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I have a link to my Lemmy profile on my Reddit profile and not even shadowbanned 🤷

This, I follow a single Reddit sub on RSS because it just doesn’t exist on Lemmy 🤷 And in general, communities for many niche topics or smaller countries are nonexistent. But the conversations are much better here, so I hang out more on Lemmy nowadays :)

Interesting, I had my 9GAG phase around 2011-12. Never really used Digg, just saw the front page a couple times, then started dabbling in Reddit in 2015, then Lemmy in 2023 with the blackout protests. (I almost said those achieved nothing, but I think that’s probably when most current Lemmy users joined, so 🤷)

haha I ran into this too, someone changed the title of my question on one of their non-programming boards - I was so pissed, I never went back to that particular board (it was especially annoying because it was a quite personal question)

I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.

I hope an increasing number of projects come to realise the drawbacks of Discord, namely that you keep years’ worth of information on someone else’s centralised platform, and it’s very difficult to find past information even for members of the server, and impossible from the outside. I look at a handful of Discord channels daily, but had to mute some because users keep asking the same questions every two days…

Hear hear, it was the hostile atmosphere that pushed me away from Stack Exchange years before LLMs were a thing. That very clear impression that the site does not exist to help specific people, but a vague public audience, and the treatment of every question and answer is subjugated to that. Since then I just ask/answer questions on platforms like Lemmy, Reddit, Discord, or the Discourse forums ran by various organisations, it’s a much more pleasant experience.

Otoh according to Iain Banks’s speculation, space colonisation might be the thing that finally lets humanity toss off the chains of capitalism:

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.

Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line of the Culture’s existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication of the hegemony’s control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress - battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that this point has been reached before and the hegemony has won… but it is also assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

Your values and principles are the foundation everything else is built on.

I would say our life experiences are the foundation that our values are then developed on. People in different circumstances will likely end up with different values (or even if broadly the same values, they will prioritise them differently).

People will certainly judge your actions, and that’s fair for them to do much of the time, but if your actions and your values are so disconnected that the difference comes into play so strongly then you might need to read the post over a few more times.

I wasn’t commenting because of my personal experiences, but because I’ve read about life stories of others where they had to act in ways that went contrary to their values. Like when they are stuck in an abusive family or relationship dynamic, or in a job where they have to act unethically to be able to afford housing and food. During the pandemic I’ve come across the concept of moral injury which seems to refer to similar situations.

Google never thought to email their customers about this?? Why tf do I have to learn about this 2 months after the announcement, from social media…

While I agree with the rest, “your values are who you are” sounds very reductive. We are not one single aspect, not just our values, or thoughts, or emotions, or actions, but the dynamic system of them all.

Sorry, your reasoning sounds ridiculously arbitrary and elitist. Yes, reading a single wiki page won’t give the same depth of knowledge as studying the topic for years, but it’s still increased knowledge compared to what the reader had before. By your reasoning nobody learns anything before they go to university? Because in what other educational environment you would read multiple books’ worth of information about a single subject…

I feel like you’re nitpicking. For physical activities personal experience is obviously best, but for most topics, reading about them is the same as learning about them. Except for PE and art, nothing I learnt in school was through direct experience. Also how is anyone supposed to learn about stuff that cannot be experienced personally, like history or space?

tbh that sounds a lot more entertaining :D

You’re right! But from what I could find, the fake version started circulating less than a year after the original, so I honestly can’t remember which one I’ve seen more over the years. I didn’t even notice there were multiple versions lol.

Yeah, I never used it, except to follow links from lemmy/reddit, but even those acquaintances of mine that did use it, gradually stopped since Musk took over, with the last few leaving it around a year ago.

(My vocally pro-LGBT workplace also switched to other platforms bc our engagement noticeably dropped around that time. Either due some Musk-induced algorithm shenanigans or just users leaving in droves.)

that’s just sad (though I do like that they use fediverse, but it shouldn’t be the main way of communication)

I hated chemistry in school, because it was teaching us irrelevant shit like the electron structure of atoms. But when I’m interested in something, I’ll look it up, and may get lost in a Wikipedia wormhole for hours about the most random topics. (some recent ones were: image file formats, the history of feminism, Serengeti National Park)

Imho the difference all lies in when knowledge is shoved down our throats vs exploring it out of curiosity.

who tf still uses Xitter…

Tangentially related: the fucked-up experiments they were doing on dolphins, like giving them LSD or keeping one in a flooded, human-style house and trying to teach it English: The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong | The Guardian

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