There are three types of pet owners:
The first and third groupings I can get down with.
I got onto a video chat with a friend-of-a-friend who was not from the US.
The instant I took the phone and we saw each other for the first time, he scoffed and said “Big fake American smile.”
It was 100% true. I had a big dopey bullshit “meeting people” smile on. That’s not common in other countries.
Many of these bands are misplaced.
Gin Blossoms is sad. NIN is incredibly angry. Mazzy Star is a little bit horny. Deftones is pretty happy. Radiohead is at least a little horny.
Yeah. Also, even with the best material and military forces in the world at your disposal, you can still completely fuck it up. The history of war is absolutely filled with empires who had all the advantages and still got clowned on because the leadership just made dumb decisions. And if your MO is similar to Trump’s or Putin’s, none of your trickery works anymore once you get outside of your own little corrupt orbit and have to cope with reality and skilled committed adversaries.
I dug up the actual article, because it says it better than I can: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman
I think you are overestimating both of their ability to execute.
I’m not saying there is not an enormous danger on the horizon depending on what happens. But as long as Trump stays in charge, maybe even as long as Musk stays in charge, their ability to do real damage will be limited somewhat by their incompetence and their many personal failings. The American system is so corrupt at this point that people can take control of vast elements of the output and power of the system even if they couldn’t pour water out of a boot. But that doesn’t always carry over to their ability to influence things outside of their little weakened environment. Tim Snyder wrote about it in “The Weak Strongman.”
Lol
I’m happy with what I’ve posted so far. Part of the reason I engage in this stuff in the first place is that it is useful to learn things by having people assert them to me or challenge other things I am saying, and then I can go and look up what the actual truth is, see what other people say, go back and forth about it a little bit.
You and me have long since passed the point where it’s productive, though, on this topic. I wish you the best.
Hey, that’s a really good point. I think I should go back to the ActivityPub spec, look up what is the exact behavior for this kind of thing, go into the Mastodon code, see what it’s doing, in what areas its behavior is mandated by the spec and in what areas they were just doing their own implementation, basically make sure I am fully educated on the issue, and then have Claude write up a full comparative analysis in bullet points, with sources so everyone can verify, to make absolutely sure that it can be clearly seen by anyone who wants to take the time to verify, that I’m right about this.
I’ll get right on that. It sure would be a waste of time if, instead of that, I just kept repeating over and over and over, what my point of view was. That would be a huge waste of time. I definitely won’t do that.
Sir, we’ve had complaints from some of the other patrons. Can you just go back to your seat and quiet down?
We’ve had this technology for years
Lol
Here’s the relevant section of this quite good explanation of how Mastodon’s privacy settings operate:
Something you may not know about Mastodon’s privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn’t display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don’t implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).
Servers don’t necessarily disregard Mastodon’s privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon’s privacy settings aren’t a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don’t run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren’t configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn’t expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user’s reblogs.
That’s the explanation. You’ve been persistently pretending to fail to understand it, but it’s honestly pretty straightforward and clear. And now you’re following me into new comments threads to try to restart the argument in new places. Great stuff.
Of course it’s a good thing if Pixelfed wants to start to honor these advisory privacy settings, and I can understand why Dansup gave a high priority to the fix starting to honor them. That doesn’t mean that it’s Pixelfed’s “fault” that this happened in the first place. That’s all I was saying.
OP and the person who wrote the article seem surprised. The article author got very upset that it happened, as well as being upset that Dansup fixed the problem and pushed out a new version incorporating the fix within a few days, because that let everyone know it was a problem, which apparently he didn’t want to do. Which, of course, he tells a whole story (“I already dreaded what I felt was about to happen.” “clicked follow on my partner’s Mastodon account, and… I could see all of her private posts” “‘Oh no, not again’, I said”) about what a huge deal this whole thing is. But he doesn’t want users to know about it. And he totally dodges the issue I explained, even when going into a really abundant level of detail about how all the protocol works, about how this is a totally a Mastodon-side-created issue and one that their users should absolutely know about if they are being permitted to create “private” posts.
Give it a rest. A fork of Mastodon created a new abstraction for “private posts” and started sending to instances some posts that were marked in a new way as “private,” and now they’re trying to blame Pixelfed for not adopting their homemade standard for what posts their servers are sending out to everyone that they’re not supposed to show, and what ones they are supposed to show. And, Pixelfed fixed it once they became aware of the issue.
It’s fixed in 1.12.5. Why is this not titled “Mastodon instances claim to their users to offer ‘private’ posts but send them out exactly like normal posts, get surprised when software that hasn’t magically adopted their new standard is showing them to people”?
That didn’t really go under the radar
Yeah, but YPTB didn’t stop it from happening. I do see your point that it eliminates and limits some of the harm, I definitely think it’s good to have around.
I know about this one, but let’s be honest, that mod was quite aggressive as well
Yeah, but he wasn’t guilty of the multitude of sins he was getting accused of. The persistent myth was that he would bait people into disagreements with him and then ban them for it. In all the time of me asking for examples of that, people leveled a torrent of abuse at him (most of which was factually objectively untrue), and they finally came up with one factual example: Someone was saying that certain types of female / transfemale athletes were “freaks” and needed to have special rules applied to them. Squid asked for some clarification, then banned the person once they clarified that that’s what they were saying.
