That’s a cool concept, but there are indeed some caveats to address, especially with the propagation part. For example, if you rely on user A to filter you gaming posts, and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore. Or if he is a sudden Nazi, not only you but people who trust you will get that content until you react (and until then, some others will unsubscribe you).

With a complicated enough network of trusted people, this will trigger a chaotic chain reaction that will make your feed less stable than a chair with one leg.

Also, conflicts should be resolved somehow. If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?

One way to go about it is to create a limited list of authorities, but that obviously comes with the danger of someone having too much power. You can make groups of people vote for inclusion or exclusion of topics, but it’s not feasible to vote for every single filter because there are simply too many. You can elect someone to do this, but we know what may happen to elected officials.

I don’t believe the transitive principle of trust that you cite is all that workable, unless it can be done at a finer granularity.

In my own case, I (A) trust B and C. But B doesn’t trust C, for reasons that have conditioned my relationships with both B and C so that I can still trust them. The reason for that is that trust is multifactorial: A can trust B for some things, not others. So what we’re trying to model is an ontological relation, not just a directed acyclic graph.

Based on that, the best we can probably achieve is being able to set the degrees of separation of delegated trust (maybe 2 hops and that’s all in my case), and add the ability to subclass or otherwise tweak someone else’s blocklist (say, B’s a fine person but habitually forwards Joe Rogan crap that I find to be nothing but vexatious noise), or C despises my favorite band but is otherwise quite sound, etc.

Will not happen on lemmy, structurally the power flows from instance owners and their delegates. Their power to shape discourse and association and to steer thoughts of the lemmy user will not be relinquished. The first fundamental block to this, like on mastodon, is their power to silence and eliminate users from lemmy history without recourse and with transparency at their discretion.

But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.

The heads yearn for the guillotines

Can we not design guillotines that cut multiple heads at once, thus reducing the head to guillotine ratio?

Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about toxically insecure people in power when they are behaving awkwardly? Does an appearance of awkwardness grant automatic innocence?

I have been be intensely awkward with my insecurity in the past, and in my awkwardness i have definitely hurt people. If the victims of my insecurity brushed me off as awkward they would be enabling me to continue to harm others

He made Twitter into a Nazi bar. This too. There’s plenty more that you can certainly find yourself if you actually look.

Sorry, I don’t carry on conversations with Nazi sympathizers. I hope you have an awful day.

Luckily, there’s normally little cost to switching Lemmy instances anyway. You can even probably take the same username and register on another instance, quickly rebuild your feed and that’s mostly it.

As everything is connected and there’s not much reason accumulating account age/karma/you name it, the loss is pretty minor.

It’s a Windows logo!11! /s

It sure is. It’s important to touch grass on a daily basis to stay sane. I personally go outside take a stroll and caress some leaves.

Regarding your initial point : I see “capitalism” as the family of systems that enable that kind of IT monopoly. Sure, human traits such as greed and bigotry are probably the source of evil but it seems to me they have to be tapped, and enabled. The fact that the conversation often ultimately turns back to capitalism is legitimate imho.

So, capitalism then.

Proving your point…about what? I was just curious to hear someone’s thoughts who went against the idea that most modern problems can be traced back to the roots of capitalism. But fuck me, right?

Public provision of services is not socialism, it’s just common sense. The first mass state pension system was rolled out by that crusty reactionary Bismarck. Every rightwing country still has fire departments and (mostly) public road systems too. Not doing it that way is just stupidity, not ideology.

What is socialism is when people doing the work have control of the means of production. Control, not a token share. One example is cooperatives. By this definition (which goes back to Karl Marx), neither the USSR nor Communist China were socialist, they were totalitarian state capitalist entitites. China still is, though less incompetent than under Mao. And this isn’t some revisionist point of view. Rosa Luxemburg and other contemporaries saw it happening at the onset.

I mean, I mostly agree with this. You can boil any problem down to existence. And existence down to molecular processes.

But two things: discussing modern problems, it’s all built on systems. And the system we deal with is capitalism.

Human fallibility is the problem, ultimately. But there is no overcoming human fallibility. So building systems that place peoples well being above all else is an actionable solution. Whereas solving human fallibility isn’t.

And secondly, hierarchy in all its forms. Which I would argue is the problem boiled down past the system to look at its problematic parts. Does a system rely on or serve needs in a hierarchical manner? Then that’s the problem.

That’s as far as I think is logical to go. Digging down further to human nature is a problem for a utopian society to deal with, and that we are nowhere near to achieving. So, my point is we need to deal with the first layer of problems. And that would be capitalism. Abolishing hierarchy in all its forms comes second.

