deleted by creator

Oh uh… I was gonna say “don’t allow an over-reliance on any technology that could be hacked (by Cylons) and thereby become unreliable at any time”, but sure, we could add that one too! :-P

How quickly we forget the lessons that Battlestar Galactica tried to instill in us… :-D

Exactly that. Which ironically doesn’t mean that everything that they say is false… but it does mean that everything that they say is suspect.

We need a billionaire to swoop in an save us. Which won’t happen, so we need a grass roots effort from the ground up to save us. Which won’t happen so we need a spaghett monster or god to save us. Which won’t happen bc e.g. the Christian God allows free will hence consequences… so we need aliens to save us. Which won’t happen bc they do not exist - that we can demonstrate.

It is a lot easier to destroy than to create, and it will require enormous efforts to maintain constant vigilance to know things in the future, in this our mis- and worse yet dis-information era.

Rules for Rulers

The rulers change, but the rules do not.

Ho ho ho, okay then! (But not me in reverse - I don’t think I want to know!?:-P)

For-profit media sells whatever makes them the highest profits. (Those who won’t, make way to those who will, or remain in obscurity e.g. how many people have even heard of Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios.)

They will sell anything it seems, with little to no regard for facts. Then they leave it to you to determine the lies of omission, while hunting for the real truth, i.e. to do the true work of journalism. But usually unpaid, painstakingly, and again you’ll never be able to share that message by virtue of being in conflict with the for-profit sources. Or if you do, who would even understand you, especially among the sheeple who either cannot and/or also will not bother to read anything at all.

Some people like Jon Stewart have railed against this for decades… but he lost, and it’s worse than ever before. Adjust your expectations accordingly. This is the world.

https://infosec.pub/post/18142706

I suppose it depends on your goals - for a child or pet, is it okay to lie to them or simply force the issue, whereas for an adult human, how far should someone go to remove from them the consequences of their own actions?

Interesting article about the changing language surrounding climate change. Like now it’s starting to become climate emergency/breakdown/crisis, but before any of that it was global warming, and in the 80s apparently it was “inadvertent climate modification”.

Never forget that behind the mobs is a controller.

If you say that 1+1=2 and they say that 1+1=3, what should be done?

The inverted Turing test, it would seem.

Beep boop I am smarter than you… 🎵

Bleep bloop you seem to me dumb as rock… 🎼

That’s how I got almost all of my furniture:-). Granted, I didn’t do it in a “next door neighbor” setting, but rather apartment where it’s more acceptable. Oh well now you know:-).

You are very welcome:-).

My journey was similar, and in fact from what I hear of people talking, that applies to most and probably all of us (e.g. regardless of what people “say” about opening themselves up to a wider expression of ideas, we all tend to retreat to places that are comfortable or familiar - the only difference is whether we honestly acknowledge that an instance admin has done the work for someone of outright banning people who have dissenting opinions, vs. whether we implement those efforts by ourselves).

Personally I had to put in MONTHS of effort to make the Fediverse “usable”, as I switched around between various instances. My start was Kbin.social, which before it went defunct I noticed how much friendlier the Fediverse seemed, compared to Reddit!!! But when it stopped working I switched over to startrek.website and then to my current account at discuss.online, neither of which block hexbear.net (and the former is quite rare in not even blocking lemmygrad.ml, as most others do). The “feedback” to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse and something in lemmygrad.ml, which persisted for WEEKS and WEEKS, each, after what I considered a fairly innocuous comment, almost convinced me to drop social media entirely… but I persisted, and after finally blocking lemmy.ml, I am now quite happy with it. Ofc my personal user blocklist is still quite long - but blocking the big 3 immediately improved by experience by >95%.

