The last sentence. You can say all you want in social media to blow off steam, but you’ll only make things right in the real world with real power applied. And posting it here you’ve removed yourself from there.

Social media are not designed to be usable for organizing and combining those crumbs of power we all possess. They are actually designed for the opposite goal - to let everyone receive the dopamin hit from saying what should be done and forgetting it, from dispersing their power as thinly as possible. Look at your (EDIT: the guy I was replying to, didn’t realize you’re different people) 300+ likes, all worthless.

A self-regulating propaganda device, better than cheap and good brothels everywhere, or cheap alcohol and cheap and legal maryjane. Also alcohol and maryjane reduce one’s labor value, while brothels can have an effect opposite to the desirable (there’s need for validation in the society, thus in hierarchy, which gets reduced by being sexually content). Social media are better in both regards.

Shoulda coulda woulda.

My aunt recently gave me a good advice, and a person in one chat with, I suspect, very interesting expertise gave the same advice in different form.

Emotions harm reason, and propaganda is not just directed at suppressing or increasing the emotion. It’s directed at making you emotional when you should be patient, and apathetic when you should be emotional, and act when you should wait, and wait when you should act.

It can easily work since everyone feels their fight of their day to be unique. But it’s not, and more than that - you can always look a few years back and remember that not only was it predicted, but you yourself predicted it.

By all this smartassery I meant - people making the laws don’t want them to work as we do, and they have sterilized the field. Think further.

In 1999 this had already happened, just the information about that explosion hadn’t reached your part of the galaxy yet. Metaphorically.

I’m thinking about at least Russia (Putin taking power and the second Chechen War), Israel (repatriation and its political turn and its choice of allies in the changed world, Likud taking power), Armenia (Kocharyan taking power, Sargsyan and Demirchyan being assassinated) and Azerbaijan (starting to boycott negotiations and build up oil industry since that time) having made a clear direction change.

These may not be obviously connected to other things we see, but I think they are part of the same tendency. I think at the same time Microsoft got an anti-monopoly decision saying that documenting Windows interfaces its bundled applications use for independent developers is sufficient for it to not be a monopolist, and Netscape died, and dotcoms crashed, and Linux attained the love of corporations, albeit not so notable yet, while FreeBSD didn’t, and Amiga started dying, and DEC, and Sun received a hit, and one can notice many other things.

By the way, it’s the favorite thing to say for journalists mentioning it that The Phantom Menace was a bad movie and hated by fans, and Attack of the Clones an even worse one, and Revenge of the Sith kinda better. But these were all political statements (I’m not imagining it because Lucas said that himself many times), and when we treat them as such, they were very good as that - the predictions came out to be correct.

OK, I might just love Star Wars too much.

What an infodump.

I mean, yes, obviously I agree with Agent Smith on that part.

I think this is intentional. Call me paranoid.

Elaboration: we have seen in the past how RedHat’s and others’ policies would always not reach some part of Linux users, and those users still wouldn’t feel as second class citizens - it was just a matter of choice and configuration to avoid PulseAudio, systemd, Gnome 3, one can go on. That was mostly connected to escaping major environments and same applications working the same with all of them. Wayland, while not outright making Gnome the only thing to work, creates a barrier and doesn’t make that a firm given anymore.

It won’t be too long until using Linux without Wayland will cut you off from many things developed with corporate input - and that’s developers’ time paid as opposed to donated for or volunteered, so much more effort.

Now, there was a time when there weren’t that much corporate input and still things would get done. But it will be hard to fall back to it, when the whole environment, one can say, ecosystem, is so complex and corporate-dependent.

I would say this is the time of all those corps whose investment into Linux was so nice in 00s and 10s reaping what they sowed. This wasn’t all for free or to profit on paid support. And people who thought that it’s GPL that was such a nice license that “forced” corps to participate in FOSS projects they benefit from, with those projects remaining FOSS, are going to have to face reality.

Fat years are ending, so they are going to capitalize on their investments.

This has already happened with the Web 10 or more years ago, when Facebook, Google and others have suddenly gone Hitler, while now they are in terminal stages of enshittification.

Same process.

You can disagree, no need to insult me.

Cheap ARM Linux laptops with all the gamez, GPIO, RJ-45, interfaces and space for 2-3 SSDs plz. And battery that holds 4 days (without gamez). And a choice between amoled and e-ink display options.

Having typed that, I suppose I won’t live to see that. Still, something like RPi or OPi, but with 2 M.2 interfaces, would be sufficient to assemble a convenient enough laptop. EDIT: and upgradeable memory

And the Guardian being complicit in Azeri propaganda and thus genocide is not.

It’s funny, it sometimes seems as if people from all those nations complicit in Artsakh’s occupation thought that unlike Palestine or Ukraine it’s just normal and they can behave as if nothing happened and it’s OK.

More than that, those funny people seem to think it’s impolite to bring up.

The latter hints that it’s an error and not a mistake, and maybe it’ll get fixed, and maybe even with a better license.

That said, there are a few “winamps” I can install right now (audacious, qmmp, xmms if I bother to compile it and gtk-1.2, bmp if I bother to compile it).

Something like milkdrop I’d love, but … nah.

And nah, getting back to MPD with an ed-like “client” (script with mpc) that jumps to the right entry and position by number, by name regex, by “:”-separated time format.

