It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

For me, it was the palmy beach.

And I’ll have you know that I’m still under 30 and do regular back extension exercises!

Stop doing physics! Motion was not meant to be analysed.

convert that speed from nautical miles to miles please

let me calculate the snap, crackle and pop of that missile

Statements dreamed up by the utterly insane.

It’s a reference to the original meme. The entire image is tongue-in-cheek.

I didn’t. Even when I lived an hour away from my job, it was about as fast by train as driving, and I could spend that time productively or relaxing instead of concentrating on.

If it takes twice as long without a car, that’s a problem that should be solved!

I’ve done that. You just bring something appropriate to carry it in.

Although now that I live closer to a smaller grocer, I just walk twice.

Thanks for the detailed reply :)

I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I’m still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw ‘spyware’ around to describe anything and everything, so I didn’t realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it’s applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.

I do appreciate when a worker in a restaurant has a legitimate conversation and is social, if they can see when it’s appropriate and welcomed. And to add context, I’m not talking about the waiter hovering like you’re describing, I’m talking about something I’ve only ever seen from immigrant family restaurants where they’ve come from a culture where eating is still a social community activity, or possibly when a chef takes pleasure in knowing you’re enjoying their experience. The always transactional nature of eating in society has started to annoy me. But it’s very different to when someone is being paid to try and make your experience good, that’s inevitably plastic and coerced.

That website has a very strict, unusual interpretation of ‘spyware’. Even if all the telemetry and unprompted connections made by Mozilla Firefox are in good faith and legitimate features, that website still labels it ‘spyware’, as it is revealing unnecessary information without your consent.

The same website gives Tor Browser a ‘Not Spyware’ rating, as it (necessarily!) removed the default features of Firefox that concerned them.

Side note - I think you may have accidentally marked your account as a ‘bot account’ in the settings.

It’s Chromium-based, so I don’t understand how it could be “configured in the same way”.

That website is […] full of verifiably false information

Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn’t notice any last time I checked the site.

they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.

They’re very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn’t make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.

They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.

It says “Not Spyware”. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor

Honestly, trying to find a definitive ‘in the right’ of any large-scale conflict is tough, almost moot. Especially since moral values like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are subjective, and that small groups of powerful people may not represent a whole. Complex reality doesn’t fall neatly into these ideals of right and wrong.

It’s very narrow-scope to frame this conflict as just about one attack at a music concert, and furthermore to think that a decades-long invasion, colonization and blockade shouldn’t be compared to other acts of colonialism.

Also, please read the community rules before posting, there are only two of them.

Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.

The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.

Honestly, brigading is still a valid thing that can exist here, but yes, people don’t realize that if a post gets popular on a popular federated instance, people who appear like ‘foreigners’ (for lack of better word) will jump in and flood it. It looks as if a brigade, but it’s entirely organic, non-malicious, unorganized and unprompted.

I’m not sure how to classify things like ‘dunk tank’ posts, where someone on an instance will say ‘lol look how dumb this post over there is’… it’s not really calling a raid but many people will go to the source comment and dogpile them. And sure, that’s just part of being a public website, but it’s a bit easier with federation to go over and interact, just like it is moving between subreddits on reddit.