Likewise, you can ditch a lot of news stories that have the most clickbait titles by blocking the bots that post them, while retaining the rest of the community that may then have content that you actually want to see. Unfortunately, nearly everything in Lemmy is “opt-out” rather than “opt-in”, but… it is what it is, and it can be workable, as we both (& everyone else here) have found. Also, there are shining beacons of hope - e.g. check out !globalnews@lemmy.zip, which is now #9 if you type “news” in the list of communities on your instance and sort by user count, but when it was told to me it was MUCH further down the list iirc, and therefore quite buried and exceedingly difficult for newer people to find, but avoids a lot of the spammy !worldnews@lemmy.world. i.e. I am saying that if someone wanted “news”, but less of it and only some of the most interesting stuff, then this “Interesting Global News” fits the bill, yet is opt-in rather than opt-out:-).

And therefore our monkey-brains forget all the pain that came before, to get us to this point.:-) Which is healthy, b/c why carry forward that negativity when you don’t have to?:-P But then when people looked at me with such a horrified expression on their face, I literally could not figure out why, at first, b/c my own experiences are so VERY different than theirs. Also those kinds of posts don’t dominate everyone’s feed every day, also we keep hearing of places like X/Twitter that do somewhat similarly so… at some point, isn’t that up to you, to curate your own feed, just like literally everywhere else? Like, why would you stay on Reddit but not try out Lemmy then, when this aspect is the same?

But then again, I am a Unix programmer, and most people do not think like us:-). i.e., not everyone is willing to RTFM in its entirety prior to being able to make realistic use of anything here. Also, anytime there is a major election in the USA or UK such posts have a way of popping up all over the world… but since then they have receded (it looks like?), and thus again we forget, until it comes back around again.

Mind you, like you, I would love to see more content-creators here on the Fediverse!!! I mean, I am here, and would benefit from such, and college students are exactly the crowd that might do so - creative people letting off steam by posting interesting material, presented in a funny way? Yes please!:-) But… yeah, all of the aforementioned “issues” are definitely more than a little bit of a minefield, for the uninitiated.

Also, this is where we enjoy chatting, but there is very little to no actual “content” on the Fediverse atm - everything is posted here from elsewhere, and unlike even Reddit, I am not aware of e.g. answers to technical questions given here that exist nowhere else. So like you said that you wanted to share a video but… off the top of my head, I cannot even think of one that would qualify. I did post a Super cool video on viruses in !videos@lemmy.world, but it only got 3 upvotes - I thought at the time in large measure b/c I posted it immediately after someone else also posted the one (oops, I hadn’t seen it), and yet that one likewise received no (net?) upvotes. Oh, and both of these of course are merely links to YouTube. So… we aren’t all that receptive to “content” of a nature that isn’t news, comedy, maybe fuck-cars, and everything technology but most especially GNU+Linux (sort that community Top for this year and see precisely what I mean), oh and ofc nostalgia e.g. Trogdor the Burninator, obviously.

So… it’s hard to justify sharing even a video, with all the variety of pitfalls that also await. But… maybe you’ll find a way? Being forewarned is forearmed after all, so now you can go forward more safely!:-)

Every single person without exception that I’ve ever told about Lemmy (even/especially those with PhDs) tells me upon our next visit, often with somewhat of a horrified look on their face, that it contains extremist content, then promptly never wants to discuss Lemmy ever again.

Sexually explicit content is easily turned either on or off at will as the user may choose at any given moment. However, “extremist content” cannot bc those who share such refuse to display the same level of sensitivity to self-label it as is done for porn. Granted that it likely surges in waves, but that only means that their first impressions of the Fediverse may or may not be formed by let’s say 4 of the first 10 posts that they see calling for the actual, not-really-joking beheading of landlords.

Yes, you can block it (as I choose to do), but again I’m talking first impressions here, before people have even decided if they want to look at 10 more posts, or simply walk away - and let’s be honest the latter is a heck of a lot easier than having to learn the intricacies of how the Fediverse works currently. We are nowhere close to the level of e.g. Wikipedia where you (1) click, (2) read, (3) repeat.

