AstralWeekends

If your soup or sauce sparks a little bit next time, you’ll know, lol.

I have been using Calyx for the past few months, which is a 1 year pre-paid connection through the T-Mobile network for $750 the first year. No data caps, have used it in the Southwest, South Central, and Midwest parts of the country with fairly good results. I measure up/down occasionally and get anywhere from 30Mbps - 250 Mbps up / 1 - 25 Mbps down. Lots of variety in the signal based on location and time of day, which is my main complaint, but it should be expected with a mobile data connection. Not fancy, but I go through a lot of data at my job and generally don’t have much problems streaming video.

To be honest, I will probably try to switch over to a fiber connection when my year is up because I’m not longer working from the road, but it really hasn’t been the worst solution by far.

I mostly agree, and that’s the main reason why I’m in favor of remaining federated. Beyond that, I think there may even be some benefit to remaining federated even with people that, as you say, “generally want bad things.”

For one, in real life, people who generally want good or bad things are exposed to each other in public. That may lead to some confrontation, and that confrontation could be an opportunity for people to stand up for what’s important to them. Digitally, pushing “the bad people” out of public view could encourage them to isolate more among the like-minded and radicalize further.

Second, selectively filtering people out of a largely broad community on the basis of a moral judgement about their intentions shouldn’t be a decision made lightly. I am not saying that it’s never warranted, or that we should try to be open-minded with people who hold horrifying, dehumanizing beliefs. Good/Bad is a label that seems easily applied in some cases (nazis = bad), but it is not always that clear. For that reason, I believe we should be conservative with defederation.

I find myself having conflicting thoughts about defederation in general.

Much of mainstream social media these days leads to isolation of ideologically-opposed communities from one another and pushes together more like-minded communities (“echo chamber”). I think that’s a bad thing.

I don’t find Hexbear’s culture a good fit for me, and though I share many of the same political sentiments, that’s why I’m using lemm.ee and not hexbear.

I would not enjoy it if a large group of alt-righters suddenly federated with us and became a very vocal presence, even if a large number of their users were often polite, because I am so strongly opposed to those politics.

How to balance between an “all or none” approach and avoid perpetuating an echo chamber? I’d say continue bolstering controls for individual users to decide and federate widely for now. The more visibility the instances have among each other, the more overall awareness there will be in the user base of which communities are truly bad actors vs. large, vocal, and a little immature.

Can find some great deals at thrift shops if you’re not too picky about resolution!

My dude that is Stevie Wonder, not Ray Charles.

The problem in the US is that increasing productivity among individuals is not scaling evenly with increasing benefits for individuals. So despite the success of large scale agriculture or the efficiency offered by computers, it feels like “productivity for productivity’s sake” at best or “productivity for the wealthiest individuals’ sake” at worst. It is not productive for me to work harder at my job because it does not translate to any tangible benefit for me, my family, or my community. To me, this is what makes “productivity” feel like an abstract concept.

Disgusting.

To add to this, in this case there is even some rationale for being closed source - given the critical nature of the code, less visibility means availability to examine it for exploit opportunities. But that’s just one side of it, right? Open source might mean more opportunities to find and fix possible exploits as well.

This was a nice analogy, thanks for the write-up.

Got to remember to stop giving away free 30 day trial periods after the first one’s up.

I hope years from now you get to look back on these times as the beginning of something great not only for you, but also for the future of social media on the internet. Your dedication to this project has been admirable, and you are absolutely crushing it.

Kramer turns his apartment into a cannabis cafe that starts attracting clientele who still operate on the gray/black market. Before long, rival street dealers are arguing over who gets to keep using the apartment, and Kramer decides he needs to take matters into his own hands. He teams up with his friend Mickey. They disguise themselves as a tough pair of cops and are going to burst through the apartment door and act like it’s a bust. When they come through the door, they find the real police are already there, having cleared the dealers and are looking for the apartment tenant. Kramer and Mickey go along with the charade as Jerry comes over from across the hall and they finger him as the resident. Jerry’s just got back from a routine surgery and is still hopped up on pain meds. The police think he’s acting suspicious and promptly arrest him as Kramer whispers to him on exit, “Don’t you worry, I’ll get you out buddy, they always bend the rules for a man in blue” (referring to himself). Jerry looks a little worried now as he’s escorted out of the scene.

(funky bass outro) ba-da-da-dum da dum, bum ba da da dum, ba, da da, ba dum da