On the other hand, if my workplace was on a list of announced missile targets, I’d stay away.

Assuming that there’s no real chance of their enemy setting up a defense in time:

• It reduces probability of civilian causalities (improves their international image, reduces incentives for affected people to join the fight against them)
• If there is some failure in the attack and the center isn’t disabled, they still reduced productivity. I’d say indefinitely
• Tactic could theoretically be used to threaten or feint. For example, publicly list five target but only bother bombing three, and you get the benefits of scaring away people at the other two without spending weapons. This could also be used to manipulate enemy logistics, like moving their defenses or response teams to one place and then attacking another.

It seems to me like many have arrived from huge mainstream sites and don’t realize that the fedi is actually pretty big. There are many thousands of us, just look at this community’s stats alone!

When you’ve explored beyond the core of the internet and found websites where there truly are dozens of you, it’s much more calm and communal (or as screentime enthusiasts would call it, slow and ded). I actually was on Lemmy back when there were mere hundreds of us, when many were yearning for the day when reddit would shoot its own foot and bring people here. So I’m very grateful that there aren’t dozens of us! Welcome!

Perhaps its too late for the largest instances, but the idea of a site like this being a spectator activity, about consumption, rather than creating communities. Some smaller instances, and even some larger ones, have an actual unique atmosphere and have larger projects across the instance. When we suddenly got a flood of reddit users escaping from the third-party API fiasco and the Luigi bans, that was huge enough to dilute some of the communities with large amounts of people used to simply voting and commenting, or having a website premade for them.

What’s the actual point of holding someone back from joining your online community if they don’t have enough “points” on their comments or posts?

It is a legitimate anti-abuse tactic. Like you’ve mentioned, there are obvious flaws, but it does help prevent brigadiers, advertisers and other bad actors from easily spinning up throwaways to harass or manipulate a community.

Another way to do this could be account age testing, but this can be defeated by pre-registering empty accounts.

Codeberg works for me. I used to use a couple of indie instances of gitea for various smaller project, but both have either gone down or been at risk, so I mostly use Codeberg which is more organized and failsafe.

That’s it, I’m deleting the internet

Oh hey, my anniversary is coming up.

For base daily driver on desk and lap, just a stable standard beginner friendly distro. I’ve customized it a lot, added custom hotkey scripts here and there, but it’s so close to base that a stranger could use it. VMs for anything specialist, a couple of portable USB distros for presentation/demo/one-purpose OS environments, but for the most part I’ve just kept it simple and clean.

It needs to [snip]

Yes, but that’s answering a different question.

When I talk to co-workers about our material conditions, my aim isn’t the immediate implementation of utopia. Our legs aren’t long enough to get there in one step.

Am effective protest needs to be disruptive.

What do you believe the (realistic) aim of the protest is mean to be? Its demand is obvious, but that’s different.

This is a sincere question, I don’t know the stated aims, if any. If its aim is to bring together concerned people and expose them to progressive groups, including socialists, then even a passive sanctioned protest can contribute to the labour movement.

You have to build dual power to organize things like strikes and work stoppages. That’s what hurts capital. The protests come after that.

Yes, although protests can complement that process of building dual power, they don’t have to come afterwards. Like you’ve said, protests on their own accomplish nothing, yet they can still be an important way to gain awareness and introduce a broader range of people to these politics and groups involved.

I am speaking generally, I haven’t paid attention to these No Kings ones, but they’d surely be an avenue for fresh faces to meet socialist parties among all the spectacle.

It’s pretty funny to see someone travel to a lemmy.ml thread and complain about lemmy.ml users being there.

huh, guess my habit for picking smaller indie providers is paying off.

Clean McStainKill

My approach if adblocking isn’t an option is switching tab/window and muting the tab (on a computer, that’s just two click at the top of the screen) or on a phone, muting and putting the phone out of view.

And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.

That’s a good point. If we’ve reached a point where the basic experience Just Works while solving real Windows issues (incl updates and performance), then it’s going to get word-of-mouth praise instead of complaints. And if regular people start hearing about Linux stuff improving their computer, it’s going to mean far more than my ideological rants about owning your own tools and community created software.

I’ve tried to make a couple of anonymous throwaways (for privacy reasons - I’ve never been banned) and they vanish pretty quickly, seemingly as soon as I share a link. Yes, even when not using a VPN.

I was already no longer posting on reddit through alternative front-ends since around 2018, because I disliked privacy issues with it. I was just lurking via alternate frontends (the precursors to Redlib, there were more before the API fiasco). I was already into the FOSS community and so I forget exactly how I came across Raddle and Lemmy (maybe through /r/piracy or /r/datahoarder, but could have been many other places), and Lemmy was far far far slower then, but when I landed on Lemmy I really wanted it to become a viable alternative to reddit.

I have heard the same sentiment about privacy, and from what I’ve seen in privacy tool communities (e.g. meshnets, where the densest networks I saw in the world were Germany and Catalonia, or Tor network where it’s common to find German nodes) this matches up.

That’s not true; there are plenty of logistics roles needed!

In seriousness; bloodless (or relatively bloodless) revolutions exist, but almost every time the ruling class is threatened, they choose the bloody route to cling onto power by any means necessary. I’ve seen my friends beaten by police just for protesting against the Zionist Regime, and that’s not even close to a revolution. So for all intents and purposes, we must accept that the necessary changes to society to fix all this, will end up violent.

I think Lemmy in general is very against AI

I agree, although for a counter-case, db0 has involvement in community-driven image generation (Horde, some communities they host and banners they use).

My view isn’t as blanket as pro- or anti- “AI” (and I add quotes because I see that as a science-fiction term adapted into a marketing fantasy).

These technologies are powerful and there are legitimate, productive, pro-social uses of them (an obvious example is assisting in medical diagnosis). They are not inherently incompatible with social values, environmental progress, and the other problems associated with it - these technologies are tools powered by electricity and materials. But the way they are currently implemented, the economic concerns around marketing them, and the lack of broad education around them, are very very dangerous.

• The way regular people misunderstand and misuse the technology has already resulted in direct deaths, all kinds of mismanagement and mass sacking of workers. Mistrusting technology is no new issue, see ELIZA in the '60s for example, but this is so much more accessible, more misrepresented due to marketing campaigns and social media, and more powerful. Furthermore, a huge proportion of people don’t have the media literacy to instinctively doubt its output - and this was already a big enough issue with news media.

• Processing currently is largely done using non-renewable energy sources in large centralized data centers (consuming water, creating noise pollution, etc.) which has serious global and local environment issues.

• Most of our exposure to this technology as regular citizens is wasteful or actively harmful, such as propaganda/forgery, vapid industrialization of artistic aesthetics, unsolicited sexualization, scams and fraud attacks, automated bots, advertising and other ‘slop’, along with misguided attempts to eliminate workers from jobs which cannot be adequately delegated to these tools.