I do realize that he eventually had some kind of meltdown where he said some terrible things. I’m talking about his moderation before that happened, people had been harassing him for months before he actually did anything.
It’s the same with JordanLund. He has a weirdly establishment-friendly way of moderating, which I certainly don’t like, and so the accusation is ten miles past that: That he’s a vile racist piece of shit zionist who will delete any criticism of Israel. That is cartoonishly false and incredibly easy to disprove. But people keep saying it. Why?
I mean, it’s possible that it’s just Lemmy being differently-abled sometimes, but it feels different to me than just the randomly undirected failures of comprehension that are more commonly on display. That’s just my own judgement, not really anything factual, just kind of stating my opinion.
Yeah. The whole model is broken. It works most of the time just because most people aren’t propagandists or assholes, but it is more or less helpless at protecting the cultural space against propagandists and assholes.
So, leading up to the election, there was a very obvious tide of “let’s all vote for Jill Stein” propaganda on the political communities. Basically, linking Kamala Harris as hard as possible to the genocide in Gaza and the US’s current bad immigration policy, in cartoonishly lazy ways, and in ways that violated the site rules (for example posting dozens of stories a day with the same messaging, from the same account, apparently with the mods’ blessing).
It’s been fairly quiet since then as far as US politics. There are still some isolated communities that are clearly written with the exclusive goal of shitting on Democrats or boosting up Russia, but it’s not really a front-and-center feature of browsing Lemmy like it was pre-election.
So the mod who was harassed out was FlyingSquid. From time to time, people would have these extremely performative freakouts about how Squid was power tripping, banning anyone who disagreed with them and arguing with everyone, which had a grain of truth (the arguing part, sometimes, but not the banning part) but it all got blown up into some kind of emergency so consistently and so emotionally that it felt to me like some weird kind of deliberate campaign.
If you want to see another more recent example, check this out:
https://lemmy.world/post/27393569
Jordan is the mod being harassed and being accused of racism and censorship, in my view, there, with the persistently repeated myth being that he is a Zionist and will delete from worldnews any anti-Israel story.
Let’s be real here, you would have removed it even if it was in a “actual news agency”.
Ah, the good ole “I’m not racist, I had a roommate who wasn’t white” argument.
Terminal liberal brain. PTB.
Thank you for censoring a journalist who died to get the word out, using made up rules. You must be very proud of yourself.
Another Jordan Lund post, another chance to remind everyone that @[email protected] is a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
Jordan Lund is a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.
And so on. Literally all he did is remove a link to Substack, and tell the person who posted it that they should post instead the same story from some more reliable source (of which he provided multiples they could use). A number of accounts then commenced a loud hours-long freakout about what a piece of shit he is. Literally the number two story at the time of posting was reporting on some of Israel’s crimes, which happens every day in worldnews.
It’s possible that that’s just Lemmy reading comprehension and virtue-signaling at work, and they’re ignoring the facts and trying to create alternative facts just because that’s a fun thing to do on the internet. My personal belief is that it is more malicious than that.
Yeah, but I think the 196 blowup was just home-grown hamhandedness. I don’t think that was anything malicious.
The moderation activities I’ve seen on Lemmy that I would interpret as malicious are a lot more subtle and do not show up on YPTB that I can remember. One example is anonymous /c/politics mods making malicious decisions (making it illegal to claim someone is doing propaganda, or running cover for UniversalMonk), and then shoving Jordan to the front to take all the heat for it. Another would be having a little tidal wave of accounts accusing one of the moderators (who is taking action against propaganda) of all kinds of sins, until eventually that person stops spending time on Lemmy again and the propaganda can stay.
I feel like the techniques for doing this kind of thing are pretty advanced at this point, and no one really has time to pay enough attention to counteract them. On reddit they can be more overt, because there’s not enough of a coherent community to notice or do anything about it, whereas Lemmy at least does have YPTB to keep it a little bit in check. So maybe on that score you are right, but I definitely don’t feel like YPTB means it’s not happening.
There was someone who did it professionally who showed up on Reddit at one point talking about their experience and techniques and it was pretty interesting and pretty depressing.
It’s very easy to take over a subreddit or Lemmy community. Become friendly with the mods, then become a mod, then subtly harass and drive out (from separate accounts) any moderators who are standing in your way, then do whatever you want.
There is a whole industry of “reputation management” that specializes in distorting the narrative on the internet in favor of your company / your government / whatever. The question is not “are there gangs of Reddit moderators who are bad actors trying to distort the conversation,” the question is how many and who they are acting on behalf of.
Of course, Lemmy copied Reddit’s fairly silly and failure-prone model. Why they did that, I don’t know. On Twitter / Mastodon-style networks, you can do the same but you at least have to be a little bit sophisticated about it. On Reddit/Lemmy, it is trivial to do if you are patient about it and put some consistent effort into it, and you can make a ton of money if you can do it well.
It is the difference between aspiration and victory