NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.

Would you be surprised to learn that business is actually a network of cargo cults, where the thing they’re trying to superficially mimic is other businesses that don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing?

I work for an online edtech company that saw massive organic growth during lockdowns, and has been chasing that dragon since lockdowns were lifted. They spent millions expanding their workforce at the time, while they severely pared down their school outreach team. They made multiple moves that only made sense if you assume lockdowns would last forever.

I raised this with management a couple of times, and their only response was “everyone else was doing it, too”.

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”

“No, not like that…”

Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.

At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.

Ok, but hear me out. Have you seen most Python code?

It didn’t. It’s 90.5 AU from us, and us is Earth. Or do you live on the Sun?

But I am home at 1pm, and they still didn’t actually deliver the package!

The reasons why the wealthy like liberalisation matters, though. The reasom the wralthy want more wealth matters.

Money is power. The wealthy are competing to have the most power. Eventually, that turns to taking control of the state. So, the wealthy will back free trade and deregulation right up until they, personally, are in a position to attempt a coup. After that, regulation and trade barriers work for the particular rich folk who have taken control over the state.

“It’s chemicals!”

Technically correct, I guess.

And if people would just recommend or advertise instances, and try to grow instances rather than the network directly, there’d be no problem. But every Fedi platform falls into this ptoblem of hiding the host and championing the platform itself, rather than powering independent social websites.

It’s so frustrating and sad.

I think it’s dangerous to imagine people follow these folks, or let them run rampant over society, because they aspire to be like them. That makes it so much harder to really understand why people support them, or even just refuse to tell them “no”, and makes it impossible to do anything about it.

People believe that life is a meritocracy. Even when they themselves can look around at the people near them and see that those in positions of power don’t deserve it, they still view society as a whole as “fair”. Yes, they personally have may have gotten screwed over, but, in general, the people who float to the top got there because they were smarter and more capable. Therefore, we should sit back and just let them cook.

They need some kind of trigger to see the billionaires not as people who have earned their place, but who have stolen it.

Trump, and many of his supporters, think that America is China’s biggest client. They’re totally blind to the idea that China is China’s biggest client, and that it’s not even close.

Their total lack of understanding of the world outside their little exceptionalist bubble is hilarious and depressing

I saw. Bringing the original Canadian cast back for the announcement trailer fills me with fuzzy butterflies and fluttering kittens.

They don’t own it yet

You answer your own question.

And from this post, I discovered there’s a new SPC game im development.

This just made my month!

It works the same on Lemmy, it’s just that on Lemmy you subscribe to groups, and on Mastodon you subscribe to users.

Groups just forward replies and other interactions it sees to subscribers.

You have to soft launch your fascist dictatorship. People need time to accept the possibility.

It took a lifetime to turn the Roman Republic into the Principate. You gotta ease into these things to keep peope from shanking you on the senate floor.

I have a colleague who knows someone working at Tesla. Apparently Musk would walk the floor and declare “this isn’t cyber enough, make it more cyber” like the awful client in every freelance webdev joke of the last 30 years.

They’ve also lowered their placement on the front end, meaning they’re pointing more horizontal.

Oh, and everyone’s driving three story tall monster minivans now