What? This is true but that’s not my point at all. I simply don’t care if they are military weapons or not. The entire point of the second amendment is for the citizenry to pose a threat against tyranny, which could include the military. Civilian ownership of effective weapons is part and parcel with that.

Do you really think an assault rifle is going to give you that critical edge against an f-16 or armored fighting vehicle vs a hunting style rifle? What kind of war do you think you will be fighting that this would actually make a meaningful difference?

Weapons were entirely different things when the second amendment was made, that is your interpretation of the second amendment that a fully kitted ar-15 with high capacity magazines fits the definition of what the writers of the constitution had in mind when the wrote the second amendment is and frankly it doesn’t matter too much after a certain point if the writers of the constitution wrote this part of the law without ANY of the modern context of how much more violence a single person with a weapon can do in a short time.

You’ve never fired a gun, have you? There is a massive amount of misinformation out there, and that’s not how any modern firearms made for the civilian market (including AR-15s) operate.

Yes I have, save your “civilian ar-15s aren’t automatic or burst fire so they aren’t technically assault rifles or military weapons” nonsense for someone else you can more easily pull the “bro have you even shot a real gun” condescending card on, an assault rifle is more effective and lethal especially in the hands of some panicking chud like Kyle Rittenhouse if it is only capable of single fire except in the case of a driveby style hit. Exhibit A: most modern military doctrines.

I don’t wear gear to the range but I know folks who do, and also go to faire and belong to a group who likes to fight with foam swords. From my perspective, it’s really the same deal.

When was the last time a bunch of rennaisance faire nerds turned on the news and saw that someone else had just murdered 30 kids in a school dressed up in the same kind of costume they all like to wear… with the same brand and model of “foam” sword? … and then just kept on dressing up in that same costume as the bodies of children pile up after school shootings happen over and over again repeatedly to the point that it feels fucking normalized as something that just happens ?

That is the difference, or at least one of them.

It is very different than ren faire people showing up in military gear obsolete for hundreds of years, you can kill an entire crowd of people with an assault rifle in seconds, a person carrying around a murder weapon of that spontaneous ability to catastrophically induce violence isn’t “LARPing” they are normalizing carrying around a murder weapon and being utterly obsessed with it which even if their motivations are innocent provides a nice big smokescreen of normalcy for the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world to hide behind.

I am not even making an argument against guns here, I am just pointing out how much more lame and uncool this is than ren faire or LARPing stuff .

Any alien archaeologist worth their preferred home planet’s seasoning ingredient would treat the development of a motorized sanitation device to clean large amounts of food prep and eating tools as a major labor saving milestone of technological development.

Thus complaining about having to the dishes is probably considered a reliable indicator of saturation of these devices.

This is why complaining about having to do the dishes is actually a selfless act of historical preservation for future alien archaeologists.

You don’t call it semi-boat if there is a gaping hole in the hull and no convincing indication the hole will be fixed or indeed any really solid evidence the hole wasn’t put their on purpose to negate all the other floaty bits.

You either call it a scam or a $15 million boondoggle of a yacht that was designed so poorly that it can’t even go in the water without sinking.

Everybody has been led by the hype into speaking about this boat as if it was a foregone conclusion it will float when nobody can even conclusively demonstrate the motives of the builders and financers is to create a boat that actually floats rather than just the vibe of one.

We have a perfectly seaworthy boat here and while it is ugly, obtuse and patched together it is still actually a working boat that was designed by people who would be absolutely mortified and ashamed to find out they somehow missed patching a gaping hole in the hull that allowed the cold brutal ocean of corporate money to rush in and effectively sink the ship before it could even set sail.

Monetization of the commons to the exhaustive extent modern capitalism demands is fundamentally at odds with any meaningful sense of decentralization and worse the health of the commons and the community members who compose it, it is surprisingly easy to understand if you just think about the basic incentive structure here.

