The Fediverse isn’t a democracy though. Admins self-select, and moderators are merely those who made the community first or were selected by those who made the community (or maybe replaced by the admins). Hosting a big instance costs quite a bit of money, so it’ll naturally attract people with some kind of agenda. Those in charge will self-select their users whether intentionally or unintentionally.

The discourse on Lemmy (don’t know about the rest of the Fediverse) largely happens on a handful of instances, and I think that’s to be expected from the above. We’d probably be better off if we actually has democracy, but I think that’s the wrong metaphor to use since we’re not restricted to a geographical area like we are on real life.

I think the solution is distributed systems. Instead of a handful of people running things, everyone should take part in running things. Instead of a handful of people moderating things, everyone should be a moderator, and users should be able to select which moderators they trust and which they don’t. Internet services can do things that physical services can’t, and I think we should while explore that (and I’m doing just that on my own projects).

I refuse to accept the false dichotomy. I hope I’m not alone.

Whether you care about down votes on your own posts is irrelevant. But down votes on topics/categories absolutely steers the conversation and is precisely the concern we’re discussing here.

People love to rail against big tech companies for silencing certain groups through moderation or tweaks to the algorithm, but look the other way when we have tyranny of the majority doing the same thing through down votes and general pressure from the community to drive away dissent. It’s the same idea, just different groups of people doing the silencing.

I don’t care about down votes on my posts either, but I do care about systematic down votes on posts with ideas that are not dangerous, just unpopular. We won’t progress without challenging the status quo, yet we humans love to group ourselves into tribes and cast out anyone who doesn’t conform.

My point is that Lemmy isn’t any better than other social media, it has the same problems, just a different status quo.

I agree it’s good data, but good data isn’t particularly useful if you don’t know how to interpret it. It seems to largely answer questions I don’t have, and finding relevant answers is a bit harder since the data is focused on datacenter use.

So I personally look for support quality first (very imprecise, but I look for anecdotes about good and bad customer experience) and avoid the capacities that seem to have consistently high failure rates and low average age in Backblaze data (e.g. 10TB drives). In the past, they largely used consumer drives (not even NAS drives), and now they largely use enterprise drives, neither of which I’m planning to buy anyway, so the main commonality between drives I’ll consider and drives they monitor are the platters, hence the focus on capacity.

I’m glad they publish it, I just think people misinterpret it more often than not.

I’ve been there and it’s way worse. In fact, I almost left Lemmy entirely when it seemed Lemmy.ml was going to remain the dominant instance, but the still bad but much less bad Lemmy.world seems to have taken over.

I’m not talking about right wingers, I’m talking about anything that seems different from the majority opinion on a given community. It could have absolutely nothing to do with marginalized groups, if it challenges the leftist/progressive agenda in any way, it gets downvoted or moderated away.

Examples:

• Trump pardon of Ross Ulbricht (Silk Road guy) - this was a libertarian agenda item, and completely goes against the conservative “War on Drugs,” yet so many push back on it; if Biden did the same, people would likely approve of it (“that poor kid was treated unjustly”)
• try discussing any form of government waste (there’s plenty, not $2T like Musk claims, but probably a few billion)
• TikTok - people claimed it was anti-China fear mongering when Trump initially suggested we ban it, then supported the ban when Biden admin supported it, and now are against softening the ban now that Trump is in power (that’s some serious political whiplash)

This isn’t tolerance vs intolerance, it’s tribalism, and the Fediverse just has different sets of tribes vs mainstream social media.

I’m not talking about intolerant speech, like disparaging marginalized groups or something, I’m talking about even mundane policy. Try agreeing with Trump on something and you’ll get the same tired “Nazi bar” reaction.

For example, try agreeing with the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who was given a life sentence with no possibility of parole for hosting a website that facilitated relatively safe drug trade. He was a first time offender, there’s no evidence that he actually sold anything illegal or did anything violent, and he acted on the philosophical idea that consenting, peaceful adults should be able to trade things freely (i.e. he wasn’t in a cartel or anything). But because he was pardoned by Trump, people jump to the conclusion that it must somehow be bad. If Biden (or Harris) did the exact same, it would get positive responses and people would likely assume it was somehow good. This has absolutely nothing to do with either side here, and if anything, it leans liberal/progressive, but because a conservative did it, it’s automatically bad (he only did it because he made a deal with libertarians to try to get their vote).

It’s the same kind of tribalist nonsense we see on the right.

And to be clear, this isn’t a “both sides, lol” argument, it’s commentary about tribalism in general. If something sounds sufficiently different from what we’re comfortable with, we reject it without further consideration. This is more extreme on the more popular instances (e.g. Lemmy world), which seem to be a lightning rod for this type of behavior, and my best argument is that people comfortable with group think flock to larger instances, whereas people interested in combating it flock to smaller instances.

Eh, they’re just doing their jobs. The real problem here is the judge and the laws on the books.

