sanity_is_maddening

Oh, I do know that. And I apologise if I inadvertently implied something else in the process.

In the case of these two, the serial killers one, it was the number of serial killers reported to date on record. It wasn’t percentage per capita. It was all the other countries with reported serial killers on record (because not all countries even had a single number on record). When all the other ranked countries’ occurrences were summed, it still came quite short in comparison to the American number alone. I saw this on a broadcast news report about a decade ago, where they went on about what reasons could be the catalyst for such (there were too many referenced and suggested to briefly resume here now), this to say that my memory could be faltering too, but this may be something that can be found online somewhere if one goes looking for it.

In the case of mass shootings, there’s too many statistics being thrown around about this all the time now for me to pinpoint which one it was. But personally knowing people from countries with a higher violent crime rate than the U.S. it is still not a practice known to any of them to have “school shooting drills” for students. That’s a particularly unique U.S. occurrence.

I was merely talking about these two specific issues. I wasn’t talking about anything else. And again, I apologise if the way I wrote these suggested otherwise.

And what you stated should be highlighted about every statistic everywhere all the time.

And I want to reiterate again that I agree with the original comment we’re branching off. Too much focus is being placed around the U.S. in a silly global “schadenfreude”, that I find quite rude to the many people in the U.S. who don’t deserve any of it. Most of what is happening there is happening everywhere and we ought to be vigilant and helpful.

And if you are in the U.S. and particularly in one of the states being harassed and invaded, please be safe, and know that most of the idiots you see around the web mocking this situation, are actually also rooting for you to turn the tide.

I wish you nothing but the best, and for you and your loved ones to be safe.

I absolutely agree with you.

I’m European and think Berlusconi was Trump way before Trump. Sarkozy was a terrible telling of France leaning into the far-right as a new normal, and people are now still cheering him and paying him tribute as he heads to prison for corruption by the way. What?? Bolsonaro in Brazil, the same. And the list goes on.

This all to say, you’re correct. This is everywhere. And I do believe it is starting to coalesce into the same global movement and in my opinion backed and financed by the very same people worldwide as a destabilisation of democracies to establish the new feudal system that is already in play, but not in total control.

But you do have to admit the U.S. has some unique problems. Like Mass shootings and serial killers. In both of these, the U.S. has more occurrences than all the other countries on the respective lists combined. WTF?

And if you’re in the Netherlands, the existence of a functioning public health care system is something that makes a huge difference. Including the reduction of crime.

This is why I’m gonna end on a quote from the great George Carlin…

“When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.”

I stopped using YouTube a while back.

There’s still content creators and people in there still trying to do good work, most of these (although not all) are on Nebula, in case people wish to support them and ditch youtube altogether.

But YouTube as a platform has become unusable for me. And it was not recent.

And I don’t want to use second party clients anymore either. Chasing which one isn’t blocked now is a hassle that is just not worth it for me any longer. The culture that exists in there is not something that I want to bother myself with this much for anymore.

Throughout the last decade after Google purchasing the platform in 2010 (if I’m not mistaken?), I saw YouTube become the first epicenter of everything that is the most horrible online. Gamergate started on YouTube (and was maximised and driven by its embedded algorithms after the Google purchase) before moving on to reddit, 9Gag, instagram and virtually any other platform. And now it’s just rampant common ground in culture, with “SJW” becoming “Woke”, and “Anti-SJW” becoming “Anti-Woke”.

And the masses took the silly pill.

Clickbait articles are the least of the problems that YouTube has for a very long time.

Misinformation unchecked and even blatant lies allowed freely to circulate for years and years now. Just check how many flat earth channels are spewing nonsense freely over there for so long now. And that is just one example. Just one.

Rage and disgust rewarded by the algorithm, resulted in deranged forms of behaviour and rage inducing statements to become common ground in the pursuit of monetization.