Yes, but optimism about that is unfounded.

It would be impressive were it properly maintained using the funds allocated only for the stated goal.

But I’d expect that to not be the case.

And also when a significant part of the chain is interested only in stealing, there will be negative selection. Everybody capable of learning will leave for greener pastures. Those who remain will be dull and full of themselves.

I’m not sure Harmony OS is what you said, but it definitely presents and Android environment as the main way to run applications. Say, Sailfish does that too, but it also has native ones.

It seemed cool because everything was beige or white or black and square. “Boring” industrial design (that I liked, but those Apple stuff pictures I liked too, though not as much as chromecore GBA and PS2, remember when everything was chromecore?) and this bubbly-transparent-plastic-luminous thing.

I don’t think I’d like it really using it though. And it is tasteless, like everything Ive designed.

I feel like throwing up even seeing Ive’s “the work behind this turd starts with a carefully engineered thread of digestion, and the smell and texture were carefully selected by thousands of experiments handled personally by our engineers, it’s a miraculous creation, and in its own way it’s unique” face.

Those giving out the awards want to wait and see if someone dies over laughter about this event. Then they’ll get the award.

So basically it’s a project done by MBA geniuses, entrepreneurs and visionaries who optimized by cutting on those mundane and boring nautical engineers and software developers?

God, do I like how evolution works.

but this sounds like you’re attempting to legislate that social media companies are not allowed to pursue user engagement of their product. Basically telling them that they’re not allowed to seek profit.

If a social media system can exist as a P2P network with distributed encrypted storage (similar to Freenet, but we only replicate what’s in the communities we are subscribed to), which is sufficiently fast and functional, then such a system can exist without commercial companies that would be interested in user engagement.

Commercial products there may be:

1. content - this is what’s supposed to be commercial in such a system, not various attention trap algorithms,

2. moderation - you may browse it unmoderated, or you may subscribe to some paid moderation provider, which would give you some collection of “delete” and “censor edit” technical messages posted by its moderators, or “confirm” messages if it’s premoderation,

3. storage provided to users, not like some Mega subscription or some corporate cloud, but like additional cache,

4. access to a community, which may be similar to premoderation where only paying users’ messages are seen in that community, or maybe there’s some DRM (unique parts) in community content shared between well-behaving paying users, and it’s encrypted, so that those leaking it can be excommunicated.

One common part is that architecture should not be owned by companies and infrastructure should not be defined by them.

Then the parts about user engagement can be frankly even made illegal. It won’t be a problem since the ecosystem won’t rely on them.

Social media combine a lot of how general Web and even Internet were used before them. So it makes sense that to undo this problem we need a new iteration of the same idea, but technically superior - with more transparently reliable storage, no stupid shit with PKI and CAs which get compromised often, no Chrome monoculture, no siloed services.

A-A-AND

after typing all this load of bullshit I’ve looked at the current list of Nostr NIPs, and like 80% is already described there. People here don’t like Nostr for some kinds of people coming there, but with moderation would you care about the rest of it? https://satellite.earth

Well, in some sense Lemmy does that too (by its paradigm inherited from those). Because were it not similar, it would have even fewer users.

It’s an evolutionary mechanic, that I don’t know how to fix.

If you have an Android or Apple phone, there is likely a whole collection of backdoors to any taste (no, every eye looking at the sources won’t notice a backdoor ; people are not stupid, backdoors are not obvious ; and also your phone’s firmware is a binary you’ve downloaded from their update servers, you haven’t seen the source it has been built from) allowing special services to install spyware to it. Maybe not from Google or Apple themselves (which I wouldn’t trust either), but below the chain (no, you don’t necessarily need sources for that), does that really matter? The difference with desktops is that people tend to make choices about security there, bigger chance of failure.

I mean, there should be a reason governments are fine with popular and easy E2EE when it requires to login on such to use it even on desktop. Like WhatsApp, Signal and what not. That is, we don’t see them sabotaging, killing, prosecuting, forbidding or otherwise preventing the other kind, but we also don’t see black holes in astrophysics. It doesn’t mean we can’t say with high certainty this happens.

An analogy. Humans prefer to eat behind a table from dedicated dishes using dedicated cutlery. Despite them being able to eat on foot and that being available in more places. Just like that humans would prefer to text others when they don’t have other distractions and with a faster and healthier (for your hands) input device, like a normal keyboard. If most people don’t do that, there must be pressure. If we can’t determine its nature, it’s likely masqueraded. If it’s masqueraded, then it’s a power interest.

TLDR smartphones are a conspiracy. Conspiracy theories are usually bad because people assume conspiracy before more probable reasons. Not the case here. A few supercorps and their pyramid-shaped ecosystem allowing spying on levels unprecedented in history are very likely to have conspiracies.

Also yes, I’ve lost my mind, but in this comment the part indicative of that is that it consumed time to type in order to exist where nobody cares and not its content.

Sigh

Are militaries businesses in a wide sense?

Thinking of those “permissions for Ukraine to strike” being discussed and the reasons Armenia couldn’t use Iskander missiles against Azerbaijan in 2020, and Azerbaijan apparently hasn’t used Lora missiles after 2020.

But does it make a boom when Mossad needs it?