Having a pet lizard has made me have a hard time taking the “lizard people/reptilians” conspiracy theorists seriously. Like, have these people actually been around reptiles? Deeply unserious creatures. Not generally social, sure, but they definitely have body language and would fail terribly at running some kind of complex scheme.

I feel like this makes sense for very politically focused spaces, especially for less “mainstream” ideas like db0’s anarchist communities, just cause not every community will allow arguments about their stance, and even ones that do will see more arguments turn into flame wars and incivility than communities for which there simply isnt as much for heated arguments to start over, especially when the arguments arent always something “new” to that space and might just be someone from outside noticing and saying “your ideology is bad because [insert reason that community has probably heard enough before to be tired of]”.

Am a bit curious about why pawb is so high though, Ive not really noticed much of the hate that furries sometimes would get on other platforms (I guess it could be because theyre all banned but I doubt it, because that wouldnt hide it from communities outside of pawb). The instance administration has always felt rather reasonable whenever Ive seen like instance announcements or defederation decisions or such too, at least by my standards. Itd be interesting maybe to see what communities these bans tend to come from and what reasons are given, just looking through the modlog doesnt seem to help much there given that it doesnt seem to let one sort by instance.

I feel like that would really skew the data, because it would then just be “instances that defederate some big instances (or just ones that defederate .world) and others that dont”, It’d be hard to ban a major instances worth of users with even a heavy handed “normal” moderation strategy surely?

If you wanted to make it possible to opt out of certain categories of ads (like alcohol) on personal devices/computers, without having to tell the advertiser that you’re an alcoholic or similar, perhaps a law could mandate that ads made for those products or brands associated with them be tagged as such in some way, and that software that displays ads should have a setting to not display ones that arrive with that tag? That way the setting only needs to be client side. I mean ideally you’d just not have ads at all but that’s a much bigger and more difficult fight than just alcohol obviously.

That calcium-loving one that eats your bones if you touch it?

If your species showed affection by rubbing against others and you trusted the creature not to step on you, and you were trying to act all sweet to beg for food tho…

I don’t most years, unless a friend really wants to do something with me for it in which case I might go along for their benefit. Not really a holiday person in general though.

I highly doubt a dem president would commute his sentence if he’s found guilty, for one thing, anyone with the resources to mount a successful presidential campaign, dem or otherwise, is almost certainly going to be wealthy enough to personally sympathize more with CEOs than with people that cant get healthcare. Consider how panicked some of the CEOs and their ilk supposedly got right after the shooting, and consider that thats exactly the kind of person that a dem president, or at the very least their friends and associates, would likely be.

Wasnt “messengers sent by one country being attacked by rival they were sent to” a source of a number of historical conflicts? I seem to recall the mongols destroying some empire in revenge over that, at the very least.

In regards to the second part, I’d point out that earth isnt a closed system, and small amounts of new matter are constantly ending up on earth. Think things like meteors (if i remember correctly, a few dozen tons of them fall on earth daily) the very thin traces of gas in space (it’s not a actually a perfect vacuum) and certain types of cosmic radiation that happen to consist of atoms. As such, I’d imagine it’s unlikely we’d ever get every atom on earth having once been part of one.

Its worked out fine for me thus far, but given that one of the selling points for how expensive it is is reparability, and I’ve only had it a few months, I don’t think I can yet give a useful review beyond that it works as a phone, at least for the hardware.

A handful of quirks from the operating system (most annoying being that the option to paste stuff has a visual bug that makes the little popup button for it not appear, though it still works if I just tap where it should be), but nothing I’ve not been able to figure out with at most a quick internet search. Might not work out for everyone though as some apps (only a small handful of the ones ive tried, but still) dont fully work, so how viable the OS is will depend on if one absolutely needs one of the ones that doesn’t or not.

Not had it for long, but a fairphone 6 (the version thats sold in the US that comes with /e/OS instead of regular android).

Im beginning to think that, as annoying for users and difficult to build a userbase for as it may be, the answer might ultimately have to be for future social sites to charge people for use in some way, be it to create accounts or as a subscription or just for the ability to post/comment/vote or whatever. If it’s no longer going to be feasible to keep bots out, and there’s a financial gain for their use, then they’re going to get used, so at that point it has to be somehow more expensive to run a bot than that bot can be expected to bring in as a result of it’s contribution to an advertising or manipulation campaign, to deter them. On the bright side, I guess it might lead to a shift away from advertising everywhere. Either you charge people and therefore dont need ads, or you dont, and have most of your ads being “seen” by bots, which advertisers probably don’t want to spend money to reach anyway.

Ive seen this said a lot here lately, but like, cloud computing still requires computer hardware, so shouldnt an increase in hardware prices make that more expensive as well?

I mean, they did say “most people didnt own a car” rather than “road vehicles don’t exist”. That removes the more serious of those concerns I think, because the existence of delivery vehicles, freight trucks, moving vans, or even vehicle rental services for the occasional road trip doesn’t depend on a majority of people owning a car personally.

To be fair, any currently living but older relatives will have had the ability to access high speed internet for just as long as you, but also time with older forms of media as well.

Maybe Im not saying this right: Im wasnt arguing for the virtues of echo chambers with that, Im saying, with how fedi is designed, there is no means to prevent someone that wants to make an echo chamber from doing so, so suggesting that one should not allow an echo chamber to exist is a fool’s errand. In a more general sense, it seems to me that, either you let people decide what kind of content to see, in which case many if not most will naturally create echo chambers simply because they dont want to see views too different from their own, or you have some means to force people to see stuff they dont want to, which requires some difficult-to-escape authority have power over their media feed and as such is incompatible with decentralized federation (and of course risks that authority pushing everyone into their echo chamber). Both of those things lead to serious issues in my view, so its a bit of a “pick your poison” situation when it comes to social media design. Beyond that though, it does have to be acknowledged that there is simply more content, more messages and people wanting to spread their word, out there than any given person has the time or attention or mental capacity to process. That means that some system must exist that determines what fraction of it all you actually see (even if its just as simple as “the things most recently posted on a given platform when you looked at it”). I can see no way to do this that doesnt introduce biases.

I mean, allowing echo chambers doesnt really seem avoidable on fedi tho? Like, only one side has to defederate to break two way communication, so if someone wants to avoid you, you cant really stop them, and the whole concept of moderation in a decentralized system relies on each instance being able to selectively view or block content from other instances based on the values of that instance. You cant really say “what works is challenging people” if the people you want to challenge have an “ignore” button for when you get too loud for their taste.

Winter ending and it not being so cold out so I can enjoy going into the city again.

Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn’t that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially “grandfathered in”, but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?