Yes. And even a few years ago, we had some Star Trek shows which got some weird criticism. But also a lot of valid criticism for being overly emotional in a very American way. Like they never do anything without someone delivering a 10 minute speech, filled with an absurd amount of emotionalism. And then they all swear in on some team spirit… While I miss the good old times when the characters would just show how they’re the good guys, and not talk about it a lot.

I watched it anyway, wasn’t a bad show after all. But they really should have cut some of the monologues to make it more enjoyable for people who don’t need all that emotionalism and holding hands with ideology.

Looks like it’s the combined total of both your post in news about the subcontinent and world news@quokk.au. There’s 3 comments in the one community and 3 in the other one, plus a deleted comment. That makes 6.

But PieFed had issues with the number of comments calculation before. As far as I remember on occasion it’ll do the maths some other/wrong(?) way. So this number might be inaccurate.

Totally agree. First of all with the Linux vs Meme… Yeah, we’re all living in more than one dimension. Guess I more or less wanted to say, most helpful advice I got on what non-spec combinations of RAM and computers work etc… I got from Reddit. I think it’s a bit an amount of users thing.

I’m also for human connection. I’m also here to talk to people. Especially in the comments. Also why I sometimes disagree with people on what the Threadiverse needs more of.

With the pamphlet bombings… Well, the internet changed a lot in my lifetime. We had times we thought it was a bit unethical to do statistics on what software you install, hence what packages in Debian are installed how many times. As a more privacy-oriented person you were told to just put it out there and not worry about collecting that kind of data… Or just write your Blog mainly for yourself and maybe some people will like it as well. I think as of today, that’s very niche way of thinking. Thanks to the advertising industry, we need exact page impressions. And everyone expects social media to come with all these engagement metrics, how many people saw the post… Not only professional “influencers”. I’ve heard random people will also have a look at the numbers. And your local youth organization also wants to know about the propagation of their invitation to the summer party. What the algorithm does to their posts, etc… Just counting how many people showed up isn’t how communication works any more. At least in my experience.

I’ve upheld the opinion, the change in the MAU is probably a rough indicator on our attractiveness. If a place is nice, people will come and want to join the party. But it’s a bit of a diffuse metric and doesn’t tell anything in specific. Plus it’s not the only factor.

If my quickly written down SQL query is right, those are the numbers for the last month from my instance’s perspective (my subscribed communities):

 num_comments | upvotes_on_posts | downvotes_on_posts | num_posts 
--------------+------------------+--------------------+-----------  
       188597 |          1646685 |              46461 |     13928  

So without the boosts, it’d be a total score of 135.

I guess with statistics, you’d always better ask a very specific question. I mean, these are just numbers, I guess? And if you’re fixing an old Linux computer, there is no point in lots of people commenting on meme posts. You want the one person who’s done this before to be part of the network, read your post and then reply… Or if you want to discuss politics, all the people re-posting the news articles on geopolitics don’t really count, you’ve already read the newspaper, now you’d like nuanced opinions in the comments. I’m a bit unsure whether a single abstract number means anything.

For the health of the overall network, I think MAU isn’t even all that bad. There’s probably a strong connection between “health” of a place, and how many people think it’s worth subscribing and then coming back on a regular basis.

Yeah, thanks. Guess OP asked if they want to do it / are trying. But i answered another question, whether I think they’re successful in actually doing it…

Thh, I can’t even tell. What Trump does is a lot of caprice. Goals and rules change on a weekly basis. Probably so we all learn to submit to whatever is sent our way, as proper peasants should. That would be learned helplessness for one part of the people. And gladly accepting the role as sheeple for the people who just want someone to tell them whom to hate.

But I really question whether there’s more geopolitical strategy behind it. Doesn’t look like it to me. And Venezuela was kind of the only successful thing Trump did. Iran… not so much.