Then there’s ads there are openly scams for the gullible to fall for. Yes, I know Meta allows these as well, but I stopped using anything Meta even before stopping youtube. Yes, even WhatsApp. The Cambridge Analytica scandal should’ve made everyone quit in rage and never look back. But hey, I guess I was mostly alone in that. And look at where that got us now. Not just the U.S. but the whole world.

And then there’s AI…

If people need a case study for how the once considered silly “Dead Internet Theory” is becoming true, take youtube. Plenty of AI generated content as a non-stop sludge, reacted by brigade bots, scam bots and sex bots, all rising in the algorithm through faux viewership. The human is becoming incidental in their current model.

Now, everytime I end up on youtube through some website sharing a link to a video there, I can tell you that the feeling for me is one of entering a loud space of derangement, a most horrifying circus, displaying mental illness and sociapathy as their acts.

But to be honest, ever since I moved to the fediverse exclusively in the last couple of years, that’s how I feel about every major platform now. But youtube still does feel worse in many ways to me.

And I hope nobody here takes this as judgement for their usage of these platforms. Youtube alone took hours of my week before this. Reddit too. I know how absorbing it all is. But now, on the outside, I also know how draining it was.

But if your focus is truly just on “clickbait”, know that predates youtube and even the internet in the form of sensationalist headlines. Tv made it worse. Then the internet exploded it in scale. And Social Media consolidated that as the only viable option through the algorithmic incentive for it.

Just check News Headlines from reputable sources from each decade and you’ll see the issue glaringly worsening throughout time.

Good luck on your project and I also hope you’ll share it on the fediverse.

Cheers.

Yeah, Bazzite has the best word in town for a gaming distro.

Rendered speechless I am, as I weep at the sight of such sublime prose.

A delight worthy of a true bard!

Bravo!

Did ye mention the cursed option?? It is wretched and thou shalt not name it to others here!

“Amazon”! “Google”! “Apple”! “Microsoft”! These art with the devil and shalt be pledged to be forsaken! Forbidden words here, ye see? And thou shalt forsaketh these!

Linux, by the one Torvald is the bid! We shalt fork it or foster thine many bastard children to a better morrow.

And all sources shalt be seen!

And all protocols shalt be open!

To all who shalt join the bid of a morrow of freedom!

Sorry. Frustration has its way with me. I apologise if I also tired you in the process, beyond myself, obviously.

Apologies.

I want to start by saying… Thank you. And also that this is precisely why I’m still on this platform. You engaged thoroughly and thoughtfully with everything I wrote. And I mean it… thank you.

All that you pointed out is valid criticism.

But to be fair I didn’t say that killing those filters would solve every problem, just that it would eliminate that implicit incentive to seek the reward to be highlighted at the top. Through “easy to be enraged by posts”, “karma-farming like reddit posts” or just hoards of low effort memes just to mention a few.

It’s low effort but it works. On me to.

And to be completely honest about how the only “New” filter being hijacked the way you mentioned by barrage posting… I have no solution to that end. It already happens. There’s like five names (I’m not counting an exact number so it’s figurative) on lemmy that seem to post more than the rest of the lemmyverse in its entirety combined. They completely hijack the feed in any filter one chooses. I also want to say that I find that these are passionate individuals that want the lemmyverse and the fediverse to grow and I still find that they are doing a great job to that end. But one doesn’t need much insight to know that these will turn into a problem as well. Unless they are all gracious and know the perfect timing to slow down as more traffic takes off. I have seen some of them being criticised for it. And I think at this point it is unfair, but soon it might not be.

Mentioning the upvote/downvote system, I always said that we could do without it and it would be for the better. I said it on reddit for many years. I say it here as well. It’s actually the most easy to hijack feature of them all: bots, brigade hits, you name it. I never thought of this being the defining feature of reddit, but its biggest flaw. The community building, the interchangeable branches of discussions, that was what reddit got right and was stolen to the end of the earth for it. Virtually every platform stole this after 2005/2006.

