I don’t buy this. I am a cis, white, middle-class male. Should I vote only for my best interests, or should I take a wider view, and vote even if it will personally disadvantage me?

Voting against one’s own best interests is not brainwashing, necessarily.

And this is still within my first point. They are definitely voting against their best interests, but it could just be that they find this an acceptable trade off to getting something else they want-- like more codified religion in the law, or bringing back the good ol’ days (/s) of overt racism.

The point is that “they’re brainwashed” is a cop out. And, not for nothing, a corollary to them being brainwashed is that they are not responsible for their actions, isn’t it?

While I understand the urge to come to this conclusion, it’s a simpler hypothesis that they just like the policies these people have pushed for, so much so that they disregard all the negatives that seem to be connected to Republican control (lower life expectancy, ineffective government programs[^1], lower standard of living, etc. You might call it “brainwashing” but that term in this context is too vague; they could claim we are also brainwashed with the same amount of accuracy.

Also, while it isn’t your point, this would be a reason they keep getting voted in-- not a reason they run unopposed.

[1] This may be seen as a good thing, for some of them.

Because people keep voting for them, or they simply run unopposed.

If you spent $1 million a day since 0AD, you would not have spent $886 billion yet.

I appreciate the additional information, however, a link found in the codeberg link you provided leads to this comment from earnest:

The up arrow is the equivalent of a boost on Mastodon, adding to favorites is represented by a star. The down arrow is equivalent to the Dislike button on Lemmy and Friendica, Mastodon probably doesn’t have an equivalent (Dislike will be federated this week). Compared to Lemmy, it works a little differently, as the up arrow there is the equivalent of a favorite.

The comment activity can be checked by expanding the “more” menu and selecting “activity”

This seems to imply that downvotes (reduces) are federated. (And notably, upvotes are now “stars” “boosts” are, uh, “boosts”; this was changed since the linked comment was made)

Or am I totally missing something? That’s always and option.

he thought it would be better for the user experience

Is this articulated somewhere because I was under the impression that everything was federated, and this plays right into the point. Why should this be up to the devs? Or, perhaps better worded, what information does the “ActivityPub” label actually tell an end user, right now? Seemingly nothing at all, from a functional standpoint. It’s possible for two ActivityPub-labeled implementations to be completely incompatible, right? Does that sound good for users?

I just can’t think of a devastating real world example.

Why is this your chosen metric? Wouldn’t “this might make the users confused” be a better metric?

The extinguish step is a bit unclear to me.

Once they’re the de facto standard they abandon it altogether and the users, who care little about the nuts and bolts of this, get frustrated and make an account on Threads (using your example).

It’s worth keeping in mind that we’re not talking about normal software. A hypothetical technically perfect solution is still a failure if there isn’t a critical mass of users to make it “social”.

Nothing says “Hey ladies, we consider you Reproductive Chattel” like making the argument that women should be forced to give birth so that the state government can get more money.

Last time I checked downvotes in kbin are not federated at all, by design. Lemmy users cannot boost content at all as far as I’m aware, and it’s not holding them back. Developers are completely capable of looking to past implementations and make informed decisions about interoperability in whatever way they see best fit

As I understand it, this is the exact complaint from the blog post. This is great for devs; it’s not great for users. I am referencing this part:

Putting the ActivityPub logo on a project’s website and writing “we support ActivityPub” announcement posts makes technically versed people very happy, and people supporting open standards will read them with shining eyes. However, there is a secondary effect: these announcements carry over something to non-technical users as well. It tells users that this piece of software is compatible with other pieces of software that carry the same logo. But it is not. In another recent discussion, when someone asked me why diaspora* does not support ActivityPub yet, I claimed the project has two options here, which has a direct impact to how we can explain the compatibility with users on other networks:

1. Sorry, Alice, Bob is using software that is not compatible with us, so you can’t communicate with Bob here.
2. Yes, you can communicate with Bob, but since he is using ExampleNet, please be aware that Bob will not receive your photo albums and will be unable to interact with those. Carol will see your photos, though, but unfortunately, she will not be able to see your geo-location updates. Moreover, because of technical limitations, Dan can comment on your posts, but we cannot make sure that Carol and Bob see those, because we cannot redistribute Dan’s comments.

I, perhaps foolishly, assumed that ActivityPub was more structured than it actually is. Though, to be fair, as you point out, this is an older blog post, so there’s some chance that things have improved on that front-- I admit I’m no expert on ActivityPub-- but notably, “there are only a few different implementations, so it’s easy to dig around and make your new implementation compatible” isn’t an improvement. It doesn’t scale. It’s practically begging for the now infamous EEE to happen to it, because whatever is the most popular implementation sort of becomes the standard.

I think the link blog post author’s point isn’t that there can’t be interoperability, only that there’s no standard for that. You have to seek out each implementation and ensure that your implementation interoperates with theirs, on a case by case basis for every implementation.

That’s a pretty specific requirement but luckily you can host your own VPN and access it on your device and then access the service you’re hosting via a local address. So if you do run into this again know that there is a way to circumvent the need to rely on *checks notes* DNS.

I’m kind of curious about how you think the internet works.

The scuttlebutt is that it’s a inside joke by the far-left dev of lemmy to stand for marxist-leninist, but it’s just as likely, if not more, that it was chosen because it’s free.

Keep in mind that most (all?) two-letter TLDs are associated with a country. This includes stuff like .io, .tv, and .me

it’s like a few steps away from trying bring back human slavery (which I’m sure the supreme court would have no problem with)

Undoubtedly, since slavery is still allowed in the constitution.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Emphasis mine.

It might be worth noting that Florida has consecutive term limits for their governor (for now, anyway.) Desantis can’t run again this next election. (He can for the one after that, though.)

Right? I’ve been using public restrooms for a long time and I don’t recall ever seeing anyone’s naughty bits.

…and for me the most ridiculous part of this discussion is that bathrooms have never been a secure space. If some creep wanted to go into a bathroom to harass people, there is literally nothing stopping them. It’s not like bathrooms have guarded entrances and now people have a sneaky way to get into a bathroom by pretending to be transgender or something insane like that.

It’s literally a manufactured issue to get the GOP electorate terrified, as everything they do is designed to do.

In places with large crowds, gender neutral bathrooms (assuming you also mean single-use) don’t really work. It causes massive lines.

Not to mention, there’s no need. It’s a bathroom. Why does anyone care who they pee or poop next to? It seems so silly and arbitrary to me. Just get in, do your thing, wash your hands, and get out. haha

Right about what? Using whataboutism to spread russian propaganda?

I know it’s something of an unpopular opinion around these parts, but I could see this being much more likely if Threads does federate, which I think would be an overal boon to ActivityPub-based instances as a whole.

and honestly, businesses too. There is opportunity here in the business sector, I think.

We might have figured out why you get called a tankie, friend.