Can you imagine if anonymous social media was allowed to influence elections?

This sounds a lot like “I’m immune to propaganda”.

You… do understand that the point is the problems with our social media and our geopolitics, right? It’s not something that’s gonna actually change.

It’s more like a trusted authority would know your name and your pseudonym, and only your pseudonym and your country or county would display online.

They’d make sure you’re not using ten accounts to reinforce each other, and make sure you’re representing the country you say you are. Ideally, like medical records, the more detailed information would be secret.

All anonymous social media threatens democracy.

I’ve done my best over the years, but regular people can’t compete with the resources of a nation-state that decides to go on a social media influence campaign. No matter how right you are, it’s near impossible to win over public opinion while having 20 times your numbers arguing against you, bandwagoning, and “helping” you by creating easily defeatable strawmans.

It’s really hard to be outnumbered in an argument and then also argue with your “allies” that no, that’s not what you meant. And when the average third party reads over all of that, what are the odds they pick out your small part? You need those odds to be around 70% or more, and they’re just not.

And that’s if you don’t just get banned by hostile moderators. I don’t know if you’re aware of how most moderators are chosen, but it’s not a job interview. And if it is a job interview, it’s in Mandarin or Russian. Even if it’s a legit mod, they’re going to be one of those average third parties that have been subject to all those other arguments.

Today someone said, “Burn the (US) Democratic party to the ground”. That’s so hard to deal with. There are two parties in the US, and you chose that statement?!? The prevailing sentiment spreads. There are valid criticisms to make of the Democratic party, absolutely. Those criticisms needs to be targeted, well-researched, and specific if they’re going to be helpful. So you’re one or ten or a hundred people trying to improve the shitshow. Meanwhile there’s a mix of natural sentiment, seeded sentiment, and fake sentiment making arguments all over the spectrum for your side, and their number in the tens or hundreds or thousands. And that’s before you get to the actual opposing side, which has its own, similar nuances and outnumbering tactics.

Oh, and don’t forget, you’re not immune to the tide. They’ll feed you false information that aligns with your arguments just to discredit you. Something like “Lottery winner pays 70% in tax. Only billionaire to be taxed properly.” That’s not how that works. They pay the same 37% or whatever top marginal rate everyone else does (and then state).

I think it’s possible to have pseudo-anonymous social media, but some authority has to know who you are and where you’re from. The giveaways of propaganda Twitter posts with Russian flags were a clumsy mistake and unlikely to continue voluntarily. Whoever that authority is will be uncomfortable for us, but the only reason we’re comfortable without verification is that we’re used to it.

This isn’t one you can dig yourself out of.

And the boss is likely not on site.

Yes, typically. I don’t know if that trumps “the bank has to give you your money when you ask for your money.”

Hello, ml.

We have roughly three million ways to say “US bad” right now, and you pick a less than true one.

US government data collection is not on the scale of China. The US is limited in what it gets from companies. China is absolutely not.

Yes, the US should absolutely have more data protection laws. The EU is better. China is absolutely not.

Sedans please.

They need to actually go into Ukraine before the US takes a more active Russian stance. He’ll talk a lot, but he doesn’t want a war with the EU. Europe needs to move first.

Should be fine with the way git works, just inconvenient.

Any maintainers (or someone here) should set up a regular job to git pull the repo every night.

Kendrick Lamar did it better. (Not like us)

It depends on how badly we’ve fallen under herd immunity, but it does seem likely.

You can catch measles by entering a room, such as a classroom, where another student had measles two hours before.

Unvaccinated people are going to pay for the ignorance of their parents real soon.

You should have had two, and yes. It’s 97% effective for life, typically.

Infinite options is bad design for a number of reasons. One is that when everyone’s experience is unique, troubleshooting is impossible. Two is that when you add an option, you have to support that option forever.

Options are expensive, at least if you want to keep your software working for a long period of time.

Lemmy.world is also the most reliable and the smoothest experience.

I strongly have the opposite opinion. Let people start on Lemmy.World and once they have experience (like you), they can move to where they want.

They’re an actual non-profit org out of the Netherlands with professional hosting.

Federation is a feature like divorce is a feature. It’s extremely important that it exists and is accessible. Not everybody needs to do it. Other servers are a fine option if you know what you’re doing and are willing to deal with more issues OR if there’s a compelling reason (such as the various regional servers).

When federation between lemm.ee and lemmy.world is behind by an hour or two, where do you think users will have a better experience? When 90% of their content is now a couple hours older, that’s a worse experience.

And spreading people out doesn’t really fix anything. It just puts more stress on federation technology. If you spread out all the users, Federation becomes a much harder to manage many to many relationship between all the servers, instead of primarily being a one to many relationship.

In short, if you spread out the users equally, suddenly every instance begins to have federation issues with each other, and everyone has a worse experience. With a bigger “main” instance, the majority of users are less affected by federation issues, and the issues are less common.

The regional servers have more of a balance here. 90% of their content may be old, but the 10% they are up to date with are the things closest to them, most important to them, and maybe in their language.

I do appreciate having several general use instances. I just don’t want to send newbies there who will generalize their experience to all of Lemmy and the Fediverse.

It blows my mind that places like the transit systems that were on Twitter haven’t migrated over to their own Mastodon server. They’re not that hard to set up, and there’s so little risk when you just don’t accept public signups on your domain.