The first because the system rewards the worst parts of our nature. The second because it’s almost uniformly led to corruption. Those are the root problems, from my point of view. Human fallibility is, I’m afraid, baked into the cookie. But removing systems that reward those errors instead of eradicating them should be job one.

Yeah, because I consider myself a pretty reasonable person. People have a big problem these days of never engaging with nuance, no matter how much you try to bring any conversation back to it. Things are definitely not as binary as people seem to only be able to conceive of them. The entire world and even the most seemingly clear cut issues have loads of grey area that people just can’t discuss because as soon as you say, “yes, I agree we need to ____! But we need to discuss the trickier parts” it turns into a witch hunt for anyone pointing out anything that might be considered a tricky part because it goes against the “I’m 100% on this side and it’s the only right opinion.”

It’s frustrating.

Even Karl Marx noted capitalism’s dynamism and ability to cause change. In my own case, I went from poverty to modest wealth in a capitalist system, and I know many others who had similar experiences. I’m also aware that it empowers sociopaths, causes corruption, of its tendency to degenerate to oligopoly, and its failure to adequately address externalities.

And there are many, many variants of capitalism. The one now prevalent in the US is one of the more lethal strains. Improperly regulated capitalism such as that is a nightmare. Properly regulated, many of its negative features can be mitigated. I could stand living in a social democracy until a better alternative is piloted and proven.

Wake up, my friend. It’s 2025. Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better.

Except the entire capitalist system works against us striving to be better. It’s not like the American health care system sucks because the people in power suck. It sucks because to fix it you’d have to take capitalism out of the health care system because capitalism drives the profit motive within the health care system which makes it suck.

Same with transitioning from oil to renewables. Fucking Exxon knew half a century ago that climate change is a thing and will lead to catastrophic results. They were in prime position to shift from oil to renewables and reinvent the global energy system, but it was more profitable to run disinformation campaigns and actively work against the transition so they did that instead. Even now some of the oil CEO-s are like “we’re already so fucked there’s no reason to go for renewables so let us keep making that money”.

Same is now going on with electric vehicles. It’s much more profitable to sell ICE cars and fight the change instead of actually changing. I don’t remember if it was Mercedes or WV or some other manufacturer, anyway one of the big german car CEOs pretty much went “we can’t change to electric vehicles in time for the regulations. But you shouldn’t punish us with fines because we’re too big to fail.”

The list goes on. The reason people here are so anti-capitalist is because most of us see that even if we want to strive to be better we can’t because capitalism keeps dragging us down. It’s like that scene in “Don’t look up” where the world comes together to save itself and just as the crisis is about to be averted the capitalist tech bro fucks it all up because who cares if we’re risking our entire planet, there’s money to be made. Capitalism will try its best to undermine any effort that prevents maximizing profits.

Do you really think we’ll get to the 15 hour work week in 2030, like Keynes predicted? Definitely not under the capitalist system. We have empirical evidence that 32 hour work week improves productivity and we can’t even get that because the capital owners refuse to accept it. Literally something that could easily improve all our lives and we can’t get it done because of capitalism.

Nobody is against striving to be better but wanting to get rid of capitalism is striving to be better because capitalism is like a steel ball attached to your ankle. It’s just weighing down all your efforts to be better.

Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better.

Yep, let’s rake our forests and rinse our recycling to handle climate change!

If your house burns to the ground, no worries, you can just collect floatsom from the beach and build a new one!

Dude, some things cannot be solved via positive vibes and being a good neighbor, and if you want my honest opinion on it, I think pushing everyday people to be accountable for everything while the broligarchs are accountable for nothing is a big part of the problem.

In other words, you should strive to be better than an apologist for the system.

Most civilized countries know that there is more than one way to implement capitalism, and the current US way is a catastrophic shit show.

I’m sorry bud, but that’s how the rumour mill worked since humans could talk. The message your trying to bring is good, don’t get me wrong. You are trying to currently change human nature somewhat.

Yes, but it does not work well. You constantly get failing payments due to inadequate channel liquidity unless you’re using a large centralized wallet provider and using a large centralized wallet provider defeats the purpose of peer to peer digital cash that’s uncensorable.

Not this article. It’s free. Paid subscribers can read it without ads, is that what you meant?

Some of their posts they do reserve for paid subscribers, but those are usually behind-the-scenes type things, not the journalism.

I wish I could subscribe but I’m not $100+ dollars a year rich. Still impressive that they are doing DIY tech journalism.