Interesting question. I mean it probably depends a bit on how long we think the current political course of the USA lasts. Seems to me the current wannabe king lost quite some backing with the electorate. And all of the unsteadiness, extra cost for the economy, … might not be very sustainable in the long run. So this situation might swing to the other direction sometime soonish?!

I think the USA overall might still have quite some of the original idea deep inside. It’s just the current administration and whatever crazy things some individuals come up with. But it doesn’t look to me like they’re doing a lot of successful geopolitical strategy. I mean they do have ideas. But then they just do random things. One week they’re big into conspiracy narratives against the jews, the next day they side with Israel and start a war. Which is another thing they promised to do less, a few months before that. They start some trade war against China, and they lose it. Then they do declare themselves the winner. I think only real strategy here is some Orwellian: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength… And their flood the zone strategy. But that mostly deals with the domestic population. A good amount of them is stupid and they cheer for Trump for deporting people. But at some point even they will realize the current rate at which Trump is doing it will leave you with immigrants for another 30-60 years. So he can’t even meet the expectations of the xenophobes. In reality, that is. They can lie about it, and they do. But I guess at some point there will be a reality check. Plus there’s also lots of clever and sane people in the USA.

So I don’t see any proper attempt suitable to beat China or Europe. And I think the MAGA days are already numbered. So I just don’t think we might be looking at a strategy like that in the near future.

And it takes two to tango. Putin has been following a long term strategy for decades already. And up to now, all his negotiations with the US and phone calls have turned out his way. Seems to me that kind of direction comes Putin’s way. But idk. He’s kinda weak? He misjudged the situation in Ukraine and he’s now busy with that. He can’t beat them. And he lost over a million men, wasted his weapon stockpile. His economy isn’t doing good at all. I don’t think he can afford another war, right now. Plus he already has a strategy against us and he’ll probably stick with it for a little bit longer. He’s doing this hybrid warfare to destabilize us. Fill our social media with misinformation, sow distrust, give suitcases filled with money to our most fascist and corrupt politicians. Sabotage our infrastructure… I think that’s more like Putin. I don’t expect any pact with the USA from him. At least not any pact that makes him promise anything to the USA.

Ultimately, I don’t think Russia and the USA are even aligned. There’s some overlap with the oligarchy and corruption going on. But it’s not really like they follow the same goals. And the USA as a democratic country are supposed to do what the population wants, anyway. Not let some politicians do whatever, mostly for personal gain.

Aren’t they doing a super shitty job at it?

I mean computer tech and movies and TV series are a good point. That’s entirely dominated by the USA. So are the internet platforms. And I think that is a big issue. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have the stupid culture war and as many radicalized or passively doomscrolling people, if it wasn’t for their effective algorithms.

Other than that, idk. Most our consumer goods come from China. Our infrastructure is made here or at other places. Trains, a good chunk of airplanes. It’s a tiny amount of the population who buys American cars, because they’re just not as good as any German or South Asian one… If I look at my apartment, furniture, appliances, pans and pots, power drill… None of that has anything to do with the US, nor does it have any American brand name on it.

We have a lot of culture, books, podcasts, music… It’s more or less just the TV and cinema that come with predominantly US content. My bookshelf is >90% non-US authors. Lots of Germans, quite some Brits, something about a Witcher made by a Polish dude… And I’ve been socialised that way. I think it’s only Americans who grow up consuming only their own culture.

Energy… Well if it wasn’t for stupid politicians, we’d do the renewable ones. And seems with recent events, quite some people learned we want electric vehicles and heat pumps, and renewable electricity. So if we manage to convince our politicians to invest, we’re free from the shackles of the oil and natural gas industry a bit sooner. We need to do it anyway, because it’s cheaper and there’s a finite amount of resources. So selling the outdated energy isn’t even a good long-term strategy in colonializing anyone.

And US military “protection”… Against whom? We didn’t have any proper attempt at invading us with a military, since WW2. And now that Putin tries waging war, we can see the US isn’t even reliable anymore.

