private among some set of authorized participants.

And if I am rating movies on Netflix, I really do want them to take my ratings and put them in a big machine learning pile to try and find me better movies. That's the point of rating the things.

But there's a big difference between me actually sharing information with people so they can do good, and people trying to collect information about me without my permission so that they can make money, or, worse, try to manipulate me later.

And even if the data is not in itself all that worthy of secrecy, and I might be willing to share it, someone else deciding for me that they get to follow me around and see what I am up to or what I like, without actually asking or without genuinely expecting that I might say no, is... not how consent works.

Also, some of the point of this is that one cannot in fact genuinely ignore advertisements. At the very least they constitute a cognitive load, where it is harder to do or see things because the advertisements are in the way. They can also hammer brand names and desired associations into people's heads, to ensure that most people know that e.g. X Brand Soda is the "luxury" soda. And of course in aggregate they cause people to buy things. Each person might choose to buy the thing of their own apparently free will, but running the ad will cause more people to make that decision than would otherwise.

Where they are most dangerous is when advertisements try and create problems, rather than just offering products. A sign that says "We sell Coke" is fine. Three commercials a day asking if you are guilty of "old-shoeing", the social faux pas of having old shoes, look at this man being laughed at for it, etc. are dangerous, even if they never try to sell a product.

These kinds of marketing campaigns are that much more effective if they can be targeted at the people who are the easiest to convince that made up problems are real. And while one's general personality is not exactly a secret, we also don't want scammers like this going around making lists of the particularly gullible.

What does it even mean to be "against NATO"? Is it, like, saying "the NATO alliance ought to disband because the terms of the alliance are bad for my country actually"? Is it like "I hope NATO countries lose all their wars"? Or like "NATO is a dangerous thing to exist because it allows an invasion of Country X, which is likely to happen, to result in a global thermonuclear war"?

A bunch of countries could be arming Ukraine without the sort of all-for-one, one-for-all terms of NATO specifically that make it likely to figure prominently in any explanation for why we have all died of nuclear weapons.

That is itself a political belief, though. You cannot in fact have any sort of community without answering political questions about how that community should work. You could say that no external political questions should be discussed in the community, but:

1. Enforcing that could cast a bigger shadow over the community than the political arguments did.
2. It amounts to saying that the external political situation is acceptable, or at least relatively safe to ignore.

This is what is known as the "Chewbacca Offense"

Keep your enemies close. Like Hitler, whom one keeps in one's car.

I'm not sure it's feasible to try and compare the two in an objective way. It's easy to know which oppressive empire one personally prefers, but trying to actually reach consensus on which was better or worse using some kind of convincing evidence would be so complicated that it would probably amount to a waste of everyone's time.

My view of the socialist position on China is that it is not "the Chinese state is good", but rather "stop being mean to Chinese people".

China is an empire, and socialists hate empires. But the US is also an empire (in that there's a core that gets all the good stuff and a periphery that gets the good stuff extracted from it, which for the US is often places not technically in the country but in practice obligated to listen to it). So when the US comes in all scandalized and decides that what we really need to do to save people from the Chinese empire is to make sure that US companies don't lose market share in GPU computing, and can manufacture solar panels at competitive prices, and that people get their short videos from Instagram Reels and not TikTok, the socialists are very suspicious. The net result looks a lot more like imperial protectionism and/or racism than a coherent anti-imperial program.

I'm not sure why this ends up as a socialist talking point? Maybe because the nonsense of the policies seems obvious? Maybe because it seems like warmongering and wars are terrible and so it must be stopped at once? Maybe just to get a break from telling people that they should probably make sure people have houses?

Defederating instances on ideological grounds isn't a bad idea IMHO, and I can see why people might not want their feeds to end up full of people who just sort of assume that what we're here to do is use facts and logic to destroy western propaganda, with the goal of bringing about the downfall of the International Monetary Fund. That sounds like an extremely tiring project to be involved in; you wouldn't want to hang out with somebody who does that in every thread.

But I think it's important for the reason here to be that Hexbear is embarking on a project of ideological warfare. Not that the community consensus there is that the IMF is a bad idea. A load of communists is probably fine, while a load of evangelical communists determined to exactly follow the letter of every rule while maximizing the amount that they can evangelize is probably not fine.

You could try Google. Most big email and calendar apps will support their nonstandard login flow.

I subscribed to too many YouTubes. Then I tried to watch all the good videos from the YouTubes I was subscribed to.

I can sort of almost keep up? If I go and watch YouTube constantly I can clear like 6 months' backlog in 2 months. But then at the end of the 2 months I'm like, was all that stuff really any better than the new stuff that's showing up today? Or than the other stuff I would have been watching or listening to? And the answer is really no.

So I think next time I take an interest in YouTube I'm not going to try and clear the backlog. It's not like it won't be there later; if I hear of a great video, I can go and watch it. And anything that won't be there latter is deliberately designed to exclude me, so why would I want it?

Whatever you decide to participate in, you're participating in that thing. You can't actually participate in anything if you keep going around trying to participate in everything at once.

I see 402 users per day in [email protected] according to the my instance shows me.

Granted that's going to be one of the biggest ones, but that's not a small number of people to visit somewhere in a day.