You should go away and stop wildly fear mongering.

They listen if you listen

In a fantasy world version of the US, conservatives do that, in the real world US the minute you start doing that you have abandoned what it means to be a conservative.

What ICE is doing is way worse than what happens on the internet…? Most of the stuff on the internet is words, ICE is actually kidnapping, killing and deporting people.

You can put a clause in the license saying the software cannot be used for the dissemination of hate speech. The open source community has discussed this and decided it goes against the principles of free software and open source.

Says who? How can you authoritatively say the open source community has decided something collectively on this subject? That categorically doesn’t make sense on multiple different dimensions.

Combo!

Ok, what content stream in what medium when viewed in a bulk popularity view like that isn’t 90% memes or equivalent?

I agree, I think something that has been lost in conversation about progressive politics and leftism more broadly (in US-centric circles at least) is that as much as people on the left disagree about absolutely everything, in general (with plenty of exceptions) politically left movements and cultural spaces tend to be far better at identifying common values and truths that are universal and holding individuals and communities to those values and truths.

Whereas on the right the endless stumping about valuing freedom of speech turns out to mostly be a mirage when it comes to innocent, vulnerable people being physically murdered on camera by the state, on the left institutions and individuals are much more often held to a standard of values and called out if they fail to reach it.

When people enter a space where progressive and left voices haven’t been systematically silenced and it is a new experience for them, they often react negatively and feel rebuked. I know some of my first encounters when I was younger with actually left spaces initially made me bristle with how willing they were to say no to things that weren’t healthy, to challenge oppressive structures even if they were so normalized they were invisible to me… it can be an uncomfortable process but ultimately more often than not leftist spaces actually try to do it and it that is a good thing.

I entirely agree with people having agency to decide when politics comes up on their feed and when it doesn’t, but the idea that we are all just being a bit too negative and obsessed with the news and we should cheer up is honestly insulting in 2026 given, you know gestures at everything. Everything is political, if you have the capacity to complain about being subject to “too much politics” be thankful for your capacity to experience that state of choice.

Also, and this is on a personal note, talking about politics doesn’t make me depressed, it helps me feel less depressed and anxious because I know other people feel similarly and the more educated I am about what is happening the less scared and confused I feel.

What conservatives want is for us to treat them like babies with tiny little fragile baby beliefs that we have to coddle.

I don’t care if you think differently than me, what I care about is babies demanding we take their hateful and irrational ideologies seriously while they simultaneously target vulnerable groups with at a minimum hate speech and harassment.

If we coddle conservatives this place becomes less welcoming to new people, that is how it is.

What if we figured out the right prompt to get an AI to regurgitate its memorization of reddit and just copied that? Is that still theft if it was already stolen twice?

1. More then Reddit this place is an echo chamber for the far left anti capitalist crowd. While I don’t mind a discussion, everything over simplified to EAT THE RICH was getting tiresome.

That must be so difficult for you compared to all the wonderful corporate platforms full of rightwing hateful trolls who genuinely harass people.

: (

Edit Actually after taking a step back and looking at how many thoughtful comments and conversations have happened on this thread, I am heartened.

There is a lot of passion here, we are just fighting against unbelievably strong currents.

I gave two conference talks this year. In fursuit.

If that isn’t a flex I don’t know what is

NeoDB is committed to creating a free, open, and interconnected space for collecting and reviewing books, movies, music, games, and podcasts. Here, you can manage your collections, share your thoughts, discover new content, and connect with others.

Very cool!

hell yeah, thank you!

Embedded in the DSA is a theory about what X actually is. It treats platforms like X as communications infrastructure where speech happens, and the platform is conceptualised as a singular place, mostly neutral, with certain obligations for moderation and transparency attached. It views platforms as companies that are capitalistic in a textbook understanding of capitalistic companies: entities with the goal profit maximalisation, that are responsive to legal and economic incentives. This place can be regulated properly via transparency and via a set of complex process requirements. The platform companies that run these places will then implement these requirements as they are incentivised to do so via legal and economic pressures. The DSA’s approach follows from this understanding: establish transparency requirements, ensure researcher access, and prohibit deceptive design practices.

…

Where the EC treats X as a communications network, Musk understands intuitively that X is something more than that, although he does not spell it out explicitly. Social networking platforms are collective sense making tools. Social networking platforms, whether that’s X, Instagram or TikTok, are platforms that we use to shape our common knowledge, and to determine which political opinions are currently in-vogue. These platforms are used to create a shared reality. This goes from how TikTok and Instagram influencers can push Dubai Chocolate into a global hype, to how the conversations on X shape what’s inside the political Overton window. The algorithmic feeds actively shape which voices get amplified, which narratives spread, and which facts feel established. Henry Farrell summarises the problem as: “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” The fundamental power of platforms like X comes from its ownership over the tools to shape the collective understandings of the public, and allows them to be malformed in favour of fascism.

Viewing platforms like X exclusively through the lens of a communications network, without taking into account how the platform affects collective knowledge, leads to two problems, both on the individual level and on the political level. This misunderstanding operates at both the individual and regulatory level.

…

In a recent blog post, Mastodon calls for “social sovereignty”, as a response to how X can retaliate against government institutions. Mastodon understands social sovereignty here as public institutions taking control of their social media presence, mainly by running their own social networking servers on software like Mastodon. They mention explicitly that the EC already has their own Mastodon server, at ec.social-network.europa.eu, and invite other organisations to follow suit. That the EC already has their social sovereign presence, but only uses it for press releases without any of the Commissioners using the platform, further accentuates the large gap between the rhetoric and behaviour. Still, the infrastructure for alternative ways for the EC to take power already exists. Initiatives like Eurosky further indicate that the tools for the EC to shift power structures away from the platforms they’re trying to regulate are available.

Fantastic article thank you for sharing!

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give the Fediverse (Original: Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip) isn’t money, praise, or interpretive dance (although we would absolutely accept the last one). Its participation.

Participation awards are given out here, this is just that kind of degenerate place where that kind of stuff happens. I have seen the underground storehouses filled with participation trophies made of solid platinum and gold under some of the larger instances, it is staggering. We are the deplorably thanked for participating, witness us in our moral decay.

I think some kind of “pod” system would be nice where similar posts/crossposts could be visually grouped together like a “pod” of dolphins all surfacing on your feed together in a natural flowing way (randomly assigned color coding maybe?). Seeing one dolphin surface after another should feel like cohesive movement of a pod and any one post should link towards other dolphins in the pod not currently visible too.

You could then as a user “pod” a post by linking it with another post and the resulting feed of newly “podded” posts could itself be a browsable “pod feed”.

Obviously a different word than pod may be better, but I like the whale pod metaphor.

Does anyone know of a #pleroma server that isn’t fascist? Pleroma has a lot of interesting stuff, but unfortunately, it also has a lot of rotten people.

I would like to think such examples exist, I have not encountered them.

Write Freely instance maybe?

https://writefreely.org/

I think this kind of critical analysis of the Fediverse could be completely right in every single one of the details and still miss the more important point that corporate social networks are being used in a directly hostile fashion towards vulnerable people RIGHT NOW to a near catastrophic degree of negligence to put things in the most charitable terms possible. Further the people who own those corporations publicly endorse narratives that invisiblize the violence happening to real human beings.

Realize that by getting lost in a baseball stats esque evaluation of the Fediverse that we cede ground already to people who are disengenous. We have to consider the context of the alternative reality of corporate social media to fairly evaluate the Fediverse.