• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

    You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

    Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.



  • I do think people get caught up in hating Epic, but the difference is that if any of those developers felt like releasing on another platform, they could. The “exclusivity”, such as it is, is just happenstance. Whereas Epic’s exclusives are largely actual contracts.

    99% of the games on that list are small-time indie games that only release on Steam because that’s where the market share is, and they probably only have the dev capacity to support a single platform. Steam also has a lot of API support for devs. Those games exist on Epic too, but when people complain about Epic they aren’t complaining about those games, they’re complaining about bigger games that are artificial exclusives, timed or otherwise.

    Steam offers the better customer experience, and Epic can’t compete with it, so instead they just buy exclusivity rights to games. It’s arguably anti-consumer, and definitely different from those games that just happen to only be available on one platform or another.




  • That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.

    What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.

    Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.



  • This is certainly an interesting topic. There are men who are comfortable wearing dresses and wearing makeup and all that, just as there are women who are comfortable with cutting their hair short and wearing baggy clothes and all that. It’s also true that those people are sometimes harassed and called “eggs” by people who are ostensibly trans-friendly (especially fem-presenting guys).

    But I don’t think that that is equivalent to the trans experience. I assume you’re not trans, correct me if I’m wrong, but dysphoria is a real thing that for many people is very deeply related to physical body parts, and your theory just doesn’t account for that at all. I don’t think that your average fem-presenting guy wants to take HRT to get breasts, let alone go to the extra length of getting bottom surgery and get vaginoplasty. There’s clearly something more about dysphoria than it just being a matter of what they like differing from what’s socially acceptable, unless you broaden it so wide as “liking having breasts or a vagina” or “liking having a penis”, and even that is a stretch because dysphoria is a very visceral sense of wrongness in one’s body that goes much deeper than just preferring a different body part.

    Not all dysphoria is physical, either. It can relate to misgendering, or any number of societal things that aren’t necessarily related to just what we’re “allowed” to do. Frankly, unless gender is outright abolished and there are no longer distinctions between genders or even societal differentiation between sexes, I don’t see it going away. And even in a post-gender world, I imagine there would still be trans people (perhaps by another name) who experienced physical dysphoria.

    Your theory also doesn’t account for trans people who present as would be socially acceptable for their assigned gender at birth, and have interests that are similar to their AGAB, but still identify as trans and even may experience dysphoria.

    All in all, while I appreciate your conclusion to support trans people, I disagree with your reasoning. I don’t think that being trans is merely a result of one’s likes not being in line with societal norms. I think it goes much deeper than that, and can’t be reduced to such a simple cause.



  • I love to be able to reclaim works from their hateful authors, especially cultural ones. I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, and that dude was hateful. He makes JK Rowling look sweet and kindly. But it’s a lot easier to reclaim the narrative and make it a part of our culture when the author is literally dead.

    Lovecraft is a cornerstone of modern fiction, despite being a bigot. We can acknowledge how he was a terrible person, even analyze it, but we know that our enjoyment of Lovecraftian fiction isn’t benefiting Lovecraft’s hateful causes, especially because the work is public domain.

    In contrast, JK Rowling is not only still alive, she is active and vocal about her hatred, how she spends her money towards hate, and how she considers support of Harry Potter in light of her hate to be support of her vile views.

    Consumption of media is not a passive action. Even if you do not actively give any money to the franchise, promoting the franchise encourages other people to do so, and then their money goes to fund hate.

    I understand that HP is important to a lot of people. It was a cultural phenomenon. But we aren’t leaving it behind just because JK Rowling said something offensive. We’re leaving it behind because the author is actively using our consumption to fund hate and campaigning to deny rights to trans people.

    There are plenty of other forms of media, new and old, that aren’t being piloted by known bigots. If you want a cultural backbone, using one that is currently controlled by a bigot will probably make a lot of trans people feel unwelcome at best and at worst, if HP continues to be a cultural phenomenon on a large scale JK Rowling will use the platform and the money to further the oppression of transgender rights.