tristynalxander

Right! Plus, it'd be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!

While I don't disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn't a technical issue but a financing one.

I've been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they'd be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it's not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.

Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to "salary overhead" while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves... Honestly, I'm probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it's just too perfect of a solution.

There was a similar post recently about Cambridge leaving twitter, and it got me thinking that universities are really the ideal organizations to host lemmy servers. They have a vested interest in truth and community building. They have a decent enough sense of free speech to stay federated with most other instances. They have pre-existing communities on topic ranging from clubs to technical subjects. Users can confirm their identities by association with the universities, which will keep things civil. Obviously I don't think they should be the only instances - anonymity has it's place and value - but I really think universities should be hosting instances.

So... invest in private prisons?

Maybe if we call it a "free vacation" we can send them all to Israel?

Yeah, Clockwork's channel is great. Given those interests you might like his other video on the color of fall leaves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOjkeyjJ364

Measures of democracy seem inherently problematic. Social technologies aren't voting or not voting. Little mechanisms synergize to produce radically different outcomes. For example America seems like it had a high ranking democracy for some time before a sudden drop, but in the background we've had first-past-the-post, gerrymandering, and dark money for quite some time. Similarly, even most (all?) of Europe doesn't have ranked voting with a citizen-lottery option.

With all the mechanisms in place to undermine the voting process, this becomes less a discussion about who has democracy and more a discussion about who has democracy vibes.

Good for them.

I'm a scientist, but I'm not about that whole confrontational competitive nation-states super-power nonsense. If the US doesn't care about science, that sucks for me, but I'm happy to see the work get done and the world made a better place.

mander.xyz is lemmy, so I don't know if it counts, but the local comms are all science oriented and have science articles. The server is supposed to be life-sciences oriented, but I think the space comm is one of the largest.

I can't wait to make a scene at the grocery store demanding they give me change in real money.