There’s another comment further up about a statistic showing that people who pirate content are more likely to spend more money on content as well compared to people who don’t pirate content. It seems that there’s a correlation between people who pirate things and people who care about the ethical treatment of creators. Stuff like people who pirate music from Spotify and then spend money to buy the music from the band on Bandcamp.

In that context, I have an even harder time caring about people pirating from the megacorps when they’re supporting creators at the same time. That’s closing in on Robin Hood style activities at that point.

I mean, I’d personally rather see an anime girl themed desktop than those weird statues rich people sometimes have in places like on their coffee table that are stuff like a woman in the boob + butt out pose with no limbs or head. That shit is just creepy looking. I know it’s supposed to be reminiscent of broken Greek and Roman statues, but why do they always have to be posed and objectified like porn stars? At least with the anime girl, I know that I’m talking to an otaku rather than Hannibal Lecter.

Because Bluesky is centralised.

You say that like that isn’t exactly what the majority of people want. When I first left Reddit, I was trying to explain Lemmy and federated services to some friends and one of them immediately replied with “why would you want that?” And this was from a guy who owned and operated his own TeamSpeak server just for his friends to use.

The average person wants a service that’s easy to use first and foremost, and that is always going to be easier to do with a big centralized one owned and operated by a large company. They just want to be able to make an account and connect with friends and content. They don’t care about things like privacy until it actively harms them.

Don’t forget to draw the rest of the owl, too!

No, but he does have a history of racism and supporting/promoting white supremacists.

He has a long history of incidents like, “Hey, why are you following those white supremacist accounts on Twitter and promoting their books?” or “Oops, I was wearing an iron cross just as a joke!” and “I paid a dude to yell, ‘I hate Jews!’ as a prank, bro.”

He did more than make fucked up jokes, though. He was pushing white supremacist accounts that he followed on social media at one point to his young and impressionable audience. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and he hasn’t done anything to rectify that situation one way or the other. Given the evidence we have, he could’ve simply started wearing his iron cross behind closed doors instead of on stream.

Having lived long enough to see the edgy teenagers making 4channer jokes grow up to and have those become their actual beliefs, I believe in Philosophical Inertia. You say something often enough, and it becomes what you truly believe. And until you prove otherwise, I am going to assume that your beliefs continue on that same course.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice […]

-MLK Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.

The issue with AI isn’t the tool, but the ethics of its creation (and the greed of those trying to put it in anything and everything, but that’s another matter), and this is so often lost in these conversations. Like pro-lifers arguing with women’s rights activists. Two completely different concepts being argued past each other. Your use case is exactly the kind of thing that AI could be great for - if it wasn’t made by stealing the work of others.

That out of the way, I think you’re going to have to look for lists of campaign donators, shareholders in companies Musk owns, and as somebody else said, those rolling back DEI programs and the like.

It’ll probably be easier to find lists of which companies oppose the horrors, honestly.

MLK and the Civil Rights Movement have been majorly white-washed since they happened. That narrative is a big reason why protests since have been largely ineffectual in the US.

MLK supported the Black Panthers and Malcolm X and said that the only reason that he didn’t do anything more than the sit-ins and such was because that was already illegal and anything more could get them all jail time. And he was still seen as being just as violent as they made BLM out to be.

The Million Man March was seen as a threat of violence by white America. If he could get a million people to mobilize in the capital and shut down the entire city, what else could he get them to do?

Also, civil rights were only put into law after a full-on week of violence that burned down entire sections of cities and did millions in property damage. Years of protests led to flowery words. A week of riots saw the bills written, voted on, and codified into law.

Ada is the admin of blahaj, not a part of the mod team for 196. She has final say on anything that is on the instance but isn’t directly involved in 196.

The reason for the move hasn’t really been clear. The mods were vague when they announced the move, effective immediately, and the most common theory I saw was about a certain person who uses neopronouns and an event where Ada stepped in to use her power as admin to overrule the mods of 196. The mods of 196 have since clarified with a vague statement about how they don’t like how Ada handles moderation across the instance (banning trolls more on a “vibe check” than hard rules or something? I don’t really know) and praise for .world’s instance level rules regarding things like trolls and harassment.

The community was blindsided by this, as 196 was locked and moved within hours of the announcement; and they largely voiced disagreement with the decision it seems. In response, I believe some member of the community created onehundredninetysix to keep the community on blahaj, and Ada herself is currently the only mod of the community, though she’s looking for people to take it over.

Not to be confused with a danger noodle.

One thing I forgot to mention is that there were tons of memes like this with Linux as the third as well (or other random stuff, of course), so this is kinda relevant on all fronts.

I’m not surprised, that picture is from 2009. It’s a play on an old Mac TV ad campaign and a long-standing stereotype in the furry fandom of fox fursonas being… very promiscuous.

I never thought I’d use this ever again…

Did 2 years of a 4 year degree before dropping out for a myriad of reasons.

I did well enough through high school that I never learned how to put in the effort to really study, and between that and the bad pay and working conditions I saw in the industry I was heading into, I said, “Fuck this, I’d rather go back to selling fish. I’ll make just as much for half the effort anyway.” I hated retail, but the work was pretty easy and I liked the people I worked with, so I stuck around for 10 years before I had enough and left to focus on another job and trying to start my own business.

Definitely not happy with where I am, but that has less to do with school and more to do with life circumstances like getting hit with a medical condition that knocked me out of the job force for the first 4 years of my 30s and right as I was trying to get my business working for myself off the ground. So now I find myself trying to re-enter work in a new field in an area where tourism is the economy, meaning there’s few other industries in the area apart from retail.

I will say, though, that I feel like I learned more after leaving school than I ever did in school, and that education almost killed my love for learning.

I crave medium density housing so badly. Give me townhouses, duplexes, row homes, multi family houses, and mixed use buildings with apartments above shops any day. Not only is the size of the housing nice, but so is the sense of community. Suburbs of single family homes are deserts where you don’t even know your neighbors’ names. Living in a place where you can see people walking on the streets, going about their lives, at any time of day or night is so healing for the soul.

In fact, it’s discouraged in many states.

I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them.

I think this is also true for why people gravitate towards places like Bluesky in more general terms as well. Without even getting into the details of whether or not a platform has an algorithm or whatever other features, whether or not a platform is federated means nothing to the average person and the benefits of the decentralized servers are a disadvantage to onboarding people. When the Reddit exodus happened, I was describing Lemmy to a friend, and when I told him that anybody could spin up their own instance, his response was “why the hell would anybody want to do that.” And this is a guy who ran his own TeamSpeak server for like 20 years.

People don’t want an alternative to Twitter - they want Twitter without the rightwing extremism. Bluesky offers exactly this with an easy and straightforward onboarding process and a familiar UI. There’s even browser extensions to search the people you follow on Twitter and find their Bluesky handles to make the swap easier.

I’ve also seen people praising Bluesky’s algorithm being entirely optional as well as a plus for discoverability. People really like the chronological timeline that doesn’t bury posts - especially artists. I haven’t used Mastodon, and I only used Twitter because all the artists jumped ship after Tumblr banned the porn, but I can say that I have enjoyed how Bluesky works similar to Tumblr in that regard. I’ve never liked algorithmic based feeds, so a chronological feed of the people I follow and the stuff they reblog from other people who I can then go check out as well is exactly the kind of experience I want out of a platform.