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It’s not. He wants to create a social media that exploits its users without being accused of monopolistic behaviour.

Also searching for #sup in Mastodon has been a good way to find information about developments. Not so necessary now that there’s an official account I guess. :)

Ah, yeah, sorry - that was badly phrased. I shouldn’t have included Kbin on that list. I’m on Kbin myself, just worded myself poorly. :)

On the contrary. Many charities benefit from volunteer work hours that simply would not be possible on a normal government contract. The efficiency of some charities simply cannot be matched by State institutions, as people don’t want to volunteer working for the state.

Some volunteer positions could possibly be replaced with well-paying jobs to lower unemployment rates at the benefit of the economy, but people also get a sense of purpose from volunteering. The charitable economy ran by volunteering and donations is an incredible asset for any society, no matter how great the social security net is. And in my experience, a better security net is often correlated with more charity.

Yes, I think I got your point - the soup kitchen should be financed by taxes rather than volunteer contributions by charitable souls. And I of course completely agree.

Even then, there might be room for a charity providing a social space for those with fewer means or who find themselves in a rough spot in life. I think no matter how well the state is doing in guaranteeing for people’s needs, there’ll be some room for civil society to make a contribution; if nothing else because the sense of purpose it can give the helpers is in its own right a goal worth pursuing.

I read @bustrpoindextr as not criticizing the charities directly, but rather reflect that they represent a systematic failure of government structures. We shouldn’t need homeless shelters or soup kitchens - there shouldn’t be homelessness or hunger. Taxation and sensible public spending should render charity unnecessary.

Which is a nice thought - I wouldn’t judge people for giving their money to political interest organizations promoting solidarity rather than directly to charities.

It’s a fine balance between patching the flaws of the system and trying to replace it all together. In some extreme cases charity might make the system just bearable enough that it’s not overthrown, which might occasionally do more harm than good in the long run.

I’m not sure this is a valid critique of Kant - he invites us to step back and consider how we would address the problems more rationally and in ways that could be universal rules, rather than merely as an emotional response. We might very well conclude from this reflection that we should organize politically and deal with systematic injustice rather than donating to the local soup kitchen.

Personally I think there’s room for both - in an ideal world the public should guarantee a baseline, but there might still be room for charities. The soup kitchen might not only help the people it serves food to - it might also give a sense of purpose to those volunteering for it.

I like Kant’s take on this. He argued (roughly, by memory) that giving to people begging on the street directly was a selfish act, as it’s satisfying our own need to feel better about ourselves more than the needs of the homeless population, and would lead to an unfair distribution giving more money to those who are talented at evoking empathy rather than those that might need it the most. He argued that the unselfish thing to do would be to donate to the cause indirectly, responding not to the emotional response in the moment but to a rational consideration of the needs of the homeless population.

I think he has a point. That said, there’s nothing wrong with being selfish every now and then, especially not if your selfishness gives someone a warm meal. And empathy is a healthy human reaction.

Your parents seem to have failed to grasp the challenges facing the homeless population. A better take would be “don’t give that guy money, start donating regularly to a local charity instead and help make sure that help is given to all those who need it”.

Oh, and also, rally for political change.

By what standards do you rank us? Half of us are stupider than average. We’re all of very limited intelligence - the best we can do is to team together to function as one gigantic brain of humanity, drawing from the strongest qualities of all of us. That way the world can be brought forward by brilliant scientists who are completely stupid in their own way, and who would never survive a week on their own.

Politics are tricky, but I think it’s more fruitful to think of people as brainwashed than stupid. The amount of propaganda we’re subject to these days is unprecedented.

As for general stupidity, be charitable; judge people by what they’re best at. Most people have one thing or another they are great at, and our differences is what makes humanity occasionally great.

Getting out of bed in the morning. Stupid. Huge mistake. Cannot recommend.

Lemmyverse doesn’t really make sense, as it would all be visible from Kbin instances (unless they are all defederated).

