Do you think things will get better?

Yes.

A lot of the problems we face are systematic, to do with how our society is organised rather than any human limit. They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries. The reason they’re aren’t solved isn’t because we can’t, but because the few most powerful people are powerful because of this rigged system, and have a self-interest in keeping it that way by any means necessary.

History has shown us clearly that even kings, dictators and other broken systems can be overthrown AND stopped from coming back, provided the people doing it are politically educated and organized. That’s the key. If we just get angry without a plan, we will end up like the pitiful Jan 6 riot. But if we educate ourselves with lessons from history and work to create a mass movement, we can finally move forward beyond this frightening present situation.

Privacy-focused isn’t a term I’d choose, but it certainly allows privacy-concerned people to use it, and like you said, avoiding the capitalist surveillance crap that for-profit companies are pulling.

Ones like Lemmy fit in fine to my threat model. They enable me to use privacy tools up-to-and-including Tor routing, without a phone number or other personally identifying info (you can’t do those with many other social media platforms). I can use the Fediverse pseudonymously, and if I ever want to, anonymously.

I’m not hiding this conversation from you, but I am hiding my identity from companies.

That’s a great point. While not the same, I think this relates to the bullshit assymetry principle (aka. Brandolini’s law), where as a result of the time it takes to respond to basic repetitive questions, especially those which are pretty easy to search around for existing answers, then entire communities can get tired of tolerating them. In some cases people just become rude and dismissive and in other cases staff actually just ban the person asking the question, which is already the case in some Lemmy instances.

One potential way around it I’ve seen is having a decent FAQ available and well-known within the community, so one literally just reply with little more than a link to a page with the answer already written. In fact, one site used to (not anymore) have a culture where people would just attach a whole book as a PDF and simply reply ‘read this’, maybe listing a chapter if you’re lucky, which isn’t very tactful but it’s pretty funny and still provides a low-effort, high-detail answer (albeit maybe too high-detail for the kind of person who asks such a common question to reddit instead of trying to find the answer themselves).

If we consider that phenomenon you described to be a problem, the solution is being able to make it extremely quick and easy to give a canned response and politely tell them to RTFM.

I would take the job just to make sure we can sabotage it. And I’m not even affected by their adblocker detection; I just yt-dlp and NewPipe the videos.

Classical liberalism (just to give a concrete political term for those old school liberals) is admirable. I broadly agree with its values and I support all those points you mentioned. The progressive and conservative variants we often see in US politics are blatantly hypocritical and broken.

Unfortunately, liberalism’s core issue is that it’s an ideology based on an abstract concept rather than our physical conditions - it starts with the abstract, fair idea of freedom and attempts to apply it onto material reality. For example, the liberal approach to free speech, which theoretically creates a marketplace of ideas where the best prevail, just turns into a propaganda echo chamber when huge media organisation are owned by business tycoons with political agendas, and when social media companies are financially punished by their advertisers for allowing controversial expression. The utopian marketplace of ideas never really manifests at scale when that marketplace is collectively dominated by the like-minded owning class.

Without adding restrictions (a contradiction of liberty), the huge wealth of some people turns their freedoms into their political power. If the rich owning class can control the economy through a monopoly or similar, they have the freedom to control what news you can find, what products you can buy (if you can’t DIY it, like a computer) and their quality and how safe they are, what jobs they will give you, and so much more.

There are also plenty of other contradictions which we see play out, such as:

• How can we balance freedom of religion with giving people rights that a religion rejects? (e.g. abortion, homosexuality)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with someone else’s right to private property? (e.g. trespassing, restriction of the commons)
• How can we balance someone’s individual rights with community safety needs and expectations? (e.g. weapon rights, industrial and environmental restrictions, speech laws)
• Should liberalism be allowed to defend itself against a democratically-approved transition to dictatorship, or does this contradict political freedom?

