Not impossible, although, sadly - any system where anonymity is the prime focus will also invite fucked up shit in addition to legitimate use, without any complicated motives behind it. There’s just a relevant fraction of humanity who are, sometimes essentially, sometimes temporarily, messed up fucks. Which is why I think providing ways to combat abuse has to be a high priority for the underlying development of any project like it, unless it explicitly doesn’t aim for mainstream adoption.

I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.

A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.

It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study

Some key paragraphs:

Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.

After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.

The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.

But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.

They do link to the actual study, which does not throw up any immediately obvious signs to be cautious for me, but I also couldn’t do the detailed work of deeper research myself. They reference a hypothesis that preceded the study, which they were trying to test with this. I don’t know if this is a case of bias or even manipulation at work, but at least at a superficial glance, it doesn’t immediately scream “total hacks doing unscientific things.”

Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.

As only an amateur coder, I can’t weigh in how serious the issue is, but I’m gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it’ll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.

Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it’s just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I’m excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).

A great addition to the “Threadiverse” in particular, and the larger Fediverse!

You actually make a great point. Really, for me it was mostly a quick idea because I had been musing about PeerTube’s streaming capabilities in a different comment thread, and about how it leverages the P2P mechanism, so it was fresh on my mind that I wanted to stress-test my own server somehow (and I wanted to learn how to set-up OBS with chat and stuff for PeerTube). Then, while “working” on the canvas, I had the sudden: “Hey, I’d love to set my pixels while zoomed in, while also watching the whole field zoomed out”-thought … but of course that would just as easily be possible by just having two browser windows open 🤷

If nothing else, I got some promising data showing my server can handle several people tuning in to live streams at the same time - and I am also using this to test how my server handles someone wanting to encode a 24h+ VOD from a stream, so that will be there, too - probably for another time-lapse in addition to the official ones.

I guess the engagement bait “please contradict the headline”-title is working well, I always want to keep editorialising to a minimum when sharing videos like this, but this was one of those “what they meant could have been made a little bit clearer, and they knew it”-things.

Really the stuff he is talking about concerning that - mainly initial cost vs long term savings and lack of existing infrastructure/expertise - are just realities that are important to address in the political process. He could have gone into more detail considering Munich’s attempt at Linux (LiMux) - where to my knowledge the reason it failed was a combination of lobbying by Microsoft, Conservatives (CSU) winning the local elections, and costs (as well as employee complaints) from having processes be more complicated, the latter mostly thanks to Microsoft’s outright obstructionism concerning document format standards, as well as expertise being relatively costly (whereas finding MS-certified anyones in the office space was relatively easy). Those are considerations to have, but I think more and more, the advantages of Linux and Open Source clearly outweigh that stuff in the face of rising costs and enshittification, and he does talk about all the good stuff pretty well in the video.

Could that be the common ground for the India-Pakistan conflict to come to an end?

Done and done - it was about time I got an account there anyway.

That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.

That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.

Ah, I know what you are getting at, traditional Chinese medicine was indeed seen as a tool that could be applied without having to immediately import know how from abroad, and it did indeed create a basic, professional network of care that wasn’t there in that way before. I was more thinking of how practices like Feng Shui or the broad umbrella of “traditional Chinese folk religion” and associated beliefs were treated during the cultural revolution, which got some form of “rehabilitation” afterwards, often in a newly interpreted/sanctioned way.

There are definitely similarities, but China has its own fascinating history there, with a lot of traditional beliefs resurfacing as weird, sanctioned versions of themselves after the cultural revolution had mostly suppressed them. I think on average, the administration in China will probably have less “true believers” and more “stuff like this is necessary to maintain societal peace and harmony” opportunists.

But that is mostly speculation on my part and hard to gauge without looking into peoples’ heads.

Sort of, they also had weird currents of esoteric nonsense, like “Welteislehre” for example. Or Himmlers expeditions to Tibet to find the origins of the master race and evidence of supetnatural abilities. They believed themselves to be secular and anticlerical, but they had their own cult with superstitions.

And they absolutely hated some scientists, relativity was a thorn in their eyes, for example, as “Jewish Science”.

Psychopaths, sycophants and grifters vying for power were all very prevalent at German universities and research labs at that time. While Engineering still kind of worked - as it was needed for the war machinery and larger industry - even there, with it being “politically neutral”, there was a brain drain - because education allowing for creative thinking was curtailed more broadly, and many talented minds were killed or displaced or even just disfavoured in favour of more nepotistic choices.

And the myth of “German engineering” being fundamentally way above allied engineering during the war still holds in some circles, when mostly it was about different priorities (like - reliability instead of complex engineering, or the proximity fuse instead of rocketry, or radar instead of jet engines), and even in the spaces where Germans had a leg up on their enemies, it was not a fundamental advantage, but a gap that was being bridged even before German scientists were recruited after the war.

Yeah, Crusader Kings III taught me those existed, and not too long ago, it had me dive into a Wikipedia rabbit hole. They also used shade walls and radiative cooling to create ice during cold desert nights, which then remained long enough to be harvested in the morning and put into well-constructed ice houses like this. Also, wind catchers and Qanats.

One large problem there: All the people that are “stupid” in the way you describe think exactly the same way you do here. It’s why I think arrogance and the inability to stand being humiliated by deferring to other people’s expertise, as well as a feeling of being privileged to be above the needs of other people, as well as a paranoid fear of others intruding on your space is the more pressing problem.

I have lived with and worked with people with actual learning disabilities, thanks to my own different disability, and “stupidity” is not the problem, it’s okay to be stupid. It’s not okay to demand the whole world submit to your emotional wellbeing and feelings of superiority and privilege.

So, the gambit of authoritarian regimes in those situations is: If you see an opposition leaving controlled status and gaining popularity, and you know that suppressing that popularity (at their home) is hard, the main course of action is beating it down, brutally. Thought you could put hope into a candidate of your own choosing as people? Well, we will just put him into a prison and/or deport him, and/or terrorise you with blunt force, while telling everyone outside your group, that you are part of the evil to be defeated.

If that works or backfires on them heavily depends on conviction and organisation of the (working class) people of New York. So if you are part of that, don’t let yourself be intimidated, and be prepared for some fucked up suppression attempts. (best way of preparing is joining with organisations and networking with friends and neighbours for mutual aid and independent communication/info networks when shit hits the fan.)

They do have a tourism industry, composed of ideological “true believers” (not that big of a group), tourists wanting to experience the unique culture out of curiosity (or - in the more recent years - also to produce social media content), and tourists interested in the unique architecture.

In the overwhelming amount of cases, it also goes well enough, because it is a welcome avenue to get foreign currency for them, and despite what some may believe, the state is still fully within the dynamics of capital accumulation. (Other examples are: contractors in construction, where they have unique know-how in monumental constructions, which is also one of the places where the exploitation of their populace as wage labourers can become visible to the outside world - and selling stamps and other collectibles in demand for being “exotic” as they are from NK.)

But then, every now and again, you have cases like Otto Warmbier.