Upvotes/downvotes are not only low effort, they actually reduce valuable engagement and lack any clarity. People will downvote this comment or even upvote it and I will have no idea of what was they agreed or disagreed with. It means nothing. What you and I are having here is valuable to me. You are not just disagreeing with me, but adding elements to my perspective that I might miss on my own. This is what these platforms were genuinely made for. From all the way back from the mirc chats in the 90’s.

One of the things I can point out is people mentioning to me, “you can just hide the upvote/downvote system” or “don’t use the Hot or Popular if you don’t like it” or “just block communities you are not interested in”, but these are features or elements that are driving the engagement of the people around me in here. It would be pretty silly of me to think that hiding upvotes/downvotes would change anything but to cover my eyes to what is around me. For as long as they exist, I’ll displayed them and separately. They’re here and they’re driving engagement regardless of what I think of them. No point in hiding from it. The same for everything else.

Like I said, I have the list of communities as my homepage and then I go through them chronologically in whatever I’m interested to check out that day. I don’t know what you mean by never seeing any posts past an hour. I don’t follow any communities here that if I don’t come here for three or four days (which happens frequently) that I couldn’t go through them quickly. Even back then on reddit, I didn’t have this issue with the communities that I followed. But I never followed high traffic nonsense.

You have to admit that these filters are hijacked the way that I said, just that I have to admit the new filter is hijacked by persistent posting as you said.

This right here, what you and I are doing is what some call “yellow team”… we’re tracking the issues and how unintended or deliberately so consequences can emerge.

My question is what do we do about it?

We should have like a “town hall” like instance for all federated administrators and mods to talk and vote on directions to take and have users vote. This is only valuable if we implement the same rails and safeguards as in the structuring of a great democracy. And Lemmy can function like a beacon to why federated municipality should be the future of democracy. Even deciding a cap on the number of maximum registrations per instance is not a bad idea to start throwing as numbers increase. I was on Lemm.ee. It was nothing terrible that happened there, it was just too much.

It’s better to have large numbers spread around many instances, than to have them in just a few. This is the right way to scale up. The more centralised and large the more easy it is to corrupt it. And the harder it is to manage it. Smaller instances will know better how to maintain its base and to manage it. Rimu (the piefed creator) already said he is thinking about closing the registrations on the instance he manages. Which is the one I’m on.

After a certain number, people should know to close the registrations and just maintain and manage the instance well. I would say some people don’t listen to their instincts and keep pushing beyond what they can take on and ruin their experience and the instance with it. That is the cautionary tale of lemm.ee that others should learn from. It was no bad apples and awful people, it was just too much for too few to handle.

By all means help people set up other instances, but have them be small. Lemmy.world is constantly being hit with new registered trolls and instigators and it is very clear why they pick it, because it is the larger instance and hijacks the lemmyverse attention in the process through this same filters we are speaking of, which is whay I’m on this detour. I also want to say that the administrators and mods have done a great job, but I’m seeing the same cracks that I saw on lemm.ee start to show in that is becoming too much for them to handle so much. It’s not that they are making bad decisions or becoming terrible at all, is that it is starting to become impossible for them to keep the standards they have maintained so far. It’s too much to handle. That’s all.

Like I said before… “Scale is the death of virtue”. Still can’t remember where this is from though. Aging is fucked.

Just one last quick mention, I absolutely agree with you regarding the transparency of having our comment history visible. Nobody needs to volunteer their identity, but it’s the least we can do as to gain trust to let the things we say here be visible to all. And absolutely that was one of the (many) problems of what it went so wrong with reddit. But I gotta say, reddit was amazing for a while. Then it wasn’t anymore. That is why I’m worrying in advance about this place.

Anyway, thank you for this exchange. I really appreciate thoughtful discussions and you gave a few things to ponder. I’m gonna sit with them and see what comes out.

Much appreciated.

That was unnecessarily condescending…

I know “algorithm” is not a dirty word. Algorithms are used almost everywhere for almost anything. But when we mention " the Algorithm" colloquially these days we know that we’re talking about algorithmic influence in engagement in digital platforms. And how it can have unintended consequences or dark incentives structured within them.