Sadly, yes. It’s important to know your audience.

tolerant

Really? Try making a post supporting conservatism or attacking socialism and see how that goes for you. Most likely it’ll get down voted to oblivion, and in many communities mods will remove it. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s a high quality post either with tons of scholarly sources and whatnot.

The Fediverse is tolerant of leftists and progressives, and a bit less tolerant of libertarians. If there’s any hint of conservatism or centrism, the veneer of tolerance disappears.

I don’t know the solution here, but I think allowing users to choose their moderation is a piece of it.

Yeah, the simpler explanation is that he was set up so they could put him away for longer. Since he got a life sentence, they didn’t need to pursue it further.

Exactly. He’s a first time, non-violent offender providing illicit goods in as ethical a way as he could. Also, providing hosting for illegal commerce shouldn’t be illegal, or at least shouldn’t have nearly as high of consequences as the people actually trafficking drugs and providing other illegal services.

Instead of putting this guy in jail, we should be looking at making peaceful transactions legal. Me choosing what to put in my body shouldn’t be illegal since I’m only hurting myself

Ross Ulbricht? He was given a life sentence without possibility of parole for the heinous crime of operating a website that facilitated peaceful transactions between consenting adults. Meanwhile, murderers, rapists, and con artists get off with almost nothing.

Here’s an article about it by libertarian-leaning magazine Reason, and some quotes:

From a libertarian perspective, it is obvious that no one should go to prison for facilitating peaceful transactions among consenting adults. But Ulbricht’s grossly disproportionate punishment should give pause even to supporters of the war on drugs.

…

Silk Road not only protected consumers against the risks of arrest and black-market violence. It also protected them against rip-offs through an escrow system that delayed payment until shipments were received.

In contrast with the potentially lethal uncertainty regarding drug composition that users typically face as a result of prohibition, Silk Road offered some assurance that buyers were getting what they expected.

…

As Forrest saw it, these benefits magnified Ulbricht’s offenses because Silk Road encouraged drug use by making it less dangerous and more convenient. Even if you are sympathetic to that view, a life sentence for a first-time, nonviolent drug offender is hard to fathom, let alone justify. It was far more severe than the sentences imposed on other Silk Road defendants, including people who actually sold drugs, as opposed to assisting those transactions.

…

Forrest also seemed to believe that Ulbricht’s libertarian views, to which she repeatedly alluded, were relevant in determining how many years he should serve. As you might expect, she said his moral opposition to drug prohibition “provides no excuse.” But she also thought it was “notable” that “the reasons you started Silk Road were philosophical,” adding, “I don’t know that it is a philosophy left behind.”

Hopefully that gives some context, but please read the article if what I’ve quoted interests you.

I absolutely abhor Trump, but I also believe that Ross Ulbricht should be free and that we should have a path to legal consumption of recreational drugs.

Yup, service is way more important IMO than bad products, because if the company is willing to make things right, I’m willing to gamble a bit on a new product.

DON’T TELL ME WHAT I CAN HANDLE!! I HOPE YOU CAN HEAR ME, MY PC’S FANS ARE A LITTLE NOISY!!

I use mirrors, so RAID 1 right now and likely RAID 10 when I get more drives. That’s the safest IMO, since you don’t need the rest of the array to resilver your new drive, only the ones in its mirror pool, which reduces the likelihood of a cascading failure.

Exactly. I never cheat in MP games, but I use guides and whatnot in SP fairly often.

If you’re cheating in MP, just don’t play MP.

It’s less about lying though.

Hypocrisy, at least colloquially, means saying one thing and doing another, such as governors giving stay at home orders and hosting large parties during COVID mitigations.

Saying we should ban TikTok and then saying we shouldn’t ban it isn’t hypocrisy. If we’re being charitable, it’s him changing his mind, and if we’re not, it’s simple populism. There’s a good reason the ban was scheduled for just before inauguration, they knew it would be unpopular and didn’t want it to impact the elections.

Trump is absolutely a liar, probably worse than most politicians. He’s also often a hypocrite. I just don’t think “hypocrite” applies in this instance.

At least I’m up for an upgrade, so I’ll get an M-series chip, which is cool. I really don’t like macOS though and much prefer my Linux workflow.

It’s absolutely useful data, but there are a bunch of caveats that are easy to ignore.

For example, it’s easy to sort by failure rate and pick the manufacturer with the lowest number. But failures are clustered around the first 18 months of ownership, so this is more a measure of QC for these drives and less of a “how long will this drive last” thing. You’re unlikely to be buying those specific drives or run them as hard as Backblaze does.

Also, while Seagate has the highest failure rates, they are also some of the oldest drives in the report. So for the average user, this largely impacts how likely they are to get a bad drive, not how long a good drive will likely last. The former question matters more for a storage company because they need to pay people to handle drives, whereas a user cares more about second question, and the study doesn’t really address that second question.

The info is certainly interesting, just be careful about what conclusions you draw. Personally, as long as the drive has >=3 year warranty and the company honors it without hassle, I’ll avoid the worst capacities and pick based on price and features.