I learned that just now.

Elon Musk

Can someone explain to me the difference between bluesky and twitter?

recently been finding it a lot easier to find my stuff on Soulseek rather than torrent sites.

This made me look up the wikipedia page on Bushism and I must say it’s beautiful! Thanks :)

I just use RSS feeds to follow YT-channels. It’s doesn’t seem any less convenient than a YT account.

Can’t be that much work, can it?

This is wonderful, I’ve been struggling with piped for some time now, it’s always asking me to sign in to confirm that I’m not a bot. Also it’s showing me videos in very low quality and often it stops loading halfway through the video. With this I get to see good quality videos once more, without unwanted pauses and without financing yt in any way. Great!

But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it’s doing to our world. We’d be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.

The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don’t watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn’t earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you’d be better off concluding that this creative output wasn’t so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we’d be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.

So let’s not justify ads, but let’s reject them in the most radical ways we can.

Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don’t actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That’s not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can’t help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it’s many forms, and I’m all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.

(not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)

What a great site, I’ll definitely be sharing it with some (naive) friends and colleagues :)

What people think when they haven’t heard of the Fediverse.

do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance

No I was arguing for exactly the opposite. Let’s not wait, but aim for non-profit decentralized platforms.

I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it’s not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it’s really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don’t think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn’t be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.

Slowly across the globe we move towards surveillance states, one country is further down the path than the other, but we all makes steps in the same directions. If public awareness won’t rise I don’t see us escaping this dystopian future. Still today many people argue ‘I have nothing to hide’ and don’t have any critical thought beyond this point. Are we doomed or am I being to negative?

Wikipedia is such a beauty and I’m so glad and grateful it exists. Surely it’s not perfect, but it’s so inspiring and hopeful to see a collective effort be so successful. I sometimes wonder, what new projects we’ve seen since that are equally inspiring. The Fediverse certainly is beautiful but it’s also still a little bit fringe. I personally really like MusicBrainz, but that started 24 years ago What new collective projects has the internet brought us in recent years? And what collective projects could the future bring us?

Off topic: I’d argue Love Exposure by Sion Sono is the best movie ever made.

it just doesnt work as a system in our current cultural framework

True. But our current system fits our cultural framework, because it has shaped it to be the way it is. That in itself is no reason to stick with it. Not saying this can easily be changed. But we shouldn’t lose sight of far away possibilities just because they seem far away. It’s worth it striving for a better world.

People like to contribute to society because it feels good. People will respond positively to you if you contribute, and you will feel good about yourself. and you will feel like you’re part of something bigger, that you matter not just to yourself but to others too. Look at how much voluntary work is being done in society in all sorts of fields, this is being done for these reasons, not for money. You could argue, that this is mostly in certain fields, and most work would never be done for free. For instance a lot of volunteers are care-givers, and it’s easy to see why this is very rewarding. But would people go into the mines to mine coal just to benefit society. Well no, in our society as it is certainly not.

But could it be that we’re conditioned to think about our society in this way? In our society people get paid to do such things, it would feel very wrong to us, if people usually get paid for dirty work, that suddenly this would need to happen voluntarily. That would obviously be really unfair. But we could try to imagine what a world would be like without money. If you live in a community that functions like a sort of small anarchist communist society, and you’ve never heard of money or being paid for stuff, then it’s not hard to imagine someone caring about the well being of his community and wanting to contribute for previously mentioned reasons: feeling good about contributing, having a certain status because of contributing. It’s easy to see how people currently think, but it could very well be that people currently think a certain way because things currently are a certain way. And that if the world would be different, people would also think and behave different.

Surely in any case there will be a limit to the ‘working extra hard’, and it might be different from where the limit is for people in our current system. But that doesn’t have to be a negative. Competing to gain as much money as you can often goes far beyond what seems healthy. Money is such an integral part of how our society functions that for many it’s become a sort of obsession. When thinking of how you could live a successful life some people can only think: if I earn a lot of money, then I’ll be successful. And obviously this is bollocks. You’re free to define life success by whatever measures you deem important, but comparative study will show that the ones who earn most aren’t always the ones that feel most happy and fulfilled. Focusing solely on money often just stems from an insecurity, if it’s just money than I don’t have to really think. It can feel comfortable to not have to think because this objective of earning as much as I can is predefined and I can try to optimize my performance based on that. I think a lot of people can see how that’s a very lacking view on how to live, and it certainly won’t be the most rewarding strategy for life if you want to feel happy and fulfilled.

You’re saying all human ambition is based on money-hunger and thankfully that is false.