What would make sense is a term for the “microblogverse”, referring to all the posts from Mastodon/Miskey/Kbin/etc. This makes up the majority of the Fediverse, but it’s mostly invisible to Lemmy users.

In practice, it’s Lemmy and Kbin.

More theoretically, it’s the part of the Fediverse that deals with threads rather than posts: You share some sort of content (text, images, a video, a link) along with a title, and people comment on it. The most common content type in the Fedverse is posts/microblogs, which it what Mastodon operates with. These posts are generally not visible from Lemmy, meaning that the majority of the Fediverse is invisible from Lemmy; what you see from there is only the “threadiverse” part. Kbin seeks to bridge the two.

You can view threads in Mastodon, but they appear only as the text of the title along with a link to the rest of the content. People can of course comment as normal.

And discoverability, it still has ways to go on the social networking integration. I still don’t know how to go from watching a peertube video on a peertube instance to liking/boosting it on another fediverse service, even if I wanted to.

That said, I have been following Peertube for a couple of years, and the progress has been incredible. It makes sense to create a solid foundation for video playback first, and a lot of people seem to not understand the extent of the innovation Peertube has made in that regard. Social media tools obviously come second after providing a solid service, and I have no idea it will develop in great ways in the coming years. :)

I find it easy to read, but in terms of constructive feedback I would try to write the letters larger. As there’s a lot of whitespace in the speech bubbles, the text could be made quite a bit bigger without even needing bigger bubbles.

At least where I’m from, the teenagers are beginning to shy away from emojis as well, with the exception of one or two that are considered culturally acceptable. Which ones they are seems to fluctuate, so if you’re out of the loop you’re better off not trying.

The option to keep followed users and subscribed communities separate in the feed will be great!
Really impressed by the pace of progress lately - it’s very much appreciated. You’re building something special here. :)

What do you mean kbin doesn’t really support microblogging?

The only real issue I can think of right now is that it does not display videos or polls yet, but for being an early version of a software developed primarily by one guy as a hobby project those are pretty minor omissions.

I quite disagree. Of course interoperability is not going to be a perfect one to one - that’s in the nature of these being different services. You don’t want threads from a link aggregater taking over your microblogging feed.

Yet it’s normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here. From their perspective they never left Mastodon - from my perspective, I never left kbin - and you, for your part, think it’s all happening within Lemmy. But it’s really not. So these things happen all the time, it’s just that you don’t necessarily notice unless you check the domain of the person you’re responding to. Mastodon users of course often leave in the @-tags, making them a bit easier to identify.

Lemmy is a bit more isolated than Kbin, as it is not integrating microblogs at all. That’s a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.

I used to like it, now I avoid it at all cost. The problem is that the algorithm is never neutral, even if it’s made with good intentions it can be gamed and manipulated, and it traps you in a spiral where what you interact with is what it shows you is what you interact with is what it shows you…

I never really used Twitter or any similar service, so I never had this happen to information shaping my opinions. I did, however, feel that the music I was listening to became shaped by the Spotify algorithm, and that I ended up listening to less rather than more diverse music than when I was sticking to vinyl. That’s absurd - you have all the music in the world at your fingertips, and you end up limiting yourself more. That was my experience of course, other people probably have different ones. Anyway, I cancelled my subscription.

If there’s a risk for music streaming services narrowing your field of vision, platforms shaping your opinions are downright scary. Algorithms can be tricked into showing you content, which is what russian troll farms excelled at. Tech bros tend to believe the solution is in adding more and more complexity to the point where nobody understands how it works - this is the opposite of how I want the content that helps informing me about the world to be curated.

I’m obviously not diagonally opposed to algorithms. The choose your own algorithm approach might have some merit, and I look forward to seeing more experimentation with this in the fediverse. But I do not trust corporate interests with any of this - nor do I trust a bunch of tech-optimistic rich man’s sons.

Don’t worry about it, I’m here trying to figure out what the hell AMP is in the first place.