I learned that just now.

Elon Musk

it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all

Could someone expand upon this? I’m don’t know much about tech, but the idea that FOSS decentralized platforms can’t be banned does seem to make sense right? Ban one, another one will pop up, etc. What am I not getting here?

Can someone explain to me the difference between bluesky and twitter?

This made me look up the wikipedia page on Bushism and I must say it’s beautiful! Thanks :)

I just use RSS feeds to follow YT-channels. It’s doesn’t seem any less convenient than a YT account.

Can’t be that much work, can it?

This is wonderful, I’ve been struggling with piped for some time now, it’s always asking me to sign in to confirm that I’m not a bot. Also it’s showing me videos in very low quality and often it stops loading halfway through the video. With this I get to see good quality videos once more, without unwanted pauses and without financing yt in any way. Great!

But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it’s doing to our world. We’d be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.

The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don’t watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn’t earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you’d be better off concluding that this creative output wasn’t so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we’d be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.

So let’s not justify ads, but let’s reject them in the most radical ways we can.

Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don’t actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That’s not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can’t help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it’s many forms, and I’m all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.

(not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)

What a great site, I’ll definitely be sharing it with some (naive) friends and colleagues :)

What people think when they haven’t heard of the Fediverse.

I vividly remember being over at a friend of mine, who for the first time had a members account on RuneScape and then we started doing level 1 clue scrolls on his account. We loved that game and from the point of becoming member the possibilities seemed so endless. Wasted far too much time on it ever since. Glad I don’t anymore. occasionally watch Limpwurt, a dutch youtuber, do incredible things with that game.

do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance

No I was arguing for exactly the opposite. Let’s not wait, but aim for non-profit decentralized platforms.

I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it’s not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it’s really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don’t think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn’t be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.

There’s a system in place for that. It’s called ‘verklaring omtrent gedrag’. For many jobs and positions you need this certificate of conduct in order to apply. The ministry of justice will not hand out the certificate if your crime is related to the position you apply for. This means he would probably never be allowed to work at a school for instance.

Formication is the sensation resembling that of small insects crawling on the skin, in the absence of actual insects.

Never asserted that notion. Of course you’re free to do so. I am just saying it’s self righteous and not helping any one.

I am not at all telling victims to shut up. You just made that up.

Dutch courts haven’t found him guilty of rape, but did find him guilty of having sex with a 12 year old. That itself is more than terrible but calling it rape despite this fact is in fact a misrepresentation of what happened. Sure it was terrible thing that he did and I am not defending his actions at all. I am defending his right to participate in sports events and pleading against trial by media/public outrage.

I’m not angry, just sharing my thoughts. How does it work? Like I said, I am against media-fueled public rage in cases like these.

He did serve his time, according to the Dutch rule. His initial sentence was longer because it was in the UK and over there they consider every sexual activity with a minor rape, where as in the Netherlands they differentiate between actual rape and misconduct.