Which was precisely why I was talking about these filters. Not from a place of like/dislike but because of its inherent reward system and how it rewards rage and disgust, exactly as media experts warned everyone it would with the algorithms at the core of the other platforms.

And if you are denying and saying that the same is not already occurring here, you’re being disingenuous in this exchange. As one only needs to go through their feed with these filters enabled on navigating across all the federated instances to see the rageposting and disgust at the top. The few exceptions will only prove the rest is the rule.

It’s frustrating, because people are not engaging with what I wrote, and are only replying deflections instead of addressing the direct criticism at the core of my argument.

I’m not insulting anyone, I’m not throwing shade at people for enjoying memes, as I do to. I’m merely pointing out the perverse incentive lying at the core of this feature.

And it doesn’t matter if I don’t like it, I can just not use it, because it’s the enabled option in everyone that uses that will be driving their behaviour and fulfilling the loop with its dark incentives.

Why are people not engaging with what I’m saying? I even said “I’m no better” because I will fall prey to it if I leave it on, or even if I feel tempted to go back to it from time to time. That is why I don’t.

But I still see the posts that get the most interactions and comments.

This is not an armless feature. This is what broke the civic nature of discussion in society through social media. This loop of incentive will always lead to rage and disgust to raise above all else. And reward derangement in people that seek attention for attention sake.

I don’t know what else to say…

I’m sorry if I insulted anyone by pointing this out. But I don’t see how my comment can be misconstrued as a personal attack on anyone. As it is just an avaluation of a proposition through its inherent consequences. This is basic level of scientific method right here.

This is not about liking/disliking. I really dislike coffee, and I have offered a coffee machine as a birthday gift to a friend. More than once, actually. I can have people enjoy things I dislike with no hint of an issue. It’s even baffling to me when others don’t know how to.

This is about adressing an issue at its core. And out it influences behaviour and the user base at large.

I know. But is scale all that matters? I know what you mean and I swipe through a lot of them.

But that also happens with the Hot and Popular filters. Because if I just swipe through the All option across all the federated instances using the Hot or Popular filters it’s mostly memes, circlejerking and rageposting. Is this what is wanted? Because nobody needs Lemmy for that. Reddit and all of the other platforms are already serving that low level of engagement with slop to spare.

This actively rewards it. Exactly the same way.

I don’t remember who said it …“Scale is the death of virtue”… but it is definitely applicable here.

I don’t know what you want out of lemmy, but if that outcome is what you intend to have, the end product will have virtually no distinction of its’ counterparts and people will see no reason to change. As there will be none outside of it’s not “corporate owned”. But if it’s still slop, people who want a change, will just skip the whole thing. As I did for a while. And if it wasn’t for Piefed, I don’t think I would be still hanging around here anymore either.

Beware that a lot of the people who seek these alternatives do not want anything similar to what is huge out there. And you’ll essentially be killing the appeal to the larger target audience that will bother to “learn” federation and how instances operate in its context.

This is a hard bargain. And I do understand what you mean, and I have to suffer through it. But if you don’t recognise what I’m speaking of, then I don’t think we’re having a honest conversation.

I have not used those filters in a long time. But I’m betting that the enraged posting about what’s happening in the U.S. (and justifiably so), shitposting, circlejerking, memes and Tankies causing controversy again are taking the entire feed until one gets bored. If I’m wrong I bet is not by much. But hell, I could’ve stayed on reddit for that back when I was there which was a while ago.

Meanwhile the communities with intellectually engaging posting, real propositions of solutions and thoughtful discussions get slided to nowhere like on every other platform. They’re here and they are incredible. But guess what, they’re also on reddit, youtube, instagram and so on. And they get even more traction than in here. And also no traction in comparison to everywhere else. Just like here. But they do still get more people than here in the end. So what is the appeal of changing?

I know a lot of people who want to make ideas like Syntropy, Permacomputing, the circular economy and many other wonderful things known, and these communities do exist around here and are wonderful, but they’re even smaller than everywhere else. The proportions in ratio in everything remain the same here as in every other platform. “Hey, we don’t have far-right wing nuts and that many transphobes here!” - true. But it doesn’t seem like we actually use the space to do anything but complain about them and make the real solutions and discussions as invisible as everywhere else. It’s absolutely soulcrushing.

