I am a socialist. What?

I advocate for free school lunches, free healthcare, free basic housing, free education, and free basic internet access.

You are simply demonstrating my point.

Everyone gets a little #CannibalCurious sometimes

Continuing, growing and stronging.

I am a rather happy guy who has a heart that bleeds for others.

you should not be on the internet then.

I like to envision the internet like it was New York City between 1975-1985. trash piled high in front of every building with an oppressive smog swirling down every thoroughfare. A dead hooker in every pile of trash, like some kind of hidden kinder surprise. how she got there, nobody cares, but I can guarantee that it involved enough coke to kill a horse.

piss on the seats, piss in the streets, and Wallstreet standing like some kind of middle finger while the city churns on, grinding babies into paste for the best pizza money can buy.

why did you feel summoned, what's your input?

stronking*

I'm only here because I got IP banned from Reddit for asking when they're going to launch Margery Taylor Greene into the sun.

Is there anyway to compare bots to real users?

lol

You've really got a gift.

I'm here for the awful post of "when are the guillotines coming?" In reference to the largest child sex trafficking ring ever that's being defended by the US gov.

This all sounds philosophical. How does this system actually solve problems in a society where scarcity exists? Do people still have property rights? Who enforces those rights? Who makes the decisions on where scarce resources are allocated? Our current system has answers for all of these questions, it's just contaminated by the influence of powerful scumbags. The thing is, the powerful scumbags are going to be scumbags in every system, and at least a decentralized market economy limits the ease with which they can exert control.

Are there? I don't notice much bottery.

Was it also in/r/politics and were you "promoting violence"?

Philosophy is a core component of Marxism, just like it is of liberalism. Philosophy is essentially the worldview and methodology behind ideologies. Liberalism is generally metaphysical materialism, when science first overturned the feudal idealists. The philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism, which advances from metaphysical materialism through developing our understanding of interconnection, development, and processes.

Q: How does this system actually solve problems in a society where scarcity exists?

A: I don't see how scarcity is a problem. Production is already socialized and deeply interconnected, the problem is that distribution is based on individuals owning the means of production and distribution. Collectivizing private industry doesn't mean we suddenly forget how to produce and distribute.

Q: Do people still have property rights?

A: As a matter of course, private property is sublimated into social property gradually. The material base of marketized production is in decentralized, scattered production. The material base of socialized production is in large, centralized industry. Markets naturally move towards the latter, which causes a conflict between the new economic base and the old method of distribution.

Personal property is to be respected and understood as that which people themselves use.

Q: Who enforces those rights?

A: Before production has been collectivized fully, classes will still exist, and thus the state must be under the control of the working class in order to actually enforce this. After all production is collectivized and owned socially, the mechanisms of the state that only existed to protect this status cease to have a purpose, and fade into irrelevance.

Q: Who makes the decisions on where scarce resources are allocated?

A: Administrators, workers that have been selected through democratic processes to make such decisions, both at local and larger scale levels. Think local councils, with delegates to higher councils, and delegates to higher councils. The fewest rungs necessary for effectiveness and the greater the level of participation in all levels, the better, but this depends on the level of development of the material base.

Our current system has answers for all of these questions, it’s just contaminated by the influence of powerful scumbags.

Incorrect. Capitalism necessarily is run by capitalists. There can be no worker control in capitalism, because capitalists already dominate the base of society, the means of production and distribution. The state exists to reinforce the base, not outside of the class struggle. Further, capitalism itself runs into crisis, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time.

The longer capitalism goes, the more centralized and more disparity rises, the more it risks total collapse. Production increasingly gets socialized, while a smaller and smaller group of people keep the spoils. This is skyrocketing in recent years, but has been steadily and gradually accelerating since the inception of capitalism as a system.

It cannot be fixed by replacing people, because the problems of capitalism are core to how it functions. Billionaires will always control capitalism until capitalism itself collapses. There is no such thing as a "decentralized market economy" any longer. Markets have long surpassed the level at which they play a progressive role in the developed countries. A tiny minority of companies control the vast majority of total production. Free market capitalism died long ago.

We reached the imperialist stage of capitalism in the turn of the 20th century, when bank and industrial capital merged into financial monopoly. These monopolies expand outward, fighting each other over domination of the global south. This was the primary cause of World War I, and it extended into World War II. After World War II, the world began to be dominated by the US, the dollar, its millitary. After a crisis in profitability, Reagonomics unleashed neoliberalism, saving capitalism temporarily by privatizing the safety nets created by FDR and destroying worker organizing. This is now reaching its own crisis, accelerated by the AI bubble.