Why do bluesky advocates always concede the “appview” part is effectively centralized, mandatory to interact with as part of the community inside the silo of bluesky and is indefinitely considered a proprietary entity to bluesky themselves, to the point that the CEO of bluesky (a crypto person which should already be a red flag) has gone on record saying they haven’t ruled out using “appview” to interject ads into the network as an avenue for monetization … and then act like that doesn’t undermine the basic sales pitch of bluesky in the first place?

I feel like I am being sold a boat by a salesman that just explained to me with a straight face that yes the boat technically has a huge hole in the bottom of it but that the rest of the boat is far more seaworthy than any boat ever and the builder is absolutely going to deliver by fixing the critical design flaw soon even though in this case doing so would existentially threaten the “boat” builder’s business and besides the salesman knows one of the low ranking workman at the “boat” builders yard and he is very trustable.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-reshaping-social-media-but-advertising-isnt-off-the-table/

“The way Bluesky is built largely prevents a business model solely relying on ads, because users could create alternative feeds without ads on its open protocol.” - Jay Graber CEO of bluesky

This is incredibly disgenous to say, sure you could run your own entire seperate network using bluesky… why would you? You have to either choose to be in the big silo or you are banished to outside of it, a state of affairs the fediverse was specifically designed to stop from happening and yet it still struggles with overcentralization.

I am sorry, I have been on the fediverse for years and seen it struggle with the natural tendency for winners to win more and centralization to occur from bandwagoning (exhibit A: mastodon.social) and I think it is hilarious anyone who is actually paying attention thinks bluesky has a real chance of becoming and staying decentralized in any meaningful sense (especially when the investors knock on the door to pay a visit and say it is time to start delivering).

Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.

My point is that it is unreasonable to compare the popularity of a scam being hyped by some of the biggest names in the techbro world with direct access and influence over the mainstream tech press and millions in cash to spend on advertisements, luring in big social media accounts and making a slick UI and onboarding process and most crucially lots of time to hold off on enshittification/monetization…with a community developed fundamentally decentralized constellation of people who are maintaining and developing the fediverse on a budget that is peanuts compared to the literally astronomically larger budget Bluesky has.

The danger with leaving this context out is it leads you into thinking rich people are smarter and have better ideas than you when they are really just richer than you and every single interaction in society is structured to benefit them and defer to their preferred narratives.

Bluesky was always going to grow more explosively than the fediverse, the whole fundamental issue with corporate social media is the immutable need for endless growth that supercedes any moral concern and indeed any concern for the longterm at all.

There is no use lamenting the fact that the fediverse isn’t growing at the clip bluesky is, and there is the very real danger of getting caught up in the hype and losing sight of why it is unreasonable to hold the fediverse to the same expectations of nearterm growthrate.

The Saudis footed the bill for most of that $44bn - most is only out of pocket about $10bn of it iirc.

I mean they definitely got their money’s worth in terms of torpedoing one of the most threatening social media tools for politically destabilizing authoritarian regimes.

Bluesky is at least semi-decentralized

No it isn’t, this is marketing and until the developers actually put their money where their mouth is and provide the genuine capacity for decentralization (not just along some narrow technical definition but actually decentralized in practice) this is pure marketing hype that you absolutely shouldn’t trust until you are given indisputable proof and then you should still be skeptical because they can always pull the rug out from under you.

Bluesky is open source yes, but what they are talking about is the CLIENT side of Bluesky, the actual system is dependent upon proprietary code that is most definitely not open source.

The merits of a social media provider are worthless if it has a fraction of the population of a direct competitor.

No they aren’t, the network effect isn’t some magical all powerful force of nature that you cannot resist.

We can choose to join a community that is small and help grow it, frankly if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways which isn’t to say that the fediverse doesn’t need to work on becoming way more accessible and friendly to the average person.

you became general because there was a bright light above the generals cabin next to your hole you normally lurk under beneath the stone at the bend in the river, the general leaned too far over peering down at you while out on a smoke break and fell in and tragically drowned, the peculiar thing was as he was sinking and thrashing about his uniform came off and landed on top of you, the alien enveloping of the sinking garments spooked you and you shot clear out of the water and through the still open door of the cabin right into an austere but plush leather chair behind a monsterously large desk. The next moment the guards rushed in having heard a commotion and were relieved to find the general had clearly only went for an imprompto nightime dip in the river after foolishly slipping and falling… and to hide an embarassment had quickly leaped out and returned inside putting on a blank neutral expression to try to hide it as if they weren’t clearly slimey and dripping wet.