The reward of rage and disgust still leaves on. And we get to nothing different with it. The loop that made our world even more deranged is not broken.

Hey, if this is what everyone wants, I’ll just leave if I’m the only one bothered, no need to change anything on my account. But judging by the interactions I had over the two years since I’ve been around (first on lemm.ee and now on piefed), I can tell you a lot of people come here for the opposite of everywhere else. There’s a lot of older, reflective, literate individuals with a lot to share with others and eager to learn that come looking around these parts, and I stop seeing their names around because I think they eventually give up on what is essentially the same invisibility to high value conversations and the reward of rage and disgust as the media experts kept warning us about and nobody listened.

If you read this far, I thank you for your attention.

I hope you don’t think I don’t want the fediverse to succeed, I absolutely do. But not at any cost. And especially not at the cost of what can make it truly valuable as a difference and an actual change in direction.

Please. No algorithm, please.

And I don’t use the Hot or Popular filters because I think they do possess some of the same undertones of that perverse incentive that algorithmic social media has. It would be advisable to kill this before the lemmyverse grows too wide.

Just chronological in all options: Home. Local, and All. But allowing to filter any of them through themes or subject. Piefed is already toying really well with some of these concepts.

This alone allows a lot more of the other small instances and communities to be seen. And removes those perverse incentives to “climb” that corrupting ladder that makes some people post controversial and deranged posts that seek the reward of getting more attention. Algorithms rewarded this. The Hot and Popular filter options of sifting through them rewards this too. And we all know it. And we are seeing its’ effect already. In an ideal world this wouldn’t be a problem. But we know these will keep being hijacked to that end.

And these don’t help the small and the thoughtful communities to arise as we want them to.

I personally set my home page to be the list of the communities I follow and decide what I’m in the mood for. The voyager app is also great for this. And all are set to chronological.

So summing up, my suggestions are:

-kill the Hot and Popular filters. Chronological feed only.

-Add subject filters instead.

-List of Communities followed as homepage. It let’s you know what you’re in the mood for.

These will help everything including the smaller instances and communities to be seen. This isn’t about my preferences. I do this to remove my own tendencies to fall prey to the rage bait catching my attention as a starting point. Because I’m no better. That’s the point. Media Experts as soon as 2008 said this ingrained reward loop is a problem because disgust and rage are the reactions that track the most immediately and lock on in the history of all media. If we want Lemmy to be better, we have to make it so. This already doesn’t have ads and algorithmic suggestions to nurture engagement, which is great. So this is the only thorn that remains from the dark legacy of social media. Nobody would be shutting up anybody. It’s just not rewarding shitposting. If I can disable it myself, the space at large is still falling prey to it as I would if I was using it.

PS: Also, Crossposting obviously helps smaller instances and communities to get noticed too.

I usually mention and explain the Fediverse and the many already existent platforms to anyone who starts complaining about the current state of social media. And explain why it would be better for the world for us all to move into a decentralised network than a corporate owned infrastructure.

As for Lemmy, most people were never on reddit. In my social experience, very few people ever used it. But the ones that used and use reddit, absolutely lemmy came into the conversation. And older tech nerds become immediately interested. As they should.

Instead of an edit, I decided to add another comment as PS:

If you’re worried about Aljazeera because they are based in Qatar, don’t worry, because everyone is. Including myself. And they know it very well. And I think most of us are aware that they’re running prestige journalism as a face saving front. Like many other things they’ve run over the last decade for tourism sake and to attract foreign investment and appeal to international markets.

As to their national version of the outlet, I vouch for nothing and I have no idea of how it is. I will leave that to their nationals or people who speak Arabic to state and talk about it. I’m completely ignorant of that end and very aware of it.

Like I said in my original comment, trust no outlet. But facts are verifiable.

