Spyke

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You choose what instance you are on. Quit the pseudointellectual whining.

Completely agree, this whole entitled attitude about "we left reddit because censoreship hurr durr, now u do same thing, you have to do what we tell you" is really annoying..

Nobody is censoring you, you are free to join and visit whatever instances you want and watch their content.. You can even host your own instance where you federate with whoever you want, you have free access to the code.. But nobody is forced to host ANY content they don't want on the server THEY themselves pay for..

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Ah Bernie, what could have been...

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He wasn't even a social democrat. At the time, social democrats were democratic socialists, the shift away from reformist socialism happened around the 80s (some social democratic parties still hang onto reformist socialism, at least in theory).

He was a smart liberal who realized that in order to save capitalism from collapsing again, some regulations are necessary. In Europe, similar policy was often pushed by social democrats, which sometimes leads to confusion. But actual social democrats at the time went (or at least wanted to go) further, like nationalization and socialization of major industry, worker representation at companies, and increasing worker and union power in general.

Social democrats stated endgoal was a socialist society. FDR's endgoal was to protect and maintain capitalism.

Edit: Also, Bernie is definitely a reformist socialist, I will never understand why people think otherwise. He literally mentions Eugen Debbs, one of the most influencial socialists in American history, as his role model and hero every chance he can.. And he praises the nordic model because the nordic model was literally pushed by reformist democratic socialists.. Here is Olaf Palme, one of the most important figures when it comes to the nordic model and prime minister of Sweden (until he was murdered), explaining why he is a democratic socialist:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7i2Ws1X5DSA

Just imagine a conservative politican, calling themselves a fascist, keeping a picture of Mussolini on their desk, saying he is their political role model. Would you claim that he isn't really a fascist? It's not even as if Bernie Sanders was dog whistling, he couldn't be any clearer about his believes.. Yet somehow, so many American leftists seem to sonehow doubt his intentions? Why? Because he isn't radical enough? Because he isn't throwing molotov coctails at the police? What does he have to gain from falsely calling himself a socialist??

The man's presidental campaign was giving 20% of major corporations to it's employees and having about half of the board of directors be elected by workers, among other stuff..

if you don't even want to acknowledge his values and his ideology simply because he is playing the politics game and is a reformist, send him to Europe, we would love a genuine leftist like him with so much charisma. I don't think you appreciate him..

Imagine dedicating your life to fight for a better life, involve yourself in the civil rights movement, work in various socialist groups, calling yourself a socialist and calling for major industry to be socialised, being constantly attacked by right wingers for your socialist believes, etc, only for fellow leftists denying that you are a "real socialist"..

196

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Modern medicine is amazing rule

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No. States are inherantly authoritarian entities, but authoritarianism is not simply a synonym for fascism. Authoritarianism is essential to fascism and fascism is always authoritarian, but not all forms of authoritarianism are fascist.

memes

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We can all agree on that, right?

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Yeah I'm not sure why it's nowadays common to simplify socialism as "workers owning the means of production". It's not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it's employees is not necessarily "socialism". In today's global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don't orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about "workers owning/seizing the means of production", they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means "the working class", which would be pretty much everyone ("the 99%"). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.

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How did you mess with school computers?

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would "start the browser" and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a "hacked version" of firefox..

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That time I followed my employment contract to the letter

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As far as I know this is standard at least in western Europe, I believe it is required by law, but it could also be defined in general contracts.

And it's not just for the employer, it's mostly for the worker since if you get fired, the employer needs a good reason (repeated or severe breach or contract) to immediately end the contract. So unless you fuck up severely, they still have to pay you for 3 months while you are looking for a job.

And in practice, most are aware that during this time period, they effectively can't really control you all that much. Sure, if you just don't show up for work at all or obviously breache the contract, they don't have to pay you, but otherwise, what are they gonna do, fire you?

In some jobs you can essentially get 3 additional months of paid vacation if they don't need you to teach the new guy or if they are scared that you could be a pain in the ass, so they just send you home while they pay you for 3 months.

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Ah Bernie, what could have been...

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As an European, I have never understood why so many American leftists don't see that, even by simply listening to what he is saying or looking at what he is doing. I mean he literally has a picture of Eugene Debs on his desk and mentions how he is this political role model and hero any chance he gets, that alone should tell you where he stands on an ideological or philosophical level..

And of course, he has been involved in various socialist groups his whole life and literally still calls himself a democratic socialist. Why would he do that if it wasn't true? To gain a political advantage, in America of all places, where calling yourself a socialist would have generally been political suicide?

And then are his policies, where many will focus on healthcare and say "he just wants healthcare" and ignore anything else. But of course, healthcare is a major issue because it makes the working class even more dependend on their employers because they lose tgeir healthcare if they get fired, so it makes sense for him to focus on tgat first. And of course, he also had other policy in his program, like transfering 20% of ownership over major corporations to their employees and having workers electing half of the board of directors.

You can call him a reformer, you can call his participation ineffective, but why deny his political believes?

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Don't federated instances just exacerbate already existing problems with places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter? Specifically admin/mod abuse, excessive reposting/cross-posting, server lag/issues?

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wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.

So that admin wants to actually make sure that there is only legal and ethical content on their platform? How is that "abuse"? How else are they supposed to protect themselves against legal accusations that they are hosting illegal porn? The admins here aren't working for multimillion dollar corporations, it's probably just a matter of time until corpo social media starts targeting popular instances by exactly this kind of legal action..

piracy

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When I sign up under an instance, what information am I sharing to the host?

