In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.
In college my friends and I had this epiphany about pregnancy. Under the (typically) conservative mindset, all life is deserving to reach birth and to prevent that is itself akin to murder. So with that in mind, shouldn’t we be putting fetus’ on trial when they absorb the other fetus in utero? I mean, the absorbing fetus is literally murdering the absorbed one. And we just let these murderers walk around free for their whole life?
It sure is fun taking bad logic and applying normal logic on top of it. The results are often as silly as the concept.
In the silence of the Civil War’s Antietam battlefield on a winter day, bucolic hills give way to rows of small, white gravestones in the nearby cemetery. Wandering over the deadliest ground in American history, a melancholy visitor may be excused for wondering if this November’s presidential contest poses the greatest...
There’s a quote from the movie Vengeance that I think sums it up well.
It’s not necessarily that people in rural areas are dumb. It’s that they’re creative people who don’t have any outlets, so they get so caught up in the conspiracies because they’re better than the alternative (nothing).
Which of course itself is a byproduct of anti-intellectualism, I think it is something that could be solved with support for education and extracurriculars, but it’s very much a cultural issue that needs to be addressed by propping up citizens intellectual interests instead of tearing them away.
So we just stop and let the rest control? Apathy is how evil wins. If you get 3 people who wouldn’t normally vote and they all get 3 people who wouldn’t normally vote suddenly there are a lot more people voting in humanitarian minded politicians who can make effective change.
Don’t normalize not voting. There are so many meaningful changes that can be made locally that aren’t just the Presidential election. If people paid more attention to that instead of apathy voting maybe there wouldn’t be so many terrible people in boards of education across the U.S.
How convenient to leave out the surplus we had from 1998 lost by Bush which onset part of the events you described. Which I will never disagree about how unjust the drone strikes were, nor the continuation of the deportations.
How convenient to leave out the progress in education and notably more importantly, the social progress made for queer and PoC communities which made huge strides in acceptance and it was interesting how there were far fewer open Nazi rallies from 2008-2015, I wonder what was up with that. Hm.
How convenient to ignore how quickly protection programs were dismantled after 2016, from dismantling the EPA, shutting down hundreds of CDC sites not including his terrible FEMA responses, the huge setback in education with Betsy DeVoss as Sec. of Education. Let alone the way with which both Trump and the media rallied up hatred as a political play? How there were multiple attempts at voter suppression, some of them physical? The immense rise in police brutality, and again, Nazi rallies which conveniently never seemed to have police at them like the peaceful protests did.
But okay, go on about how Democrats are the same slow burn to fascism. That’s not the point. The point is that with one party there’s somewhat of a semblance of a chance that we get our generation into politics and not these dinosaurs. But the more we let them influence the youth by having shitty education and breeding hatred as a political play then yeah, you’re right, we are screwed and there’s no hope. Because that’s what happens when you give up.
From the last 25 years to me, it looks like we had a surplus, a huge deficit, almost came out of that after 8 years, back to extreme deficit and now we’re dealing with the fallout of the onset of a war (which has its own historical connotations). In the midst of all of those there were huge shifts in social values.
I don’t disagree with you that Democrats commit evil. The drone strikes inspired a generation of youth who hoped to be hard leftists. That is no excuse to vote for Republicans, nor is it any excuse whatsoever to not vote. If anything, it should encourage people to vote more, because if every single person who was capable of voting voted for the same thing in their area, guess what? Things would change. So why in the world would we stop voting?
It makes no sense. Democrats may be the slow burn but defeatism is just how everyone loses. Saying there is no point would be true if everyone believed you. Saying vote for X if you live in Y because I believe in their ability to do the right thing. And if they don’t do the right thing then vote them the fuck out and get someone in there who will.
