Trans lesbian punk. Mutualist egoist insurrectionary anarchist. Computer science major. Dealing with a chronic neurological disability (persistent post concussive syndrome)

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I think this is a pretty good analysis, but I want to add onto it a little.

    From where I’m standing, it seems like the reason they care so much about riling up their base is because their actual policies and interests hurt the working class rust belt people that are their main constituency. So they have to come up with some huge overriding cultural battle for their base to get really invested in fighting, to make them feel like they have to vote Republican and oppose the Democrats no matter what, and to distract them from the underlying social and economic issues that are the source of their undirected frustration in the first place, and deflect their anger onto a scapegoat that they can blame for all society’s ills without actually changing the system.

    Because if they didn’t, their base would continue going down their populist route. They might start actually realizing how bad capitalism is for them and fighting against it in their own weird way. Some might see the benefit of Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps to working class people, or taxing rich more and the middle class less, and go over to the Democrats. And that could actually be pretty unprofitable for the elites and their donors and lobbyists.

    Not to say that this would be exactly a good option either, though, because I think there is still a ton of genuine nationalism, traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and so on among today’s right wing, it isn’t all trumped up by their leaders, and that’s going to tinge their social and economic understandings, so even if they went down this latter route, it would still end up being a conspirational populism that looks disturbingly like fascism.















  • I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.

    If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don’t want to be connected to, so it’s a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it’s trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.

    I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.




  • I think kind of depends on how deeply you explored the instance list to find and instance that really vibes with you and makes you feel like excited to join. If you join one of the major ones like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or shit just works or another one of the big instances, it’ll just feel like the early days of Reddit — young and active and exciting because it’s a new platform but not particularly unique feel or culture or anything because they’re just general purpose instances that let anyone in and so kind of end up with a common denominator internet culture. If you really go far down the instance list, though, and find an instance with less than a hundred users that has a really particular theme, target audience, and user culture, like I did, then it feels radically different than any other social media platform. I think that being on the big instances kind of hides the fact that Lemmy is super decentralized, just like the early internet, and so can give rise to really niche, unique, diverse, and interesting communities.