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You are only going to see how truthful the platform is when the owners get a court demand or law enforcement at their doors.

Wait, so you expect a site admin to openly resist a court order and/or law enforcement when illegal activity takes place? And what does that have to do with "honesty"? There is a reason why servers like this have rules such as "don't request or link to specific pirated titles". It's because they don't want to get in trouble with the law.. And for good reason, they aren't superman after all, they cannot fight the law..

And surely we can agree that there are cases where providing law enforcement with information on illegal activity is not only the legal thing to do, but also the moral thing to do.

dach

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Klimaschutz-Bewegung: "Ende Gelände" extremistischer Verdachtsfall [ZDFheute]

Verstehe als Schweizer nicht ganz, wie genau das definiert wird. Ich dachte, "Linksextreme" wären Teile der radikalen Linken, welche Gewalt (ob gegen Sachen oder Menschen, defensiv oder offensiv) ausüben (bereits eine komische definition, aber naja).

Aber im Artikel steht, der Präsident vom Verfassungsschutz "gehe von rund 37.000 Menschen aus, von denen etwa 11.000 gewaltbereit seien". Also ist eine Mehrheit von "Linksextremen" gar nicht "gewaltbereit" laut Verfassungschutz? Woher wollen die das wissen? Und wer zählt alles denn als "Linksextrem"? Menschen, die das Kapitalistische Wirtschafssystem überwinden möchten? Dann wären ja alle Linken, oder zumindest die meisten, "Linksextrem". Selbst die Sozialdemorkatische Partei der Schweiz wäre dann ja, laut Ihrem Parteiprogram zumindest, "Linksextrem".. Und die ganzen Umweltaktivisten, welche einen "Systemwechsel" fordern, erst recht. Aber das ist ja auch nichts neues, also was genau hat sich denn geändert? Und wer sind denn genau die "zahlreichen Akteuren aus dem linksextremistischen Spektrum", zu welchen die Organisation angeblich Kontakte hat? Und natürlich geht es bei zivilem Ungehorsam darum, das Gesetz (vor allem sinnlose Gesetze) zu brechen.. Das ist ja der Sinn des ganzen.

Wirkt alles etwas willkürlich, oder sehe ich das falsch?

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Don't federated instances just exacerbate already existing problems with places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter? Specifically admin/mod abuse, excessive reposting/cross-posting, server lag/issues?

ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?

Yes and no. There are certainly concerns with "little dictators" hosting instances or individuals with an agenda manipulating content on their instance. The difference to a site like reddit or twitter is that this power and influence stops at the instance border, nobody controls lemmy, so people can always migrate to another instance if something like this happens.

And with reddit, admins don't just control individual subreddits. There are of course admins that control all of reddit.

REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

This is just an normal characteristic of decentralized services in general and I think it will resolve itself over time. There are of course also many different websites that host similar content and there are similar subreddits that host similar content. Over time, one will establish itself and become the main community.

I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

Information tends to be more transparent and open on the fediverse. Stuff you post on lemmy is not private. Your personal information you provide when signing-up is of course readable by the person who hosts the instance or people who have admin access. However, at the moment at least, lemmy instances are not run for profit and don't use/sell your data for profit.

There are privacy concerns, there are always privacy concerns. It's important to teach users how to protect themselvs by consciously controlling what information they reveal about themselves. This is much more important and effective than trying to control what others might do with your information.

This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases.

Here I have to speculate because I just don't know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.

Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don't think it's an unsolvable issue.

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When I sign up under an instance, what information am I sharing to the host?

Am I sharing my IP address/ location with my host instance?

Yes. If you connect to any server whatsoever, the server will have to know your IP, otherwise it can not send any data to you and the whole connection cannot be established. With your IP, one can figure out your (rough) location.

is there a log of my view history

As far as I can tell, yes. There is the option "show read posts" in your option menu which hides posts you have already read. In order for this to work, your read history has to be saved somewhere.

are there general privacy concerns that I am not thinking of?

There are always privacy concerns when accessing/using any service or server on the internet, at the end of the day it comes down to protecting yourself and using services you trust.

A potentially specific issue with federated, decentralized and self-hosted services such as lemmy is that the people who are running the servers are mostly hobbyists. Most will probably also work in IT professionally, but in general, people who host lemmy are doing it in their spare time at their own cost. This could potentially mean that they have less resources to secure their servers and the data on it than a multi-million dollar company.

Another thing to keep in mind on lemmy is that private/direct messages are not encrypted, which means that server admins can read your direct messages (there is a warning about this when you write a direct message).

I do not want to be in a position where a Government creates an instance, and allows them to monitor.

I'm not quite sure if I understand your worry here correctly. In general, most of the content that is posted on lemmy is publicly available anyway, so they wouldn't even need an account to get that information, let alone their own instance.

And if governments have an issue with a user where they want information on a user, they can just contact the site admin and demand the information from them. So if you are planning on posting stuff that is considered illegal where you are from or if you are planning to access content that is considered illegal, Lemmy is probably a bad place to do that

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That time I followed my employment contract to the letter

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Of course you can still be fired instantly for huge mistakes but it’s difficult to prove for them which is why I’ve never seen it used.

I have seen it a few times, but there have to be severe and generally repeated offenses, though you can get fired instantly for stuff like serious stealing from the company. But then again, there was once a dude who tried to start a fist fight with his bosses' boss, which apparently wasn't enough for him to get fired instantly.