Ah, you’re illiterate. I guess it’s easy to think everyone else is stupid if you can’t comprehend the words they say.

It’s an easy thing to just assume people are stupid. It makes the world nice and simple and if only people would stop being stupid and start being smart (smart like you, obviously!) All the problems of the world would be solved.

For a lot of people, reality isn’t so simple. The common man is already struggling. Throughout history, the age people get married and have kids has been indicative of the stress civilizations are under, and many people aren’t having kids before they get too old to have kids because that’s the level of stress the common man is under. Global civilization is facing a demographic bomb as every continent except Africa is facing a massive reduction in population in coming decades because nobody is having kids because life is so hard.

As a study in contrasts, just look at wages vs. rent while I’ve been an adult. Minimum wage went from 11/hr to 15/hr. Meanwhile, my first 2 bedroom apartment was 350/mo, and today you can’t get anything for less than 1200. A few years before I rented, there were decent houses available for $50,000 and today the average house price nationwide is $800,000. (Not the US, obviously)

So when a bunch of the business leaders and politicians who magically seem to get richer every time something is done “for our own good” – politicians who make as much as a senior engineer on paper but all of whom seem to become fabulously wealthy regardless (huh wonder where all those extra millions came from) while the common man has suffered – get together to figure out new ways to squeeze the common man, is it really so stupid to be skeptical? “Don’t worry everyone, we’re going to make your life even harder but it’s all for your own good.”

Having the summit in Dubai is fitting – a city of extreme inequality, paid for with oil money, built by slaves, ruled by kings.

You can try to guilt and shame people into not caring about basic biological drives, but you actually can’t. Entire generations of people have been pushed so far that their family lines will end with them. It’s comfortable enough – like being in a pool of comfortably warm water right up to your neck that you can’t escape from, but when you can see people plotting to add more water to your pool the next step is you drown.

In previous eras, common people being this stressed out led to the fall of the Roman empire, the French reign of terror, the end of the Romanov dynasty in Russia or the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. While you call people stupid for not listening to their leaders, historically speaking those same leaders will be lucky to keep their heads on their shoulders.

If you want, try to help such people.

It might surprise you that you can dump unlimited money into certain people and they’ll end up back in the same situation, but they’ll hate you for not giving more because you still have something left.

It’s like trying to help a drowning person, they often will drag you into the water with them.

I haven’t defederated anyone yet, I don’t intend to defederated from Instagrams new failed Twitter clone.

Threads is a failed platform. It isn’t like they’re adding federation to Facebook.

Meta does, but I’m not sure threads does.

I know people on facebook, but I don’t know anyone on threads, even if it is owned by meta.

I expect activitypub to be relatively scalable. As long as meta isn’t doing something stupid like trying to federate everything to everyone, the traffic should be limited to the users that have connected to each other. There are already absolutely gargantuan instances out there with millions of users that federate just fine with tiny instances.

I’d go a step further – there was never a public forum on Big tech for the past 15 years. Big tech was always the illusion of a thing and not the thing itself.

Open protocols are the only way to have a real public forum.

Is it really that tough to make changes on rust? I’m not even a web developer and even I’ve been able to figure out how to fiddle with lotide’s back-end code. I added a feature (I need to add back in) for stuff without a title so it’ll just pull the first line of text for when I’m pulling from friendica communities and the like.

deleted by creator

I’m guessing unique users who have been active on Lemmy within the past 6 months.

I think for most people talking about algorithms, the problem isn’t an algorithm, it’s “The Algorithm”.

The distinction is that everything on a computer screen is displayed using an algorithm, but The Algorithm is instead this sinister thing that arbitrarily displays things for the benefit of the company rather than the benefit of the user.

An Algorithm might show posts by upvotes or by comments or by some combination of the two, or by time, or by some combination of the three. The Algorithm will show stormfront posts to black people because it drives engagement. On Youtube for example, a thumbs down is just as acceptable for the purposes of The Algorithm as a thumbs up.

Pretty decent list. It covered a lot of the myths I think about.

One myth you mention that I see a lot is the idea that people you don’t like won’t be on the fediverse. On the face of it it’s an absurd idea – So anyone can start an instance and run it however they want but somehow it’s going to be more locked down than big tech sites that spend millions of dollars on moderation?

The myth that “it’s all called mastodon” that you mention I feel is less like the gnu/linux distinction, and more like your mom calling every video game system a “nintendo”. I’m running 6 different services that use some form of federation, and none of them are Mastodon (nothing against the program, it’s just that I’ve always been running with system performance at a premium so something heavy and scalable like that wasn’t on my radar)

TIL about the Carnation Revolution in 1974, and the dictatorship from 1930 to 1974 that focused on keeping Portugal a largely agrarian economy.

Absolutely mind blowing.

The main drivers of energy use are typically going to be transportation, home heating, electrical generation, and industry.

One of the sliding scales that you have to be very careful of when implementing green energy policies is if your electrical costs go up, then you can end up taking people who were previously using renewable energy to eat their homes and push them into using fossil fuels.

One guy I knew was heating his home using 100% renewable energy from hydroelectric, but then the electric company started building a bunch of solar panels and wind farms that weren’t generating electricity during the times that it was needed, so costs went up substantially. When he moved from electric to propane, the cost difference was so much that he paid for the entire system and all the fuel for the year in one month of not paying for electric heat.

One really interesting thing about the page that I linked, is that in 1987 the same percentage of electricity generation was renewable as today, Which was followed by a massive drop and a swing to rely on fossil fuels.

I find stories like this can misrepresent the actual distance from the goal for many countries, or the progress made – if any. In the case of Portugal, it’s just barely returned to the level of renewable electricity production it achieved almost 40 years ago, but the renewable electricity generation at that time 40 years ago was the sort you could use for 24/7 baseload, whereas today we’re using much more intermittent forms of renewable electricity generation so getting a good day or 6 isn’t as meaningful as it might at first appear.

Contrast another story from earlier this year where Norway was paying people to burn electricity because of favorable conditions – disregarding that unusual story, Norway’s electricity generation is 99% renewable and in fact exports renewable energy to its neighbors, and electricity is so inexpensive that 70% of home heating in that cold nation is electric. That’s a real success story.

It’s important to have an accurate understanding of objective reality. That’s reason enough.

I looked into this more, the 2022 data tells a much different story than the article:

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/portugal#how-much-electricity-does-the-country-consume-each-year

hard to believe they’ve basically just returned to 1985 levels of renewables for electricity generation.

Gemini seems to be lighter version of HTTP and HTML for creating lightweight pages to view. I’ve seen some examples in the past.

WordPress is an option, so is writefreely, but so is just using a normal activitypub compatible platform and just increase your maximum character limit.

One thing with wordpress, make sure that you test it. I had one plug-in installed, and it claimed to be federating okay, but then I subscribed to my own feed and there was just nothing.

It’s the only thing you’re allowed to talk about on some instances. Really need to choose carefully.

Otoh the fediverse is what you make of it. I checked the top posts on my feed and I didn’t see a single post about Linux.