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Oh dangit - you’re right. It seems not being able to follow users is a feature, not a bug in Lemmy, with the advice of the developer being to use Mastodon or kbin instead if you wish to do so. There’s a new issue open about it though, so hopefully they’ll give in to popular demand.

Sorry for my misinformation! Since I don’t have an account over there I just assumed the follow button would appear once signed in. :/

I didn’t realize the @-link redirects you to the external site from Lemmy. The correct URL for you guys over there should be /u/username@server.io, which means that /u/LemmyWorld@mastodon.world should be the correct path for Lemmy users. :)

I’m very happy with Nextcloud notes.

I’m using it with Obsidian on my computer though, so not entirely open source all the way, but there’s plenty of good open source markdown editors out there.

You should be able to follow it at @LemmyWorld, but I’m not sure how the interaction between Lemmy and Mastodon works for following users. They haven’t posted anything yet of course, so for now it’ll look empty.

If you want to follow the account without being logged in to the fediverse at all, a good option is the RSS feed. :)

I guess it makes people stupid all in the same way, while they used to be stupid all in their own unique ways. The morons have organized, synchronized, and become weaponised.

Somehow I feel like they’re also dumber though - if everyone’s an idiot in their own way at least they’re original.

I mean, it’s a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.

I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.

Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

Maybe more practically, it’s just hard to argue America wouldn’t be in a better place right now if it wasn’t for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.

I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you’re right, it’s probably been written many times - I’m not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there’s a lot of brilliant work out there. :)

The brilliant thing in Brave New World was that it didn’t at any point make it obvious that people were miserable slaves - they could leave any time they wanted, and lived a life of bliss. Still, as a reader, you end up feeling like you’d rather take the place of the savage than any of the characters living in the hypercommercial utopia. At least that’s how I felt.

Well, Fox News, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter were a fresh twist. I guess all good scifi mirrors history in one way or another, just taken to the extreme with help of technology. :)

Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.

It’s been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn’t stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.

Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That’s why it’s useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.

Saying I don’t own my copy of Pokemon Gold or my vinyl record collection is like saying I don’t own the books in my bookshelf.

I guess there is indeed a limit to my freedom to how I use them - I cannot write the words down one by one and start reselling my copy. But that’s a pretty messed up concept of ownership where I probably don’t even own the shirt on my back.

For being so sophisticated, it’s incredible how dumb the Spotify algorithm is.

For me somehow it decided Pink Moon by Nick Drake was my favourite song. At first it just threw it in the mix randomly when albums finished playing and it went on to play suggestions, but after a few times of me not skipping it it went ballistic. Now every time an album finishes it goes straight to Pink Moon. No matter what Spotify radio I try playing it will be Pink Moon. I keep skipping it and it keeps coming back. I don’t have a problem with Nick Drake I just can’t stand that song any longer. I never once played that song intentionally.

In the end I just cancelled my subscription.

My reasoning is fine. Discussion of illegal content, if we have to be completely pedantic. Which we don’t.

The fediverse doesn’t need to be a unitary blob - in fact, it shouldn’t be a unitary blob. An instance could block any instance where the use of the letter “e” is allowed would be completely legitimate (though the number of federated instances would be limited).

Though they have no moral obligations whatsoever to do so, it’s fair to expect Lemmy.world to have predictable rules and relatively stable policies as it is the most mainstream instance and has a bunch of users. And honestly, for the biggest, most mainstream instance, banning the discussion of piracy is pretty predictable. It’s simply not the kind of thing joining the largest platform of the Threadiverse is good for.

If you don’t like it, this is why this place is federated in the first place. It’s literally like this by design. Just stop complaining and use some other instance instead, it costs you nothing.

It honestly makes a lot of sense to keep illegal content that’s the source of frequent legal actions away from the largest general purpose communities. As you correctly point out it is extremely easy to join another instance where these discussions are allowed, and the larger instances have every reason to have a “better safe than sorry” approach to content moderation.

It seems to me the Threadiverse is too negative of the concept of defederation. It’s a key concept of how the Fediverse works, and is supposed to work. The people on Lemmygrad is looking for a completely different experience from the folks over at Beehaw, so let them have it. Lemmy.world has become the largest instance, so naturally they need to have an approach to content moderation that is unlikely to land them in legal trouble. And even if they didn’t, they’d be welcome to block discussions of piracy out of moral conviction or any other reason, just as their users are welcome to sign up somewhere else if they are looking for a different experience.

There was drama about defederation on Mastodon in the beginning as well, but I guess people coming from Twitter had an easier time intuitively understanding the appeal of it.

*downvote, block, and move on. Makes the moving on part more efficient.

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this.

Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program’s files invisible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed.

And then they just paid some settlements, recalled some CDs, and continued to operate as if nothing has happened. Bloody hell.

One nice thing about the fediverse is that you can do forum shopping for the location of your server. I’d advice against the US.

Thanks! Seems to have a lot more songs than Songsterr, along with a much less over-designed website.

Will have to do until someone creates a de-federated alternative. :)

It’s a nice reminder that those with the skills but not the bad intentions would be welcome to look through the source code for vulnerabilities and report/patch anything they might find. :)

We removed the vulnerability

It’s open source, they can just fix it themselves until it’s released. :)