Modern society cares more about fighting perceived evil than they do about being good, or honorable. Even the truth must not stand in the way of the wrath of the angry mob of keyboard warriors.

Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they’d cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.

Every single website or app on the internet is at least partially built on free software. The internet as we know couldn’t exist without the crowdfunded and volunteer-only work of open-source folks.

Doesn’t disprove my point at all. You can say that some innovation and upkeep is done by volunteers, but paid labor does way more innovation and way more upkeep on the Internet. For example, the day-to-day maintenance of things like Youtube, a cornerstone of many people’s lives, is done for profit by paid workers.

So what is left to finance in order to free us from vampire companies? Hosting fees? That’s cheap compared to the other costs…

Well, the thing is, some hosting fees are higher than others, and people do not like paying for things. This is why YouTube has had to get so predatory with its advertising, if they switched to relying on donations to cover the astronomical upkeep costs of being the go-to video hosting service, they’d go under within a week. Websites like Wikipedia, which mostly hosts letters and images, are way more affordable, and the limited number of people who donate are enough to keep it up.

Not sure about that, see how the migration from Twitter, Reddit and other shitty platforms takes time? You can’t just leave if the people you like to interact with stay on the other side.

I thought the entire point of the Fediverse was that you can interact with people from different instances as long as those two instances are federated with eachother. Using another instance allows you to keep interacting with the original instance’s userbase while avoiding most of the ads or poor moderation that comes with it.

They wouldn’t get into it without a plan to monetize it, that’s the type of things they’re known for…

I wasn’t referring to nor do I care about monetization, I’m mostly referring to enshittification and monopolization.

The only reason why I know how to do anything more on a computer than what I needed for school and Roblox is because some of my hobbies require you to mess around with a computer. Even then, the most technical things I’ve done include modding video games (sometimes I go hackerman mode and edit a text file to change a modded hotkey) and downloading specialized software to play ancient Flash games or fix a KSP save. You can get around just fine online these days without even using a computer. Most of Gen Z just uses their phone.

I guess some people just deserve the social media they get

r/Imaginarymaps.

Idk I just heard that apparently knowing how to use file explorer is considered impressive in modern CS classes

gen z, hate that trillion dollar corporations run our social media.

This isn’t even an issue for me so long as those trillion dollar corporations let me use social media the way I want to. I can just download an ad blocker and stay off the more garbage parts of their websites. The reason why I like the Fediverse is not because trillion dollar corporations don’t have a stake in it, because let’s be real, money was always gonna be involved. The reason why I like it is because I will most likely be insulated from the effects of enshittification and corporate incompetence on company-run instances. Even if the instance I’m on gets enshittified, it won’t be that difficult for me to just move to another instance, especially once the Fediverse matures and we get things like account migration, or even account federation, if I wanna keep one foot in both instances. Same for whatever community I’m involved with. Plus the fact that I can just block any community who’s users I don’t like means my experience will be way less toxic than it would be on Twitter, where avoiding toxicity requires a lot of effort. That’s one of the things I liked about Reddit, the structure kept the toxic people in their own little bubble and I was able to ignore their existence if I stayed off mainstream subreddits.

TL;DR: It ain’t about the money (or lack thereof), it’s about the potential for a better service.

it’s byzantine enough to jump in that it dissuades many newcomers who try.

Hard disagree, it was confusing when it was first explained to me, but in practice only a few more clicks were added to the account creation process.

I can confirm. I only came here after Reddit fucked the app I was using. I switched from the official app to Boost years ago because I was tired of the official app being complete garbage, and I refuse to go back. I never really paid attention to the enshittification of Reddit up until they crossed that line, since it didn’t affect anything I was doing.

I’m Gen Z, don’t use Linux, don’t know the first thing about programming (I know how to use file explorer though), and never intend to learn, and I’m here because I don’t wanna use the official Reddit app and because I’m convinced that the Fediverse is likely to become big in the future and I wanna be able to say I was here when it all began.

On my phone, yes. I intend to still use old.reddit on my PC in order to keep up with my favorite communities.

I’ll start actually posting things when my favorite communities jump ship from Reddit. Until then I’ll just lurk while occasionally commenting.

I don’t believe that federating with Threads will be completely apocalyptic, and I actually believe that the commercialization of the Fediverse is the way it will take over the internet. You can’t run the entire internet on a crowdfunded and volunteer-only basis, after all. The beauty of the Fediverse is that competition is easy and enshittification is difficult due to how easy it’ll be to simply take your activity somewhere else, meaning that companies like Meta won’t be able to do the type of things they’re known for.

