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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • The actual act of taking some moderate sum of crypto here is meaningless to me, you were able to attain a valuable thing and so you did. It is only an intimate knowledge of the context of that choice that can inform any kind of accurate judgement fraught with grey areas as it may be.

    That isn 't what interests me about crypto, what I find interesting is that no matter what rock you check under in virtually the entire crypto sphere the attitude of the creatures involved always untangles into this same precise attitude. Maybe you fall under the category maybe you don’t, my point is about the mindset of this whole enterprise that permeates it at seemingly every level.



  • Well yeah there is a gradient of culpability but it roughly follows the gradient of power and compensation, which is an exponential curve with the lion’s share of the area under the curve contained within the very very top.

    If you want to get technical about it, if the average CEO earns 300 times the average (not the lowest) pay of employees at the company than sure, the average employee has culpability but it is 1/300th or less of the culpability of the people truly at the top and that is likely a conservative estimate of gulf between those two values.

    Obviously one doesn’t somehow nullify the other but the structure of culpability here has to be taken into account in order to make an honest analysis.





  • This is a direct consequence of “the war on terror” attempting to redefine the military strategy of asymmetrical warfare as terrorism and inherently immoral.

    To sell the bullshit “war on terror” the easiest way to make the US seem righteous was to degrade the public’s sense of why people violently resist and reduce it to the act of violently resisting an organized traditional military is immoral unless the thing resisting is also a traditional organized military.

    I am glad that narrative is breaking down though as the distortion of how and why violent conflicts occur is dangerously blinding to a basic understanding of the world.





  • You can run your own relay, in that sense the “body” of bluesky is when considered in the abstract potentially decentralized… but when you consider the “brain” of bluesky nodes and the layer of moderation and post/commenting is still locked into a centralized system it is a bit like arguing borg drones have free will because they are physically individual beings.

    Or it is like arguing an ant isn’t existentially dependent upon the structure of the ant colony to survive since each ant posesses an individual body with its own six legs.


  • At a fundamental level the intended meaning of “federate” is that disparate communities and softwares can “connect” seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.

    A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.

    A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.


  • Some recommendations for lefty mastodon instances, all are vaguely tech themed, but that comes with the territory. That being said none of these instances feel like weird places to not be a techy person, the conversations and interactions on these instances occupy as diverse a range as anywhere else.

    https://mas.to/about

    https://elekk.xyz/about

    https://tech.lgbt/about

    https://eldritch.cafe/about

    https://digipres.club/about

    https://toad.social/about

    https://hellsite.site/about

    Your lemmy instance lemmy.world is under the umbrella of https://fedihosting.foundation/ which oversees both lemmy.world and the mastodon instance mastodon.world

    Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?

    Please do whatever helps you express your identity/identities of your self best! You can always link between accounts in the public account bios.

    I will offer you a suggestion though, if you already made the account Pretzilla@lemmy.world why not make Pretzilla@mastodon.world, link between them and perhaps indicate if you use one or the other account more. You might as well, people will still recognize you immediately on your mastodon account but you might find it nice to be able to interact with the fediverse through the perspective of mastodon/microblogging.

    Then make another account on a different mastodon instance that looks cool too, go wild, do whatever fits your fancy, the consequences to making an account and never using it are small enough that except in edge cases (you took up a slot on a server with a limited number of registrations or something) nobody is going to care!

    p.s. Notice all of these mastodon instances have thoughtful moderation policies that place an emphasis on protecting and centering vulnerable voices over valuing the “right” of socio-economically advantaged groups to spread hate speech in public. All these instances have links to the mastodon accounts of the humans who moderate those instances so you can get an idea of the human element of the moderation. How cool is that? Each place has its own slight spin on being a healthy community and you can find the place that is perfect for you!



  • It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.

    Like seriously… that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.

    I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.

    Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money…to get more money.






  • wtf kind of lame criticism of mastodon is this…there are constantly cute pictures of pets being posted on mastodon… and like anywhere else with humans these posts are very popular on mastodon.

    I would say these posts are MORE popular on mastodon because without an algorithm cute animal photos are going to stick out as popular even more.

    This is all nonsense anyways, Bluesky is considered “cooler” by techy types with a childlike awareness of history, politics and power because the tech is cooler when considered in the abstract.

    Coincidently none of these technical details have the capacity to make bluesky a truly open and free place otherwise those investors would sue bluesky for purposefully and willfully not pursuing profit for shareholders. This won’t stop certain types from pointing at pictures in the sand and reciting idle words thrown to the wind by the people in charge for now.

    Bluesky exists as a legal instrument of profit, all else about bluesky is malleable and changeable and will eventually be bulldozed or undermined in the pursuit of profit for shareholders.

    edit 2 this is a real human, and I was grumpy and while it was satisfying to point fingers it just makes me into the asshole so I removed that, but my broader point still stands