The capitalist system doesn't weaken the control of scumbags, it entrenches them to the highest possible degree, and ensures that over time it will only get worse as production continues to centralize and wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. The only solution is collectivizing the economy and running it according to a coherent, scientific, collective plan.

if not bots then alt accounts.

just had one recently where I would comment, get a response, and immediately get downvotes from the same people over and over again.

I can say some pretty inflammatory shit, but I somehow doubt it's fascinating enough for people to camp my comments.

He got a notification that you replied to him, probably why he felt that

Good luck with all that, gonna block ya there bud

Hoping it's true, generally when I see posts about how strong and successful something is, it hits like a warning sign that it's struggling / at risk and someone is trying to project growth for attraction / retention.

I assume I'm not the only one with this kind of mental filter. Maybe there's a way to go about it that would get the impression across without ringing that alarm?

Maybe a show don't tell kind of tact? Like "check out all this new content being generated by the influx of users"... or a backhanded thing like "here's how to protect your insrance against recent traffic surges"?

Idk I'm no expert. Hope it's helpful but otherwise just ignore me~

It just seems like this system is capitalism with extra steps, but the extra steps involve replacing the exchange of money with the peddling of influence. The capitalists are replaced by administrators, the hierarchy of wealth is replaced by rank in the decision-making apparatus. I get that it's supposed to be democratic and protect the interests of the public, but so too is our regulated hybrid public-private system and we see how well that's going. It also seems like, where our market system began as distributed and decentralized, which was a strength, and began to be ever more concentrated as businesses consolidated and corrupted government, this new system starts consolidated and married to government. A lot of people would say this is too much power in the hands of the state, and ripe for theft by an autocrat. I'm not saying it's impossible for this to work, but the systems I have seen work best are those where the market does what it does and the government reigns in its worst tendencies when the motive of profit conflicts with the needs of people.

I wish there was a website that had like three major aggregators instead of just the one. The issue I come across is these sites all have something missing. For the fediverse observer, they sometimes do retro activity that doesn't pop up until you look at the graph again.

What I can tell you anecdotally is i am seeing a lot more engagement with content faces are sticking around last couple of months. So I pulled the numbers from the aggregator that I know at least lets you audit the numbers. But its still not perfect.

Why do you have 3 accounts?

Yeah you better do that. :)

Piefed auto-flags users it it thinks is bots and allows users to flag other users as potential AI bots. Its an interesting system. I like it so far but its on a system with less than 10k users. So not sure how the scale is going to work. Still its a step!

Fuck all that, idk it's good for kids to find stuff because they were literally born a few years ago, but if you're an adult you should know those sites really exist to mine you for data and you can just reach out to someone directly if you're interested in what they're working on.

The key disconnect is that the state itself is a product of the base of society. Marxists do not posit that we should merely merge with existing government and take it over, but smash the state apparatus and replace it outright. The capitalist systems of today, despite having a public sector, are entirely controlled by capitalists. The socialist states of today and the future, despite having private sectors, are thoroughly controlled by workers. Look at Cuba, and what it's able to achieve despite incredible blockade and sanctions. Look at China, where the underdeveloped parts are marketized and the developed parts are public, they even have a handy chart on what socialist construction looks like:

This is where philosophy comes in. Right now, your analysis is metaphysical. You see that in the past the market was more decentralized, and now that it is highly decentralized, you are trying to work backwards. This isn't how human societies progress, though. This new economic base that capitalism has created is already compatible with planned, social ownership. There is no such thing as a static system that is not evolving into something.

Dialectics helps us understand that capitalism has already played its progressive role, and that now it's time for workers, who already run the world, to take charge of it and own it. Marxism is a more scientific way of viewing the world than liberalism allows for, because metaphysics traps us in outdated forms of science, just like evolution proved older, metaphysical forms of biological categorization to be incorrect.

Exactly.

Fuckin cowards.

Becauase mastodon works poorly for lemmy, lemmy works bad for mastodon, loops works bad for lemmy and mastodon. Actually, I have four accounts because I wanted an account on mastodon exclusively for images.

Enlonging, embiggening, and stronging.

oh, that thing

Especially considering what they allowed when I joined in 2012.

Idk man, you're kinda right but also like what do we need cheerleaders for. Im gonna show this people and they're gonna sign up because lemmy is growing or something?