That being said, I believe that for technical reasons, as well as the fact that it’d be very easy for Meta to strangle their competition in the cradle if we (Referring to the Fediverse as a whole, as this isn’t even my instance) cooperated with them, nobody should federate with Threads until the Fediverse is large, resilient, and technologically matured enough to survive a hostile takeover attempt by a corporation like Meta. Basically, defederate from them for now, and reconsider at a later date when the Fediverse has had time to establish itself. I think in the future, the Fediverse will be able to easily deal with Threads being popular and enshittifying itself, but I simply don’t think we’re there yet.

Reddit’s final warning

Fascists shared many of the goals of the conservatives of their day and they often allied themselves with them by drawing recruits from disaffected conservative ranks, but they presented themselves as holding a more modern ideology, with less focus on things like traditional religion, and sought to radically reshape society through revolutionary action rather than preserve the status quo.

Yes, this is true, just like communists share many goals with Bernie Sanders. You wouldn’t call communists liberal or call Bernie Sanders a communist though. They are completely different things with some overlap.

Fascism opposed class conflict and the egalitarian and international character of socialism. It strongly opposed liberalism, communism, anarchism, and democratic socialism.

Being anti-communist is a characteristic of every ideology to the right of communism and being opposed to anarchism is a characteristic of every ideology above anarchism. Opposing class conflict is also a characteristic of any ideology which doesn’t advocate socialism. None of this really narrows fascism down very well.

MAGA Republicans today practice Fascism, Donald Trump was a Fascist Conservative by definition.

By what fucking definition?

It is better to call them by the type of politics they practice, which is Fascism, a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

While MAGA Republicans are certainly populists, definitely believe the nation to be above the individual, and their leaders act like they want a dictatorship, they are not expansionist enough to be anything like the original fascists (In fact, they actually tend to believe the US needs to stop involving itself in foreign affairs) and they’re also not very totalitarian, often wanting the state not to interfere in economic matters. By contrast, old-school fascists wanted private enterprise to be subordinate to the state, in a system designed as an alternative to both capitalism and socialism which they called corporatism. Calling MAGA Republicans fascists is not true, nor is it very useful, and throwing that term around only lends credence to their assertion that we’re just a bunch of snowflakes who can’t handle people disagreeing with them. It is more useful and more accurate to call them by the more broad term “right-wing populist” instead.

Using Christianity for propaganda reasons doesn’t change the fact that the Nazis wanted to restructure the German people’s belief system around their pseudoscientific racial theories and state-worship. Another thing to note is that the Nazis hated the Catholic Church, which about half of Germany followed, and didn’t tolerate Protestant sects which went against their ideology. Following Christianity was absolutely not a priority for the Nazis. They’d have absolutely gotten rid of it if they could.

Children undergoing sex change operations and later regretting it could possibly be viewed as one in a few decades.

While I do agree that handing out hormone treatments like candy is a bad idea and we need to do more unbiased research into how best to treat children with gender dysphoria without potentially making their lives worse, please stay real here. Nobody allows or advocates for children to undergo actual sex change operations. I also wouldn’t consider this to be on the same level as what communists did in Russia and China, or what the revolutionaries did in France.

The nazis are reactionaries which means they want to go back to feudalism.

Although it can be said that the Nazis coopted the aesthetics of feudalism in much of what they did, and that people like Heinrich Himmler actually did wish to return to that kind of society, I don’t believe it can be said that the Nazis actually wished to return to a legitimately feudal society. The main difference is that under Nazism, the most important thing in one’s life was meant to be the Aryan race and the state, while under feudalism, the most important thing in one’s life was religion.

If you knew about how horrible feudalism was you would have supported the french revolution and the october revolution.

The things the revolutionaries did to the people of France and Russia were straight up evil. Committing mass murder and establishing a cult based around yourself is just plain evil, doesn’t matter what your intentions are or who you’re rebelling against. Revenge against oppressors isn’t a valid thing to base your policies on and destroying the fabric of society in order to rebuild it based on your ideal always has completely horrifying outcomes.

The fact of the matter is that “conservative” means that one tends to be resistant to change, and that most self-proclaimed conservatives run on platforms of resisting change. The Nazis, meanwhile, changed nearly everything about their society. Also, words have meanings.