You might not realize it, but the Fediverse is social media so a ban would be rather detrimental to this place.

Governments know about parental controls. They know it’s the most effective, most efficient, and least destructive way to deal with this. They don’t care. And they don’t care about the children. If they cared, they’d develop their own parental control software, offer it for free, and encourage it’s use.

If they really wanted to get draconian about it, as they are doing now with age verification, they would pass laws to prosecute parents who don’t use parental controls for negligence.

But it’s not about the children. At all. It’s about preventing you and me, and all of us from talking to each other and entertaining ourselves. It’s about turning the Internet into TV, a one way faucet of entertainment and information controlled by the wealthy .001% where us peons can’t talk back.

These age verification laws are just the first step. They kill small forums and games like Urban Dead, and leave only sites controlled by megacorporations that can afford the age verification infrastructure and the massive corporate fines if a single kid sneaks in. Once you get used to this, it’s easier for you to accept not being able to communicate online at all, or start your own forum, or YouTube channel.

Non-profits seem to work better when they produce a product. But when they produce nothing and just have a goal, they don’t want to close shop after achieving that goal. Like MADD. The woman who founded it left a quarter of century ago because she accomplished what she set out to do. Those running it today don’t want to lose their meal ticket.

Non-profit means the corporation isn’t set up to make a profit and the business operates off of donations instead of selling a product. So there is always a profit motive. I wish more people understood this. Everything from Greenpeace to MADD is still a corporation ran by people who want to make lots and lots of cash.

That’s the problem. Comcast is famous in the US for being utter dogshit. So is ATT. And that’s pretty much our choices.

yes but how often does your internet go down?

About once a month. Not for very long, but it is an annoyance. Xfinity usually does maintenance between 1am and 2am, and the Internet will be out for about 30 minutes to an hour. About once a year it goes down for at least half a day.

My OS hasn’t gone down at all in 20 years. I don’t want that to change. If an OS stops working for an hour once a month for maintenance, it’s a piece of refried shit.

How have things changed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis

Looks legit, doesn’t it?

I’m using the website. After what you said, I checked and it has Subscribed/Local/All at the top of the page. That’s really nice. I just started using Lemmy so I haven’t completely figured it out yet. I use old reddit, so it might be set up the same way as new reddit but I wouldn’t have known.

Edit:

What are hidden posts?

I can’t figure out how to unsub from the Lemmy version of r/all. So I’m getting latestagecapitalism, politics, politicalmemes, various communist instances. 80% of what’s on my page is politics. I’m not interested in that.

I think most people unsubscribe from r/all anyway and subscribe to subs related to their favorite hobbies and games and work related info. Most of my frontpage is for video games I’m currently playing, programs I’m currently using and odd fun subs like moviemistakes or maybemaybemaybe. I wish I could do that here.

Remember that 90% of what is said online is said by complete oddballs because nobody will talk to them in real life and they have all the time in the world to post on the Internet.

And the more extreme the view, the more sock puppets these oddballs will have to try to convince you that their fucked up view of the world is actually normal.

IRL I almost never, ever meet people who are obsessed with politics, or people who are extremists like Nazis or communists. Online, they’re all over the place and it is not remotely normal. Same goes for chronic pot heads who are vehemently anti-smoking cigarettes. You don’t meet that kind of bizarro-world health nuttery offline. Or people who think that people who have outdoor cats are pure evil and should be put in prison.

Extremism like this in general is not at all normal offline. But online it seems like it is. It is not.

That’s a problem as old as the Internet. If you go through ancient forum discussions from 25 years ago, you won’t be able to spot the bots. It doesn’t take modern AI to create posts online. That tech has been around forever.

Ok. I’ll believe that Europe isn’t 90% of the world.

My source is your source. That’s just human error. The point still stand. There are a lot of countries outside of Europe.

Looks like I left out S. Korea and Honduras.

Most of them, OCD, the rehab and drug enforcement industry, I was trying to get you to ponder the concept of addiction. Saying what I said so bluntly is like telling a Christian that Jesus died 2000 years ago and he ain’t coming back. I couldn’t just dump that on you.

Algeria, Uganda, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mongolia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Papua New Guinea, Samoa. !eudefaultism

What you don’t understand is that addiction is actually a symptom of another illness and doctors would like to get rid of the concept of addiction, but they can’t because it’d collapse a billion dollar industry, turn the DEA and the rest of the government against them, and they’d never hear the end of it from the lay people. “Preoccupation and duration of use” are fuzzy weasel words without any clear definition tacked on to this criteria simply to appease us wall-eyed villagers.

I was seriously asking. Judging by your reaction though, I assume it doesn’t give a number. Probably because it doesn’t really factor into the diagnosis at all. The core of the diagnosis will be based on how much it affects your health and happiness.

I think 21 is age in Canada too. It might be in the rest of the commonwealth also.