Also, I realize that X at this point might be similar? (Honestly I don’t know, I don’t have an account thus cannot see it directly without one.) On the other hand, it is grandfathered into the public consciousness, having once been Twitter. Therefore a more apt comparison might be Truth Social. Like Truth Social, many people take one look at the Fediverse, and never want to return. Which perhaps should give us pause - bc if something is too extreme for Redditors even then dayum - but setting aside any judgement atm, and most definitely not wanting to impinge upon anyone’s freedom of speech, I am saying that the content on the Fediverse most definitely does not seem to match expectations of a “mainstream audience”. Particularly not ones not used to dealing with computer coding i.e. Linux (though the people I’ve been mentioning it to are coders even).

And ofc that depends on what instance you choose to access it from - Mbin would provide a very different experience than, let’s say, Lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.cafe (the only instance I’ve ever heard of that has defederated from “the big three”) again more than a little different from lemm.ee or mander.xyz, that opens the floodgates wide and barely blocks anything (which makes me wonder how they control CSAM? perhaps they ban anyone who attempts to subscribe to anything related).

I am glad that you remained… but since you asked, I thought I would bring it up.

Keep in mind that this isn’t necessarily a conversation about mere preference: you might literally be fired, depending on the rules of your institution, and how much it enjoys freedom of speech. e.g. I would wonder about someone in Germany exposing college kids to a pro-Nazi post (I hear they are EXTREMELY serious about such, and even so much as a symbol posed in a slightly positive light…), or someone in the USA, cough Florida cough, to a post that is critical of Trump or “God” (meaning Trump again, somehow 🙄), or daring to say something like “God loves people, regardless of sexual preference”, plus notice how far down I got into this message without even bringing up the Gaza situation at all. People can be quite litigious, and colleges can be quite authoritarian, and therefore I for one would be extremely wary of such - the same as including Truth Social in an assignment - until such time as the Lemmy experience allows itself to become more presentable to a mainstream audience.

Although maybe you can take this feedback and find a way - like proposing to go to mander.xyz but stating explicitly some warnings about keeping the button set to show only “Local” posts, while if you browse “All”… then you have gone beyond the assignment and ventured out into the big wide world and therefore might be exposed to more ah… “variety” of content then you may have realized ever existed!? 😁

Edit: although I blocked it months ago (not b/c I’m offended fwiw, I just find that instance extremely juvenile and an enormous waste of time), browsing !memes@lemmy.ml over the past week I could well see someone wondering what the heck I am talking about - they really aren’t that bad, and certainly nowhere close to 4/10 advocating for literal murder. HOWEVER, the USA election season is ramping up over the next couple of months, and I suspect that everyone will once again see what I am saying with their own two eyes very soon now. But if it helps, here is a very short list of examples:

• Example, search comments for the word “guillotine”
• Example “Guillotines are too nice for AirBnB owners; They should be thrown feet-first into a wood chipper.” - I mean… regardless of truth or falsehood on this one… :-D it can be kinda shocking to mainstream normies, yes?
• Example

TLDR: Lemmy’s content can be rather… “adult”, but unlike NSFW the violence tends not to be labeled at all, and therefore could trigger a complaint, and therefore should probably have a disclaimer/warning if you are going to mention it. Well, now you know!

Edit 2: I also am aware that places like Reddit, X/Twitter, and FaceBook also depict violence. However (1) not nearly as much, or as blatantly - e.g. perhaps you have to join a sub to see it, or see/click through a NSFW/spoiler tag; (2) they have a ToS that they at least claim to follow, e.g. remember that guillotine fuck spez in the latest r/place, with the blood splatter? but that type of thing tends to get removed, more often than it does here; and (3) authoritarian colleges (whose nearly sole purpose these days remember is to increase shareholder value) are going to like an authoritarian social media website, rather than one that is loose and open, e.g. many Fediverse instances don’t even require email sign-ups, yet their content is allowed to be spread out to all of the others (unless they are explicitly blocked, iirc?).

Right or wrong, literal advocating for actual genocide or not, what matters here is what happens to OP as a result of mentioning Lemmy, and how desperately they need that job or not. And again I’m saying that every time I’ve even so much as mentioned Lemmy to someone, I see a noticeable cooling-off of our friendship for awhile, so it’s definitely got some “issues” that can - and probably should - keep it out of the mainstream.