if they successfully fully take over, those same supporters now become the new threat

Quite a few of the current crop of deputized ICE agents are MAGA goons from four years ago. So long as you’re actively doing the gruesome work of ethnic cleansing, you’ll be given a pass.

No, we were actually liberating it from oppression.

You can find my short form username: Anon.

What could they find?

Yes, what possible community full of people named “Anon” could they find that would get you in any amount of trouble?

That starting point kinda makes the rest of us the conservatives of the community.

It makes the rest of us the liberals, certainly. But a lot of the turf battles between .world and .ml tend to be on US political orthodoxy running up against any other country’s reported histories. People getting sucked back into the argument over whether the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 was worth defending, for instance, is the baseline for what defines a “Tankie” (evil Khruschevist authoritarian villains) versus “A rational centrist” (not all CIA-backed color revolutions are bad, people!)

So it’s less a question of right versus left and more a question of nationalism versus internationalism.

If you want to feel challenged, look into who we defederate from.

One of the benefits of .world is that admins generally don’t bother outright banning anyone for their political views, even when they’re taken as “extreme”. You can head over to these other sites, but don’t expect to post very long before you’re given the boot.

Admittedly, Reddit’s political subs were much the same. Easiest thing in the world is to say something on a political sub of any flavor that will get you banned, whether its /r/progressive or /r/libertarian. If that’s the kind of sub someone is looking for…

But I don’t really see them as challenging so much as insular. Ideologically closed communities where appealing to the whims of the moderators is more important than any actual ideological tenant.

It’s called “Blogging” and it is taking the nation by storm.

This works so long as DOGE doesn’t get into the IRS offices and start turning off all the APIs.

Viewing it from that angle, open source devs and the community are more motivated to keep an eye out for backdoors.

I think it is less an issue of motivation and more an issue of selection bias. Lots of open source projects fall out of support. Lots of them are riddled with bugs. Lots of them have clunky interfaces and high latency and a myriad of other problems that never get solved, because the original designers never put in the leg work.

But the ones that do have a lively community and a robust design are the ones that get mainstream adaptation. And this produces a virtuous cycle of new users, some of whom become new contributors, who expand functionality, and attract more new users. When you have a critical mass of participants, they collectively have an interest in seeing the project get resources to improve and overcome obstacles and keep the project alive.

Private developers also have an elephant’s graveyard of failed software. But they don’t subsist on the same kind of critical mass of participation. A private development company really only needs one or two whale clients to sustain themselves. Microsoft had IBM. Oracle had Exxon. TurboTax has the IRS. Look at how LLM developers like OpenAI stick around with billions in funding despite enjoying no real revenue stream.

I would say that the maxim “If you’re not the client then you’re the product” technically holds in both instances. There’s no particular reason why a social media platform like Facebook or TikTok couldn’t be open source and still ruthlessly data mine its end-users. In the same vein, a private firm like Palantir or Fidelity or AT&T has ample incentive to keep their systems secure because security is at the heart of their bottom line.

Friend’s FtM dad transitioned in his late 60s, after it became more socially acceptable. Before that, he was just a very masculine presenting lesbian. Now he’s a guy - a straight man in what is effectively a trans-het relationship.

It’s the egg. Eggs predate chickens.

It’s weird to think that Linux causes Autism, rather than to believe that Autism caused Linux.

I have yet to meet a furry or trans IT person IRL.

Visit any comic or anime convension and you’ll find the former in spades.

As to the later, idk. I’ve got three cousins who came out as Trans in the last five years or so.

There’s definitely been a thaw around sex and gender over the last twenty years, and I can’t help notice a certain number of “butch lesbians” and “sis men” just saying “fuck it, I’m the other gender and straight” and going all the way.

Or is bullying a bigger issue there maybe?

Bullying certainly. But also there hasn’t been a large and active transgender community until fairly recently. People coming to terms with what being transgender means and how to self-actualize it wasn’t possible in the homophobic atmosphere of the 20th century.

We’ll see how long this revolution survives in the current century. Germany also had a boom/bust of transgenderism in the 1920s. Hopefully, Trumpism/Starmerism isn’t a bell weather for that kind of reactionary reversal.

There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details

I’m reminded of this mindset from the crypto scam surge.

Points at technical documents

“Well, it says it’s secure so quit arguing that it’s not secure”

Typically followed by

“If someone traced you/robbed you, then you were just doing it wrong”

Like, we’ve got high level white house officials feeding national security secrets to the Israelis because they just blindly implemented a “secure” Signal extension. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised people don’t look past the cover.

But come on. “You can just buy some tokens and then you’re secure” is painfully naive.

‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users

Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say

…

“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.

Incidentally, “Free Basics” and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist “Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!” and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say “If you don’t legislate favorably, we’re going to flood your populations’ media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition.”

There is a massive functional difference to anyone with two braincells to rub together.

There’s a massive cognitive dissonance, certainly. And your brains are practically smoking, trying to juggle the contractions.

The only reminder of the triad’s existence is infiltrator trolls who make alts on other instances to post bad-faith arguments glazing the core devs.

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS

Write me a better ending the Game of Thrones in five sentences

A special irony in it, because the “no we won’t help” crowd is calling the dev base Russian shills.

But they’re still using the “Russian” service? Even though they poo-poo Yandex for also being a “Russian” service?

Lemmyites are just as baby brained as the Reddit community they fell out of. Absolutely embarrassing.

I love to mock people who use the library by shouting “If you’re not the payer then you’re the product!”

Westerners are so baby-brained on this shit. Kagi can take your money and still spy on you. Yandex can not take your money and still not bother caching your search history, because there’s no good way for them to monetize it. Nevermind GitHub or Wikipedia or literally any other public good being hosted on any website anywhere.

The delusion that you’re safe using a free service is matched only by the delusion that you’re protected because you paid someone money.

It is funny to see people relentlessness stanning a paid service that’s built on a notoriously fraud prone crypto stack, then getting paranoid about something about as sophisticated as Lexus Nexus because it’s hosted out of Evil Country.

I hope nobody here bothers to interogate where their torrents are being hosted from too closely.

Does anyone still think their data isn’t being sold even if they pay for a service?

Very possible they’re too small to have a meaningful contingent of buyers. But I wouldn’t bank on it.

Cash and Monero being on the same tier is very funny

Christ, I knocked over my home theater system when I tried to transition to Mint and absolutely did spend a night sleeping on the couch over it.