Yeah, It’s a weak point anyway. While the graphs aren’t detailed research, there’s also no reason to believe dbzer0’s perspective on the same network includes 8 times as many new users as LW for some reason. Or all the users in their communities have 8x worse karma for some external reasons. So we probably need further research.

It’s the “anarchist” mindset 🫣

Stupid article. For once, there’s no reason to call them a “Church”. They’re not. They specifically do some shenanigans, to legally qualify as a “church”. But that’s pretty much it.

Secondly, they live off of secrecy and not getting their lunatic practices and beliefs exposed. Why call for letting them continue on that path? I’d say them not having any doorhandles anymore is a good thing. Now it’s less likely they can lure in some vulnerable people. Solely by the front door being closed and having no handles.

I think if you write an article like this, don’t lead with all the church stuff, and bury the parts with the abuse and brainwashing at the bottom. Do it the other way round.

(This comment is an opinion piece.)

I think there’s two concurrent, but different definitions of the word Fediverse. One means, software that can speak the ActivityPub protocol. And the other one means, social media service which is able to interconnect between different websites.

The first one is more useful if you want to use it and know whether it connects you to your friends on Mastodon and the other big ones. The latter is the more technical definition and includes older protocols as well, as well as newer ones and alternative approaches to form a network in a certain way. I guess it’s the more correct one. But it doesn’t tell you a lot as a user. Maybe technically it can exchange your user statuses but nobody uses it so you can’t really do anything with it in reality. Or there’s two approaches and you were talking about a different manifestation than somebody else, and you’re both federated but not part of any compatible ecosystem.

Sure, I’m not debating that. And there’s other ways to destroy or impede (with) something to generate attention towards it. Sorry for getting political here, but other example that comes to my mind is how people supposedly cut cable ties of the German train system to draw attention to the cause of climate politics. It is massively annoying for all commuters, and people who are already on board for a more enviromentally friendly way to get to work. Because now everyone is 2h late, except people with a car. And I always question the validity of it.
But ultimately it’s completely unclear who does it. Could very well be people trying to make climate activists look bad in some false-flag-operation. And in this instance (post deletion) I’m willing to believe it’s genuine.
But the gist of it is the same… Is it going to archieve the long-term goal? Because the short- and mid-term way of working is, you’re being destructive to tear down the remaining good things about something faster, so it eventually is going to have to get replaced… And I’m more on board with, focus on direct constructivism. For example I just left Reddit and went here. And I’m somewhat happy the crowd working towards something is more pronounced than the people immediately trying to destroy it as well. I mean theoretically we probably should - by that reasoning. I’ve seen the AI scrapers hammer my Fediverse instance, too.

Uh. I hate the power deleters. It mainly makes conversation worse for the remaining humans on Reddit.

PieFed Trump/Musk filter for the win!

We have the Swiss AI iniative as well. It’s in early stages and doesn’t match the performance of …well anything. But they list some more providers: https://apertvs.ai/pages/get-started/

Ah, I get it. Yes. That section is weird. And it’s unalike the bureaucrat English around it. And I’d say the call to action: “Embark on a journey […]” is pretty much like ChatGPT sounded 2 years ago. I’m fairly certain the other text comes from humans with some expertise in writing legalese or specifications, and this will be a ChatGPT snippet.

The committer also has this weird habit of naming their commits “Update Readme.md”. So I’m also fairly sure they’re not your average open-source developer using Git how it’s intended.

Most other markdown files in that specific directory smell of ChatGPT as well.

Well, in theory it’s your software anyway… In case you’re an EU citizen.

Depends on where you’re at. If that’s Germany or close to it, we have the Digitalcourage DNS server, OpenNIC. I haven’t tested anything else but there’s also dnsforge.de, Digitale Gesellschaft in Switzerland, and of course Quad9 who operate globally.

Huh, where did you find emojis? I found one lightbulb emoji in the iOS README. And some in their bio. But that’s basically it for the 7 READMEs of the various sub-projects?!