I don’t want to take away from the general thrust of your point, I just don’t think we have actually seen boycotts that people were actually fired up en masse to enforce.

I think up until right this very moment the general center of mass of society has been largely ok with most of what capitalism is, I think that is going to continue to drastically change, and we will see a lot more wildcat boycotts of companies that significantly hurt them.

That being said I agree that overly focusing on that as a strategy isn’t necessarily wise, but boycotts are definitely a weapon that can absolutely blow up the bridges of corporate 'Murica.

Boycotts are performative stunts that feel good but don’t have impact on companies and even gets more attention ON those companies.

No they aren’t? People just haven’t actually been pissed off enough to actually wield the weapon of “ok, fine, now I will not buy ANYTHING from you”.

Boycotts most definitely work, Tesla’s stock is plummeting, and one of the major reasons is an aggressive and enthusiastic boycott of buying Telsas (also they suck).

This isn’t to say in any given situation a boycott is the best strategy to use, or that your organizing energy isn’t better spent elsewhere, but don’t dismiss boycotts when we are seeing one of the most effective high profile ones in recent memeory be VERY successful.

Yeah, this is the best solution at the end of the day for most would be text wizards, emacs is beautiful, vim keybindings are beautiful.

I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.

One man’s slowing growth is another man’s hardening growth (me, from reading this headline).

They should name their union Unionvision

Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal.

This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.

I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this

Right… isn’t the obvious response to this “holy shit, they really don’t have a business model even remotely figured out here???” which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of “sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions”.

This isn’t difficult, it is just exhausting.

What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has…

Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can’t stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.

Yeah sorry I am tired and I realized after re-reading your response and my response that I misread you and should have taken more time to think my response over I apologize.

Thank you for the thoughtful response, I am sorry I didn’t give it the space in my mind it deserved!

edit would it honor you if I flicked some snot at you in solidarity?

Of course, this is also something artists who create and performs art for an audience understands, as much as expression can be about vulnerability it can also be about lying, twisting the truth and getting people to agree to terrible things because the way you deliver it is charismatic or distracts sufficiently from the material reality.

All of this to say, yes, manipulation is still rampant, but we are talking in an a semi-abstracted space, manipulation will always be possible it is simply a question of how obvious it is to authentic users and/or how costly it is to create sufficiently convincing astroturfing bots and consensus.

Your response doesn’t invalidate my point (I don’t mean to assume it does or take a negative tone), my point is that public conversation where people explain their arguments and give sources and people can respond and critique each other with no centralized authority necessarily determining the existential ability of users to participate in the conversation (i.e. you get banned from reddit for mentioning luigi) is the best solution we have. This is the fundamentally difficult problem of social media, all the programming, scaling up of server architecture, design of protocols, UIs and coding of clients, apps etc… that is the easy stuff honestly.

I really have very little tolerance for people on the continuum of techbro to naive-libertarian that try to invent lots of technical hypothetical solutions to this that all either boil down to systems of centralized control, or wildly unrealistic systems that will never take off the ground like fantastic depictions of flying machines…

Lets get straight to the point, the hard problem here is that philosophically there really is no shortcut to tell AI slop from genuine real information, there also can fundamentally be no logical operation you can perform that can seperate the “real” from “bot spam” because you fail at the first step of defining “real” especially if you are a techbro or libertarian fool who has never thought through the implications of any of this (see the shitshow that is the social media hellhole gab).

I think a lot of people I am tempted to refer to as “centrist”, though that is a problematic generalization it is of course more complicated, want to believe we just need more authoritarianism and advanced technology to solve this problem, and it is ultimately a dangerous fantasy.

At a philosophical level, which let me remind everyone, is the level you need to talk at before you ever bother thinking about technical implementations and advanced AI fact checkers blah blah blah… the only thing we can really do is design spaces that make it most likely for the human parts of real information to shine through in a way that makes it apparent that it is unlikely that information was generated by a bot or by a nefarious actor.

This is a game of probabilities, like trying to guess someone’s intentions or understand what they are feeling, we might get very very very good at doing so but ultimately there is always a significant likelihood that we are wrong either because of a lack of context or just because that is how things go with unpredictable chaotic things…

So then how do we design spaces so that they let the authenticity of “real” things shine through? I would argue the answer is genuine, spontaneous conversation and interaction in public or semi-public shared spaces. Forums, lemmy/reddit-likes and other forms of public discussion create conversations and as human beings we are INCREDIBLY good at observing interactions between strangers and deducing if those interactions feel genuine or not.

We can often be wrong about it, but anybody that has done theater for any amount of time, or really done any kind of art for an audience, knows that though the audience may not be able to put into words why something feels inauthentic the moment it becomes so they notice. That is why art performed to an audience is so endlessly compelling and why you can spend a lifetime learning from it.

What we can hope to do, and will always at some level fail at because we can never be ideal, is to help build the “real” collectively through public conversation, disagreement, explanation and sharing of sources of information.

Exactly, and centrists will shrug their shoulders and say “well if they aren’t going to pay taxes, do they really deserve to be here?” and be completely clueless to how blatantly hateful this is.

No, it is far less environmentally friendly than rc bots made of metal, plastic, and electronics full of nasty little things like batteries blasting, sawing, burning and smashing one another to pieces.

Gimp 3.0.0 is fucking awesome, haters gonna hate.

There is already a killer plugin for Gimp 3.0.0 called “Batcher” that lets you batch edit and convert images (including pdfs) either with a GUI interface or from the command line. There are already plenty of tools that can do this from the command line, or that are commercial paid software… but this is a pretty damn powerful utility to have attached to a fully featured free and open source image editor that you could teach someone who is uncomfortable with scripting how to make a bunch of edits across a large amount of image files with.

https://github.com/kamilburda/batcher

Please do, don’t leave your fate in the hands of US tech companies.

Trust me I live in US and shit is getting bad.

Start the process now! Otherwise you will just be forced to later.