aasatru

Social media is probably the most powerful propaganda tool of all times.

In the 1960s you would say the same thing about TV, and you'd be right. Before that it was the cinema. It's not because the mediums as such are inherently evil, but they carry an inherent power that can be used for evil.

Currently, social media is very much being used for evil.

There is, however, another element to it, and one that is completely new for social media. That's the illusion that we can actually contribute in a meaningful way by participating.

Nobody believes they are actively fighting fascism by watching TV all day. Yet, on social media, well-meaning people are wasting their time shouting at clouds rather than going out in the real world and and actually achieve anything. They collectively tread in water as democracy dies, all the while they feel like they are "doing their part". In other words, social media is pacifying as fuck.

I participate in the Fediverse because I have hope that we are building something different here; something that can derail the platforms that are currently used for evil, and something where the organization of actual opposition can be possible. I think it might be. But I am also afraid I am just wasting my time.

Social media is literally just a fairly accurate reflection of us as a species and our civilization.

Strong disagree. Capitalists sell it to us as a mirror, but it's a distorted mirror that shows us exactly what they want us to see for whatever reason.

If they want to sell us diet pills, they will turn it into one of those amusement park mirrors that makes you look fat. If they want to overthrow democracy, they'll turn it into a mirror where everyone standing around you suddenly look suspicious and cruel. And if the Russians want to pay them to get control of what people will see in the mirror, hell - that's just freedom of expression.

Add on top that pretty much everyone on earth is staring mindlessly into the mirror for hours every day, and you got yourself what I would consider to be a problem.

I'm not active on Reddit. Super happy to help people out if they make their way over here, though!

It seems some users have some sort of group functionality and have had it for "quite a while", but I don't see it myself so couldn't test it.

But yeah, groups in Pixelfed have been "just around the corner" for a while now.

There are very recent updates. Judging from this comment, some users seem to have some sort of grup support already.

I don't see it on my Pixelfed instance. I'm not sure if that's because it's still on v0.12.4 (not the newest v0.12.5), or because it needs to be enabled by the admin. I also have no idea how it currently works.

People keep giving the advice of following hashtags. That might be good advice for really obscure ones where you're almost guaranteed to be interested in anything posted, but I think it's terrible advice generally.

Follow users, and hide their boosts or unfollow them if it turns out they make your feed less interesting.

I think it's a platform independent movement that is now on Lemmy. Not sure it started on Reddit.

Yeah, I personally don't believe in blacklisting specific words as a moderation policy in general.

I think it has served Lemmy well though - the automatic filtering of certain words might have deterred some deplorable people from settling down here. :)

I think it's fine like this - gets the point across!

I think the Lemmy devs included automatic removal of some words on the platform, but it can be disabled by instance admins. It caused some funny problems in the early days of Lemmy, as banned words could sometimes appear in completely harmless settings/inside other words. Not sure what has happened since or on which instances it's currently enabled.

In either case I maintain that there's a difference between free speech (cool) and hate speech (not cool).

I made a slight tweak to OP's image, in case people want to share the picture on other networks. :)

Not perfectly done, but I feel like it might be an efficient way to spread the word.

Leasing it to a farmer seems like the obvious choice. I'm not sure digital nomads would be all that interested in working in the middle of a field.

I'd love to see land like this returning to nature with native vegetation, but that would take a really long time and doesn't come with an obvious path to making a profit. Unless you sell it to developers for a higher price in a few years, of course.