In these situations, we have to resolve them somehow, so we end up with liberalism variants like conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism, straying further from the pure old-school liberalism they necessarily contradict. Even without corruption, liberalism decays, distancing itself from its ideals, and ultimately turns into a playground for the powerful who have far far far far far more ability to realize liberty than almost everyone else.

You make a good point about the primaries. In the previous elections, Bernie Sanders getting shafted definitely shifted a lot of their supporters away from the Democrap Party and Bernie’s social democracy towards socialism (like, working class seizing means of production). It had a real radicalising effect on people. They were being disenfranchised by federal politics so they looked towards unions and direct democratic organising away from the broken electoral system.

Whoever is making the controlling decisions behind the party facade

Money talks - you can’t dominate a US election without it. And most people don’t have the kind of money that talks, so both parties inevitably end up representing the owner class rather than popular opinion of their supporters. Democrat donors don’t want radical changes which would threaten their wealth, so no matter how popular a Bernie is, they’re going to do all they can to block them. On the other hand, while Trump is similarly unorthodox and controversial like Bernie, they’re not really a threat to the owner class’s wealth (Trump himself is a business owner!). So even while many Republican donors did object and push hard for alternatives, they didn’t do a Democrat and obstruct him.

Republicans like Trump are also liberals. [wiki]

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally never found it controversial to talk about in person. And this includes in countries where it’s a prosecuted crime.

Copying is not theft, artificial scarcity in the digital world is a tragedy, and I intentionally avoid paying middle-men distributors (like streaming services and record companies) for art.

The more important thing is to never pretend your vote is a valuable political action.

If you think there’s a point to voting and picking a lesser evil, go ahead, but at the end of the day you must admit that no viable candidate is adequate. Both major parties are the playthings of the owner class, not representatives of the population. The last 4 years have demonstrated that clearly; the house always wins because the game is rigged. The point being, voting cannot and will not solve these systematic problems.

If you want to stop the descent into hell, you have to actually participate in political organization beyond the electoral circus.

deleted by creator

All the people trying to dissect you for science.

As OP mentioned, a lot of replies focus on loss, that friends will inevitably die and objects will break… we already face that reality with regular life! That’s hardly a downside of immortality itself.

It was released (read: forcibly shoved down our throats) by Google and came out of nowhere when there were zero problems with the decades old and extremely well researched incumbent image/video formats that the web was already using (i.e. jpg, png, gif, mp4, etc)

I don’t agree with this. There are many things wrong with those file formats. GIF, for example, is over 35 years old and has a 256 color pallete. Now, if it’s good enough for your purposes and it “ain’t broke” for that, fine, but compare these formats to JPEG-XL and it’s clear that they deserve to be surpassed. WebM/WebP, despite my many issues with it (WebP and AVIF are bullshit formats), they did serve a legitimate purpose, and quite frankly you can even say it was good for the environment due to lowering filesizes at an actually meaningful scale.

In fact, if I’m reading Mitre correctly, there are libjpeg vulns still being found since WebP was launched. I’m not saying this to equivocate the two from a security standpoint, hell no, but to critisize the common view I see online claiming the older formats are unbackable.

No contradiction. Law is a dumb basis for deciding what you like and don’t like.

Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.

There’s plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn’t come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.

(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).

It’s possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn’t really care about those ideals (perhaps they’re only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn’t do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.

For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn’t require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn’t have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.

lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn’t able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.

Almost all of my creations which I share (mostly code and visual art) are entirely volunteer work. Community culture doesn’t cost money. Entertainment does not need to be a job, even if it must take time and work.

Of course industrial large feature films cost full-time money. But I don’t come to online communities for that.

The upvote/downvote button is not a [] petition for making a problem go away by disagreeing with it.

Unfortunately, in a material way, it is. Downvoting a post is a way of lowering its visibility on the platform.

I’m not complaining about it being crypto - I prefer crypto over credit card payments for online stuff. On the other hand, any monetisation of online communities leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I came to Lemmy years ago to get a step further away from for-profit internet treating me like a customer. Root of all evil, and all that.