Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.

Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn’t very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.

I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.

Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.

Hardly - they’re doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It’s purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.

The easiest way would be to quickly look up the ones you don’t know yet. Many have Wikipedia pages and the others usually have good home pages explaining what they do. But as you can see, there’s a wide range for hosting different kinds of media and discussions.

‘ex-4chan users’ isn’t really an important criteria, especially if you’re including the people posting there before 2016. In fact, some hobby boards like /co/, /mu/ and /lit/ were notoriously left-wing. “Ex-” usually means the ones who were smart enough to leave.

But furthermore, calling Mastodon a white supremacist site is just funny. Might as well be saying that about Lemmy.

America, the state, is white-supremacist and has been since birth. Absolutely. Although that’s not good logic for explaining how. I doubt most voters for Trump did so because of his or their racist views, there were plenty of other policies (sorry, ideas and themes) Trump platformed on that appealed to them.

The amount of Democrat supporters again surprised at how non-whites can possibly vote for Trump on a non-trivial scale is a testament to why it’s important to understand voting patterns beyond race ideology, beyond “Trump is a disgusting racist, only a white supremacist would vote for them.”, especially if you’re on the ground trying to organize your community to create the positive changes neither candidate can offer.

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.

What does that have to do with Cory’s concerns? They don’t want to build an audience on Bluesky because that promotes Bluesky, a dangerous place to build up, in the view given by the article. It would be neglectful to let it gain enough power to become a Twitter 2.0, we have an opportunity to prevent us repeating history.

Thinking of the projects I work on, I don’t understand the value in categorizing by language, rather than theme (~/Development/Web/, ~/Development/Games/) or just the project folders right there.

That’s serious stuff if true. I would often the upload date to avoid reuploads and regurgitated (and lower visual quality) content. It’s also extremely useful to know how outdated some advice or guide is.

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.

I assume you also have to trust the servers which the accounts you’re messaging are stored on. (Although there are real situations where all users will be on the same server, where this is obviously a great benefit.)

It turns out, mods are gods.

I don’t see irony there. I think calling this FOSS community ‘filled with Linux-crazed people’ is a stretch, but even then, it’s very different to:

or even just hating a niche product whatsoever. It’s not like Linux is EEE’ing or being invasive, so it’s hard to equivocate being a passionate fan to being a passionate hater.

Haha they thought it was too easy and were proven wrong!

Honestly, if a place is obscure enough, even smaller barriers of entry help, like forums that don’t let you post on important boards until you build a reputation. There’s only so much effort an adversary is willing to put in, and if there isn’t a financial incentive or huge political incentive, that barrier could be low.

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.