But I thought privatization is supposed to lower prices!

To keep everyone else in check. Just wait and see. Soon not clapping at a mandatory trump rally will be a felony.

What do you think are the better alternatives? I’m interested in the work others may be doing in federated protocols.

Also remember that protocols need some sort of authority to standardize, and having a reference implementation is extremely helpful.

XMPP ran into issues with too many non-standard extensions leading to feature fragmentation. I remember it being a source of confusion and part of what allowed Google to do the whole embrace, extend, extinguish dance.

Having a company back a protocol is a concern, but not necessarily bad. If the protocol is open anyone is free to fork, just like anyone is free to come up with their own protocol. Getting people to use the protocol is a different challenge as well.

I guess what I’m saying is that you’re right that there are some problems in this space, but as they say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy, and Bluesky have all taken is a step in the direction of open federation and have started to introduce that concept to more people. They’re not perfect, but a step in the right direction and way better than the closed centralized systems they loom to replace. There’s still a lot to discover in this space, but in the mean time I see no issue in using any of these things for now.

Not the first time Nazis have been defeated by the cold.

Finally somebody who gets it! How’s an investor supposed to make any money off of other peoples misfortune in this country!?

How?

I want less notifications.

Walk away from copyright and patent agreements or make enforcement contingent on a companies or officer of the companies current taxable standing ( can only collect damages up to some fraction of a companies or officer or the boards taxable income in Canada)

This is key and could really open up innovation in Canada.

Graphically we’ve had diminishing returns for quite some time now. I also don’t find myself that interested in the games from major studios because they’re generally just not very good.

I don’t see a reason to artificially limit myself, but there are more then enough games from the past to keep me entertained.

That said there are some games on the horizon I am looking forward to. The next Witcher and Civ VII come to mind. I’m sure their GOTY editions will be great!

If that’s the case then you probably don’t want to visit the site anyway. What are they doing that makes it so hard for them to not steal your data?

trump has opened the portal to Bizzaro World

So many "um"s and "uh"s! Is Poilievre Justin Trudeau???

This is why its important for us to retain the right to what Cory Doctorow calls “self-help”.

Our right to access and modify things are being stripped away and that gives the platforms even more power!

Today, if you released a tool to bring your Facebook friend list to another platform you’d get sued into oblivion.

Looool!!! Your question is answered right in my post! 🤣

I think ignorance (in the non pejorative sense) plays a big part. I can’t really blame my non technical friends for not fully understanding that ditching Facebook for Instagram doesn’t help. Even if they know it’s the same company, it’s still a totally different product, right? There’s also a certain apathy or need to just get something done.

I’m sure I’ve purchased things at Home Depot that would make a plumber cringe, but I know nothing about that sort of thing and I just need to get my sink working.

Still, I think those of us who do know should continue to lead by example. My friends know my stance on these things and some of them are coming around.

Geez! Tone down the rhetoric!

What a stupid comparison.

Any “young person” who think the cons are going to make things cheaper is going to be in for a surprise when more privatization and less regulation leads to higher prices due to more profit motive. We’ve had 40 years of conservative style economics, even from Trudeau. So how is more of that going to make it better?

Cool! Give it a go! Do you know about the Emacs Wiki? It was a pretty good resource many years ago when I had my own config. Not sure how it is these days though, but you might find some useful stuff there.

As for Spacemacs, I never got into it. At the time I found it more complicated than my own setup and a bit more confusing. I know a lot of people liked it though, and it was the first starter kit I’m aware of that really took off, so it might be worth a look!

I used to maintain my own Emacs config, but I switched to Doom years ago and never looked back. I appreciate the community aspect that lets it be better integrated and tested than I had time to manage on my own.

I use it as my primary environment for everything you mentioned and its excellent. The initial setup is fairly easy too.

And because it’s Emacs, if there’s something you don’t like, you can change it! 😄

I think that analogy falls apart because of Lemmy’s architecture, which makes it a little bit more complicated. In real life, the reach of people is limited. Extending reach IRL requires setting up external tools, like broadcasting, so there is some (albeit small) cost there.

But in Lemmy’s case, reach is immediately unlimited (barring an instance being blocked by your instance of course). Instances will automatically pull and display your content with no additional effort on your part. Lemmy is even stranger than other federated software because an instance can host a diverse variety of communities, so defederation may not always be the right choice.

I agree with you if it was like going to a private forum, but Lemmy’s open architecture is causing me to think about this a little more. Mass downvoting could be a signal that a community may be behaving in an inappropriate way. Or, if a community is organizing mass downvotes, that could also be a signal that they are behaving inappropriately. But the beauty of federation is that then is up to the community on the instance (ultimately the admins) to decide how to react.

Not to mention that in real life people do go to private events to protest. There were all sorts of protests when Tucker Carlson went on tour. I suppose they may not have been in the venue itself, so a bit different as well, but that sort of thing does happen.