The reason I see more and more people checking Aljazeera over the years is because they function a bit as a broker between the complexity of the reality of the middle-eastern countries and Arab African countries and our over-simplistic and often latent prejudicial takes of their cultures. I have to say before starting checking Aljazeera, my perspective of Iran was an embarrassment compared to today. It’s about the fact of how they function as a window to understand the inner complexities of their countries and problematic traditions as much as we do with our western ones.

There’s no simple answers. But you mentioned Gaza, they and the respectable outlets have managed to display the problems of Israel without reducing the country to a thumbnail of Zionism and Netanyahu. Without shying away from Genocide and murdered journalists, how many outlets have you seen displaying Israeli protests and dissent? Not a lot of them…

And they get accused of being Arabs running a mission to destabilise Israel in favour of Hamas and Palestine.

I have to say, not that long ago, everytime I defended Palestine, I was accused of being a Hamas supporter. This is the reductionism of myopic coverage. And it’s sad that now I have to run defense to the Israeli sometimes (amidst this terror!! ) because all that people see is the horrific genocide that their government is inflicting on Palestinians.

But if we know how not to reduce the U.S. and Americans to just Maga, why do we keep reducing every other country to their worst faction and erase their entire cultural complexity?

I think you are driving that from a lot of assumptions instead of experience of interaction. Which is fine. We all have those. Interacting with them as a news source over the years, their coverage is very wide and very fact driven. And there’s a lot of coverage that other outlets usually shy away from that they don’t.

You should know that even in polls taken amongst journalists Al jazeera scores very high on credibility.

I’m not sure but I believe Al Jazeera now scores higher than the Washington Post (obvious reasons) and The New York Times, two examples of once reputable news outlets that have been falling out of grace. But AP News is probably still holding their credibility along with NPR and PBS, both falling apart from budget cuts this year, all of them on the American side.

Al Jazeera’s opinion side though, will be a big discussion to be had like with any other outlets that exist.

But then again, they’re just one of the various I mentioned in the previous commentary in alphabetical order because I don’t really have a favourite as a choice amongst those.

I also read “Publico” and “Expresso” and find them both reliable. And RTP, which is a public funded news station. But all these are outlets from Portugal in Portuguese only. I assume a lot us Europeans here will have a lot of reputable National News outlets we count on, especially public funded ones, that don’t really register outside of our national borders. That is why I only shared my go to international ones and not the national ones in the previous comment.

Although, EU side, Euronews still holds up nicely despite the scandals and the envolvement of the Hungarian state friendly acquisitions, which was a Portuguese asshole that brokered that deal nonetheless.

They haven’t become a shitshow. But it’s more about what they shy away from, than how they changed their coverage.

International and in alphabetical order:

Al Jazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/

France 24 https://www.france24.com/en/

Reuters https://www.reuters.com/

The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/europe

I would say these are the ones I still hold respect over the years. Regardless of issues, these still have my respect.

Trust however?

Well, nobody should trust or distrust anything blindly. Too many times I see people nowadays fall in line of blind allegiance to absolutes. To trust or to distrust absolutely. The key to media literacy is to look for what is not seen in what is being shown. And to try and cover our blind spots nurtured by our biases.

And no the answer isn’t “ground news”. That is a silly tool for Factioned Americans. Nobody gets to decide the spectrum and the polical positioning of outlets. Example: The New York Times is considered Left Wing by Americans but in Europe they would be a moderate Right Wing or full blown Right Wing depending of the country you’re in.

This is why Left/Right is dead as a deconstruction of social struggles. The original meaning of it as established in the French Revolution has been dead and buried for a while. Especially with the NeoLiberalism creation of the “Centrist” positioning with false oppositions that protect the already benefitted citizens which would render them all as part of the “Right” by the original intended meaning of Left/Right.

There is no Center or Centrism in the original meaning of Left and Right for a reason. Because the center cannot be occupied by people saying what it is. The center is the “battleground”, the “Negotiation Space” where the contesting and conceding occur between the ones privileged by the status quo and the ones left out of it.