Since then you have been doing a great job honestly shrugs

I think a better strategy is just to prefer linking to content on Peertube whenever it is feasible and just not worry about it to much when Youtube is the only source for actually good content on some topic. There is wayyyyy too much consolidation around Youtube to effectively challenge in the hardline way you are saying, it just isn’t practical.

Here are some cool Peertube instances.

https://tilvids.com/ -> an instance dedicated to educational/edutainment videos

https://lostpod.space/ -> a smaller general purpose peertube instance that I like

(I made a seperate post because for alternate idea)

Have you considered hosting a lemmy instance yourself and possibly preconstructing lemmy threads in some bulk fashion with gifs grouped by topic or theme and just use lemmy itself as the platform to share gifs?

Just because lemmy threads were created to mimic reddit threads doesn’t mean we are confined to only using lemmy as a reddit-like tool…

Just an interesting thought I had shrugs

…ok I know I always recommend dokuwiki for everything but it is super easy to set up and doesn’t need a database or anything and it comes stock with a nice gui media manager and a lot of plugins that extend that functionality.

If you are willing to provide or pay for the hosting of a large amount of images I don’t see the reason to go with anything more complicated though you may find something more minimal that suits your needs.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

https://www.dokuwiki.org/tips:cms

I don’t know if there is a way to handle metadata for non-jpg images but there are a number of ways you could organize gifs including photo namespaces.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/media_manager

or using the imagebox plugin and just directly put tags in the caption

https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:imagebox

or a number of other ways probably.

The nice thing about this solution is all the data is accessible and in plain text readable markdown which also makes it easy to strap other things onto, search through with whatever tools you want and easily run a backup process on (especially since everything is neatly contained within a folder).

Don’t make the mistake most people of thinking dokuwiki is only useful as a traditional wiki, it is such a simple and general tool that its power extends far past that.

But I know that no one is PRO genocide.

I mean I understand wanting to see the world that way but whole entire societies of people can become genocidal. That is precisely what causes the atrocity of genocides like the palestinian genocide in gaza to grow out of control.

Once the centrists in a society accept the rightwing framing of the ideology of genocide they will treat it as the status quo and resist anyone who threatens it. This is what is so fucking terrifying about blind centrism, the substance doesn’t matter at all to the ideology, just tracking the most commonly accepted “facts” which inveitably ends up in centrists bandwagoning behind an authoritarian.

This is the stage of fascism Israel is deep into and the US is not far behind in and it quickly obliterates in you any doubt that people actually can be pro-genocide.

We all have the potential to be, it is our choices and our empathy that give us agency to resist becoming so.

Do CEOs really qualify as commuters if they barely do any actual work? It might be more accurate to call them very consistent daily tourists.

Commuters are people who travel into the city to get work done during the day and then commute home.

Also the taller the building is the more potential passive air circulation on hot days.

The problem is that when the state of Israel tells you to stay home it is as likely it is so they can more assuredly wipe out your family in one go as it is they care about your safety.

The actual act of taking some moderate sum of crypto here is meaningless to me, you were able to attain a valuable thing and so you did. It is only an intimate knowledge of the context of that choice that can inform any kind of accurate judgement fraught with grey areas as it may be.

That isn 't what interests me about crypto, what I find interesting is that no matter what rock you check under in virtually the entire crypto sphere the attitude of the creatures involved always untangles into this same precise attitude. Maybe you fall under the category maybe you don’t, my point is about the mindset of this whole enterprise that permeates it at seemingly every level.

You didn’t need to tell me you own crypto, your post screams “crypto bro” at such screeching decibels that I think you just shattered a wine glass over there.

I do think that would be a superb opening monologue (set to a moody montage) for a skit taking the piss out of naive crypto bros though, well done!