I keep saying that it’s just a fantasy that everyone and big tech in particular isn’t quietly selling stuff to the Chinese, especially our data since it’s so easy. Why would they be beholden to national interests when they only exist to make money?

My HDD died and I had to redownload 10TB of stuff. I should be done by tomorrow. Sorry about that.

Not sure what’s your point really, disability olympics where we argue who has it worse? You’re advocating for people who are already disadvantaged to disadvantage themselves on purpose even more for your holy war. I’m fairly sure you have very little idea of regional context (like there’s a world outside of US) which makes this even more out of touch.

Unlike you people I have to connect with people with a rare disease and I don’t have a choice. Ride that high horse cowboy, it feels good for a time.

Okay. I’ll leave those patient support groups because you told me to cut contact with people using corpo media. You might not be interested in boring reasons people do what they do but that’s why common people don’t believe in honesty when you tell them you have their best interest at heart. This suggests that you only care about what’s good for people superficially and people can smell that a mile away, hence current popularity of liberal left.

I didn’t say you wouldn’t be at a massive disadvantage but they didn’t have functional moderation before and they’re not going to pay for it now. What’s being suggested as an alternative is flat out giving up.

You’re not going to win by waiting for old people to die off. We reproduce in lower numbers than before and tendency to go disillusioned as you grow older remains a constant. Currently that disillusionment is being harvested by far right but that’s entirely on how the left lost credibility in the west after allying itself with liberal elites.

We won’t get ourselves out of this ditch unless we stop participating in culture wars manufactured for us by those elites. Normal people don’t care about queers but society is so polarised that they assume default stance from their political tribe. When you say they should die off you only strengthen their belief. It was never about this but more serious underlying issues that we’re not addressing because it’s a proxy war that’s supposed to distract us from a bigger war by the rich against the regular people.

I’m not saying we need to abandon traditional gender and minority emancipation goal but we need to be mindful of priorities. Meta employees are more outraged about new hate speech policies but they didn’t care when Meta enabled genocide in Myanmar. See how skewed it got? People don’t like hypocrisy.

Zuck is not changing policy because of something that happened in 2023 but because of new US administration. NY Post is a tabloid, don’t use it even if they say something that you like.

That’s the moral high ground speaking. I was like that too but at some point it was too hard to not notice that it wasn’t very effective. I’m pretty sure grannies on my local FB arthritis support group have bigger problems than navigating ethics of social media and politics.

Agreed but we invented other forms of communication for a reason. [edit] All I’m saying is - don’t roll over and let them win by default. You don’t have to use corpo social media in good faith. Break rules and fight back.

Like you’ve mentioned, real public spaces have been killed so by quitting FB and other corpo social media you effectively self-ostracise as there are little alternatives. Yeah, you’re playing their game but when you’re losing you need humility rather than some moral high ground. If you want to affect the change you need to talk to people.

Meta was already enabling genocide in third world countries and countless other things but this is what caused chaos. Those employees have weird priorities, huh?

[edit] reworded slightly on the account of caused controversy

That sounds like encouraging queer folk to flee public spaces which sounds like a favourable outcome to the conservatives. Is giving ground the best idea really?

I’m assuming actual researchers know better but Scihub is accessible in plenty of ways. Retracted papers could be shared as a means of spreading misinformation or simply just stumbled upon by regular folks looking up something specific.

Having access to retracted papers is nice but:

Unfortunately, it appears that once Sci-Hub has a copy of a paper, it doesn’t necessarily have the ability to ensure it’s kept up to date. Based on a scan of its content done by researchers from India, about 85 percent of the invalid papers they checked had no indication that the paper had been retracted.

They always did because their moderators didn’t act upon old rules anyway.

It’s a spectrum like most things but to give some extreme examples - Lemmy can work without embedding media files but it can’t work without text. Instagram could work with just video, ability to scroll and a like button.

There’s plenty of core social components to Lemmy. It’s a platform for self-organising communities that curate, rank and discuss content. Without that I’d be using RSS reader only.

I believe in the right to quote which is also the law in most of the world because of Berne Convention.

This article credits Legal Eagle, embeds the original, is much shorter to read than an 8-minute video and doesn’t require me to wear headphones. Lemmy is a text based social media so it makes sense to favour text sources. Definitely better than linking to some overloaded Invidious instance which seems to be the norm.