We are in a bad spot but turning a blind eye by pretending that not voting is somehow a solution is not the mindset to have. So again, kindly, stop being defeatist and stop spreading defeatism. You don’t like Democrats or Republicans? So find the closest person who is running that encompasses your values and vote for them, because at least then there’s one person who might have a chance to do the right thing. There’s nobody? Find someone and campaign for them. Change starts at the state.
The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.
There’s no reason to not block threads. If someone wants to use it, they can go there and use it. There’s absolutely 0 need for the fediverse to have Meta anywhere near it.
Say Meta does get federated. How long until they begin making contributions to ActivityPub? Before Meta decides it’s a worthwhile purchase?
Oh yeah that’s my mistake, it was a plugin for WordPress, not ownership. It looks like it was co-authored by someone as part of W3C to be an internet standard, but I don’t know if that changes much.
It’s mostly that if something somewhere can be bought, Meta will try to. I don’t see any reason to extend any open arms. Just because something is open source doesn’t mean that ownership won’t change or changes can’t be implemented or influenced.
That aside though I also feel that any integration is just asking for an invitation to reckless abandon. I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol? As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Why risk 100m Facebook and Instagram users for the “potential growth of Masto-lemmy” when it seems like the very obvious reality is that Threads would just leech users from here after some integration then “oops Threads doesn’t support ActivityPub instances all your communities are with us now sorry!”. Not to mention the imposed tracking, dark patterns and monetization - which from my understanding instances can set fetch authorization, alongside defederating it would mostly prevent the data scraping? However I’m not entirely clear on all that.
Anyway, not trying to claim that I’m extremely well versed in the subject or the specific logistics of how it works, I just don’t see a single reason to trust Meta or why there would be any reason to federate with them.
I also personally have no issue having separate spaces for separate things, so to me the integration just seems a bit much. Some people have told me that’s a positive for them, and that’s cool. If I could functionally have one and actually interact in full I’d probably just use one account too. I occasionally view microblogs on Kbin alongside my subscriptions, I browse through here (Beehaw), both slrpnks lemmy and Mastodon instances, all different accounts. If I were interested in the content I’d have made a threads account (but the posts I get shown from Instagram don’t really pull any interest).
If someone is interested in using Threads, why not just use it there? I don’t entirely understand the reason we would need Threads to be seen in the same space as Twitter posts and Reddit threads all alongside our microblogs and posts (if say, Reddit and Twitter were also to federate). It just seems so much more centralized compared to the nature of the decentralized instances, I could see Meta’s interest here being to make their version of WeChat. A space where you have Microblogs, Forums, Marketplace, and games all in one spot no need to ever use anything else.
I dunno, I just feel like the desire to consolidate everything into a single bitty package is asking for a disaster. And to an extent, I genuinely can see this being the start of that path.
Anyway, sorry to get so long winded. Maybe I can take advantage of this idea and develop an app to centralize your Fediverse, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, GameFAQs and any account you can think of all in one spot. Then you can just interact from all of them as a single master user posting from each individual account as you come across the content. Support for all that will probably get pricey so I’ll just charge for extended account integration, maybe I can make my own subscription based off this to cover the cost (/s but feel free to use it!)
Right, we left there over much smaller reasons than Meta. If Meta is heavily involved in ActivityPub, where to next?
Yes? We’re already using not-their-version,
Right, but for how long would we be able to do this? If Threads does federate and get popular, even worse, the communities here get heavily integrated with Threads, wouldn’t it only be a matter of time until Meta makes a push to keep users on their platform over this one?
Then you don’t use their version.
We come full circle here, if you’re not using Meta’s federated ActivityPub, it’s a ghost town because the goal is for Threads to replace us. What are you doing here on Kbin when all of the communities it is part of is now over on Meta’s instance?
I don’t know if it’s as simple as “don’t use it”. This is Meta we are talking about. You literally can’t not use Facebook to get away from it’s tracking, they track you regardless.