Idk just useless information as far as i can tell, theres no ceo of the fediverse trying to maximize growth or whatever so who is this for?

I'm sorry, could you explain how colonialism was confined to, based on what you're saying here, at latest the eighteenth century? Even then, you're saying you don't understand how a political system that emerged in the exact places colonialism benefitted represents a political system that emerged out of colonialism?

PieFed, as per usual, offers more features than Lemmy, e.g. PieFed.zip places a user-level instance block upon those highly controversial instances (not Lemmy.ml though), but then tells users how to remove that block. This is an ideal scenario, not forcing users hands as defederation would but offering a real choice, as opt-in, to interact with them.

On the other hand, PieFed has a lot of problems that I think are going to preclude a lot of people on Reddit from being excited about it. Most of the criticism has ended up being proven as disinformation... but not all. For instance, the aforementioned user-level blocks end up shadow-banning users without any acknowledgement to them that their content is not being received. That is somewhat Lemmy's fault for not being able to handle such blocks, but in any case PieFed decided to go ahead and do it regardless - which I support that choice btw - but then it does leave PieFed open to a criticism that it implements shadow-banning procedures. Which Lemmy does not, but at the cost of simply doing nothing at all about the situation.

And now PieFed is expanding upon that practice to shadow-censor votes coming in, even from Lemmy or Mbin instances, whenever the user exceeds a daily vote quota. Which is nowhere explained to the users whose votes are being discarded. I've heard multiple communities canceling their plans to migrate from their current location on a Lemmy instance to a PieFed one over this issue. Note that it is theoretically possible for an instance admin to change this behavior - but it is opt-out, not opt-in, and it was barely announced at all, leaving many admins surprised at the new behavior occuring on their machines, plus it went against strong community push-back, citing logic that I think I've only heard one person say that they understood and agreed with.

The primary criticisms of the Threadiverse are lack of content overall and the fact that it is too confusing for people's tastes. PieFed has made MAJOR strides in making things simpler for people, but as I have described above, it is also making things even more complicated in some other ways. And the crux of it seems to be: PieFed wants to become more like Mastodon, a place for "serious discussions", not a place for social media like with memes and where people upvote content in order to make people feel good emotionally. Which, if true, would be 100% fine btw, except that it claims to be the opposite, hence muddying the issue enormously, forcing users to discern the real truth particularly when it is in direct contradiction to the words they are told about it. i.e., this place is too confusing for people to want to figure us out - it is far too much effort, for very little gain, compared to them simply remaining on Reddit, no matter how enshittified it becomes.

I've often wondered if this is where the internet will be headed. Not bc it's "better" than what we had before with the free and open Internet of ye olden days, but in situations where it becomes the only thing that could ultimately survive the onslaught of enshittification.

Pretty much, yeah. Except PieFed still exists whereas Kbin died off, though originally the two existed side-by-side. Rimu has even grabbed code from PyLova before, so I presume they will end up sharing back and forth despite the personal contention.

You have been added to the best of Lemmy https://sh.itjust.works/post/67282965

I don't know, Lord Pointless. I thought something foul was said. Forgive me, I will recide to the back of your mind.

Theres a book series, a lit rpg called tunnel rat that goes over a "post internet" as part of its lore. Its an interesting thought experiment. And I can see localized meshnets becoming a bit more popular.

With peertube and a city wide network, you stop having to worry about copyright as much.

I am the CEO of the fediverse but I'm struggling. If you send $7 to my account, I will reimburse you $2m when we succeed. My scam coin wallet address is "0", please reply quickly... I can not hold long

The people reddit is banning is really just sending us their best people. Welcome.

Oh shit. Wait, no. It was just a joke. I don't wanna be "cannibal man". Damn... senior year will be really hard for me, won't it? No one will want to sit next to me in the cafeteria. Some kid will be like "I hear he packs his own lunch" and everyone will gasp.

It's okay Seth, calm down. Being known as "cannibal man" is way better than being known as "fart man" like Pat in homeroom.

Moisturizing. Focusing. Inourlaneing. Flourishing.

Not welcome, corporate shill

Corporate account.

They're a corporate account.

I'm sure that it could be infiltrated eventually, but so long as it remains small that shouldn't be worth the trouble. It's an intriguing idea! :-P

First fediverse site I encountered was moving train radio, a podcast that cited Israeli war crimes in every horrific detail for hours.

It should be played in every church service in North America every week.

Dammit