Was I sanctimonious, condescending and awfully presumptuous enough?

I wrote all this because a lot of people decide their predilection of news outlets based on their perceived notions of Left/Right constructions which is why I’ve pointed out that they have been rendered pretty hollow throughout time.

Facts are verifiable. Opinions however are complicated.

I could state like many have, that The Guardian is an elitist outlet safekeeping the British upper middle-class interests against the oligarchs but at the cost of the disadvantaged as well. And if you are a reader of The Guardian like myself you know this is a warranted and fair criticism.

Taking this, what position would you place them in the silly Left-Center-Right spectrum line? The answer is quite irrelevant isn’t it?

I would say, when it comes to political governance, focus on propositions and their inherent outcomes and consequences, then take the criticism of those same propositions to correct and improve them or to abandon them altogether in favour of something more viable.

When it comes to news coverage… outlets are by majority owned by corporations and or wealthy individuals that will run defense through them. That is why public owned news outlets have retained value and common trust, because the perverse incentive is blocked out.

Suggestion wise… seeking verifiable information first, then seeking many angles of that same said verifiable information to perceive if there is insight to be found or if it is just noise as cover-up for what is truly the foundation of what is happening is the best option we all have.

Knowing that all of us are unreliable narrators of reality is something that I try to find in the people that I surround myself with. Because together we can form a better account of reality than we can on our own.

That’s it. No perfect solutions. But definitely the never-ending possibility of improvements.

The fact that all of this requires some level of ego death and humility in an age where social media and its inherent algorithmic distribution of information nurtures egotism, egoism and faction siding by the “faux virtue” path is however the larger crisis we face regarding the distribution of information. Which results in an aggravation of everything else in the process.

As to solutions to this? I truly don’t know what can “disarm” this. But I would love to hear suggestions as to how we can counter this or diminish its effects.

Any suggestions?

Yup. And to use decentralised and open protocol social media too. Like the one we’re on. And the Fediverse at large. Especially for organisational purposes and resistance initiatives like this one in the article. Learn to run their own instances and be bound to no company or algorithm that can bury them.

I’m using both Tor and the Web version of voyager right now. On a degoogled phone. And I’m in an European country where fascism has not even taken over. Yet.

Maybe a set of donation funds should be started to use for promoting the fediverse. Ad campaigns, billboards, flyers and so on. Decentralised collective efforts as well. Organised by communities in regions, not even nationwide efforts. It would be easier this way as a global endeavour too.

The problem that I find is most people don’t even know the Fediverse exists. And these are the people who would be benefited the most to know of it right now. They really think they’re gonna fight the oppressor with the tools of their oppressors?

Hmm… An euphemism instead of a hyperbole for a headline.

How refreshing.

I saw someone mentioning “kew” in another comment thread the other day.

Here’s a link:

https://github.com/ravachol/kew

I haven’t tried it yet so I don’t have feedback of my own. But on the surface seems pretty great as an indexation of one’s digital music library.

Alô alô! Tão bom encontrar alguém Português no Lemmy! Quando a lemm.ee foi encerrada e saltei para a piefed.social não sabia que havia uma instance portuguesa. Foste tu que criaste a instance em que estás?

Tens algumas sugestões de comunidades portuguesas?

Unfortunately no. Because in local elections people vote individuals they know locally and communally. This is also why parties with no expression in the legislatives anymore like CDU or PCP win sits in these local elections. People vote who they know, not along national party lines when voting locally. Independents never even make a dent in legislative elections and in these a few manage to actually win. And a few have in these again. Which is good.

But I keep saying, if the current coalition government fails, Chega might actually win the legislative elections.

The Presidential elections are at the beginning of next year, and even though Ventura (Chega’s leader) has almost virtual zero chance at getting the presidency, he’s just running the cycle of circus and noise one more round to pump up his maniac followers and attract the few idiots who haven’t joined their circus yet, so that he can set his sights on the prime minister position in the next legislatives. And that is where the worrying starts.