I also don’t really have a horse in the race. I’m with you in that yeah, I’d probably find somewhere else too. But I’m thinking long term with our space here, regardless of whether 41% of instances are defederated, Meta’s involvement is a bad thing due to their immense wealth and, in my opinion, high likelihood they will implement changes that we can’t get away from. I’m not so sure it will be as simple as not using their version. I also don’t think it’s wrong for people to be aware and vocal about this, even if it may not immediately affect us in the moment. Again, we left Reddit over basically the complete inverse of this situation. Reddit closing 3rd party apps to get users into their app vs. Threads adoption of these 3rd party apps to get data from these users.
Why would we be okay making it so that developers and users have to work around finding Meta-stripped builds when we can just… Mitigate how much Meta is able to do it in the first place?
That’s not what I was saying, or meant to say. I was saying they are tracking you regardless of whether you do or not. Why allow that to extend further by embracing them into the fediverse? I also don’t think they are inextinguishable, I think there a wide, wide range of ways to fracture then consolidate.
Alas, time will tell and we can only hope it amounts to nothing and all us worrywarts are proven wrong as Meta does nothing but integrate then occasionally serve ads (with of course, all the background tracking).
Out of curiosity and completely unrelated, do you have an Android phone? Not Google? If so, it may be worth checking your active processes running under dev services, there may be a Meta Services and Meta Services Manager running in the background. It’s worth disabling these from the apps list, they literally don’t do anything but serve up ads and track you.
On by default through many phones and carriers, gotta love it.
Inspired by the ongoing Resurgence giveaway, I thought it might be fun to discuss some of our favourite Trek games. Underappreciated gems are particularly welcome!
I remember a Star Trek MMO that I think was web based, but it may have been a preference I downloaded.
Anyway, I remember really wanting to like it but I was partly too young and the game either had a lot of locked content or needed to be paid. I think I gave it a couple hours total in the front room and never played it again.
This is a good reminder that EV’s do still have a purpose after their vehicle-rated lifespan. Anyone touting the health of car batteries as a bad thing aren’t necessarily wrong if they go directly to a landfill or other means of disposal, but that is far from the only method we should be using. Once these batteries are on a grid, from my understanding they are effectively used until capacity is sub-10%.
So it looks like this is an expansion of existing technology which is great. Hopefully we can actually get used EV batteries into these programs.
Uber Eats will start accepting food stamps and healthcare benefits as payment for grocery delivery orders, the company announced Wednesday. It also plans to add a new AI assistant that it says will help grocery customers get better deals....
I’m conflicted on this, it’s good to have options but its rough knowing that fees of delivery will be taking food away from people. That’s the tradeoff, I guess.
Mozilla reverses course, re-lists extensions it removed in Russia ( www.osnews.com )
In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.
Frozen embryos are ‘children,’ Alabama Supreme Court rules in couples’ wrongful death suits ( www.al.com )
Is Iowa the next step to civil war? ( unherd.com )
In the silence of the Civil War’s Antietam battlefield on a winter day, bucolic hills give way to rows of small, white gravestones in the nearby cemetery. Wandering over the deadliest ground in American history, a melancholy visitor may be excused for wondering if this November’s presidential contest poses the greatest...
Multiple Jan. 6 fugitives arrested at Florida ranch 3 years after Capitol attack: FBI ( abcnews.go.com )
Need help identifying type of 240 wires ( kbin.social )
Hello,...
Getting Tangled Up in Threads ( wedistribute.org )
The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.
Let's remember some Star Trek games
Inspired by the ongoing Resurgence giveaway, I thought it might be fun to discuss some of our favourite Trek games. Underappreciated gems are particularly welcome!
Energy Department announces $325M for batteries that can store clean electricity longer ( apnews.com )
Uber Eats will start accepting food stamps for grocery delivery in 2024 ( www.theverge.com )
Uber Eats will start accepting food stamps and healthcare benefits as payment for grocery delivery orders, the company announced Wednesday. It also plans to add a new AI assistant that it says will help grocery customers get better deals....