tikitaki

there's an argument that it's better to know rather than not know. i understand the ideological stand against Meta and everything it stands for, but it's easy to judge from the outside looking in. we don't know what he knows

while no doubt true, russian ~~kgb~~ fsb is some of the best intelligence in the world I'd imagine. it's one of those groups I would not wanna be on the wrong side of

you reduced my comment and favorited your own. lol

look - nobody has given me a concrete mechanism by which they could do damage. neither on here nor on mastodon where I've had similar conversations. @thesanewriter was the only one who attempted to give some sort of method - and his was that Meta's platform could become so popular it steals users. That to me isn't really unique to the fediverse

I'm not gonna hop over to Meta's platform just because it's nice and shiny.

But look at the potential benefits of Meta investing heavily into the fediverse.. we're talking millions and millions of dollars in development. i say milk meta for all they are worth, they're a failing company anyway, this is a desperate attempt on their part

I understand the concept of embrace extend extinguish

i just don't see a significant chunk of fediverse user giving up on open source instances and flocking to Meta's instance. I can't imagine what kind of features they could add that could accomplish this. Sure, they could make a site that's more polished but if Meta enters the game, we're going to be seeing a huge influx of both users and development. open source alternatives will likely be very close in parity

i think when considering this whole situation we need to calculate the potential positives and calculate if it's worth the risks - and those positives include huge amounts of money and people. this could be enough to push the fediverse to the next level of adoption.. the dream of having a decentralized social media system could become the standard in such a future.

ok i'm not saying they won't but i've asked this before and nobody seems to be able to provide some mechanism by which they would destroy it

is the system not federated? if meta starts acting up, can't everyone just defederate them? this is what i'm not getting

if someone can explain to me what exactly is dangerous, i would appreciate

i have food but i still need it too

i think there's merit to sarcasm depending how it's done. satire can be a powerful tool to poke holes into ideas.

but like many things in life, you need tact and a bit of self awareness

It doesn't need to be said that Meta is purely driven by profit - that is any corporation. But Meta is incompetent and failing - yet still a behemoth. If they want to pour millions of dollars into the fediverse, then we don't we let them? They would presumably just be another site on the fediverse.

I totally support them joining on assuming it doesn't change the fundamental structure of the system.

No real way to know. If we assume technology keeps advancing at the exponential rate, we'll all be in the metaverse or bionic cyborgs or something. 100 years ago we had just finished WW1 where airplanes and tanks were a new technology. We went from telegraphs to near- instantaneous communications across the planet. We went from the old Fords to having self-driving cars. The internet was created and then eventually popularized and now we all have constant access to the internet in our pockets no matter where we go.

There are some things we can know for certain and others we can guesstimate. For example carbon emissions will have a noticeable impact in 100 years. The temperatures will be higher, there would have been some amount of sea level. Probably not enough to drown Miami but enough to cause serious problems for people all across the world. Our agricultural systems will be put under serious pressure as temperatures change and lower productivity in certain areas (and increase it in others).

I think the future will be good for countries like Canada / Sweden / Russia because global warming will more or less only help them. A lot of land will become better for agriculture / more habitable. Of course they will probably have to deal with some sort of refugee crisis from the global south.

That's of course assuming human society doesn't totally collapse / change because of nuclear war / some sort of terminator AI.

debate bro and own you online

don't worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I'm glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here

so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You're absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn't mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).

I agree that I'm not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don't think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky's beliefs. I'm a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.

Anyhow, if you want more detail about the whole thing with Chomsky.. there's a page on Wikipedia that goes over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair

Here's what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson's alleged "anti-Semitism." Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi -- such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here -- this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read -- largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him -- I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort

I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended

If we give up the principle, we lose everything.

“Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing

I'm sure he would say this. But in this specific case it's more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there's a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that's what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He's a Jew in his 90s.

But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because "the issue has been resolved". What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I've read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.

But again, the point isn't whether the researcher was wrong or right. It's just that we can't set the precedent that certain topics are "finished" and can't be modified anymore. Because at that point we're not doing science or research - we're falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.

So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn't read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a "genocide denier" and a "CCP tankie"?

This immediate lashing out when experiencing "wrongthink" is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren't good guys and there aren't bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone's a bad guy. But I think you get my point.

Regardless, I appreciate your comment.

@tomve_cz how am i stalking you? i've never seen you before

and of course this site is going to be left-leaning. it's based on collective ideals where everyone groups together in a federated system to reduce the power of one main actor

it's essentially anarchism expressed through social media. it's about as left as you can get.

but my friend I challenge you to realize that left isn't bad. just don't be a snowflake, stick around and talk to us. learn and participate. as long as you comment with an open mind then you will do fine here

even if you are a right winger, if we can agree that big tech companies are bad we can team up to grow this site

@szczur