I hear you, and agree it’s unlikely that Lemmy will change the world. But frankly I’m surprised how little faith you have in the platform you help moderate. Why are you doing this if you don’t think what happens here matters?

Even though small internet forums are politically insignificant in the grand scheme of things, certain behaviors/topics can still be annoying for the people who frequent them. Beehaw as an instance is interested in curating a pleasant experience for their users and are simply following through on that by introducing a temporary break from a topic that's prone to ragebait until people have had time to calm down.

Mozilla is looking pretty cooked, NGL.

Oh yeah. I've always thought that Tlaib is the best of the squad members, personally.

She's a DSA member and is endorsed by Detroit's DSA chapter, which only endorses candidates that support:

• A “Green New Deal,” e.g., rapid decarbonization of the economy, a federal jobs guarantee, a just transition;
• Increased Income and Wealth Taxes on the Ultra Wealthy;
• Healthcare as a Right ( i.e. , Medicare for All or state-level single payer proposal);
• Reproductive Rights;
• Enhancing Labor Rights ($15/Hour Minimum Wage, Card Check, Ending Right to Work, etc.);
• Education as a Right ( e.g, , strengthening public schools, pulling the plug on charter school proliferation, free or public colleges);
• Suitable Housing as a Right;
• Clean Water as a Right ( e.g. , ending municipal water shut offs, ending privatization of fresh water);
• Student Debt Relief/Forgiveness;
• Comprehensive Immigration Reform, e.g. , a path to citizenship for all, abolishment of ICE;
• Abolishment of the Death Penalty;
• Abolishment of Private Prisons and an end to mass incarceration;
• Rejection of Corporate Donations/Super PAC Money;
• Ending Wars, U.S. Military Intervention, and Nation-Building;
• Paid Vacation Time, Sick Time, Family Leave, and Childcare;
• No Selling Arms to Human-Rights Violators;
• Extensive Police Reforms ( e.g. , special prosecutors to hold police accountable);
• End the War on Drugs ( e.g. , amnesty for prisoners held on possession charges);
• Justice and national freedom for Palestinians.

Would be nice, but their fanclub seems more interested in blaming everyone else for their humiliating failure this year rather than doing any sort of self-crit or reflection on their dogshit political system, so what they'll probably do instead is just run another uncharismatic shitter and move right. I just hope that there's enough of a demographic shift over the next 4 years that makes it easier for actually good candidates to get into position.

The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I'm interested to see how he's planning to handle this and I wish him luck.

Occasionally when I'm searching for something, I'll check out some Reddit links and honestly it's a crapshoot as to whether half of the comments have been deleted or not. Useful search results are getting to be a pain to come by.

Yeah, it's really weird that people keep acting like Reddit hasn't been astroturfed to shit for years at this point. I wouldn't trust the product reviews I see there.

My personal favorite from the NYT hall of shit is from back in 1922 when they published an article about Hitler, which uh:

But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.

A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: "You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them."

lmao

It's been a worthless trash rag for longer than any of us have been alive.

Night in the Woods was made by DemSocs and is basically exploring the consequences of neoliberalism on a rust-belt town.

Infrastructure for a 300 MAU Mastodon instance isn't very much, but if they're paying employees to run it then that will drive expenses up quite a bit compared to how it is with volunteer-run instances.

American socialism has the demilitarization of the police and ending police brutality as key policy goals, so news like this is of interest to keeping tabs on that problem.

That's a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.

Hopefully Pocketpair wins, because they made the better monster catching game. I'm still reeling from how bad the performance is in Scarlet/Violet.

It's because they'd have to install it to use it. I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME over a year ago and there hasn't been a single Linux-related issue since. Most people use their computers as Facebook and YouTube machines and Linux doesn't make that any harder than Windows/MacOS. It's not like it's 2010 where you'd need to install some desktop app that doesn't have a Linux version and you'd have to fuck around with WINE, which was a massive pain in the ass and often buggy even if it did work. Now in 2024, those apps are in the browser (barring more niche use-cases) and we have access to Firefox and Chrome like everyone else. If Linux shipped on most pre-builts, then I think the average person would be fine.

GTK 2 has been EoL since 2020 (GTK 3 released in 2011). GIMP 3 marks the completion of the GTK 3 port, which by itself offers:

• Moving to an actively supported version of GTK (and future migrations will be easier because the difference between 3 and 4 is a lot less than the difference between 2 and 3)
• Better graphics tablet support
• Better handling of HiPPI displays
• Better Wayland support
• Should also mean that they finished refactoring the code, thus making it easier to implement new features.

And on that last point, I would say that the biggest benefit overall with the release of GIMP 3 is that we'll finally, finally start seeing serious work on implementing non-destructive editing; I've read that some of the preliminary work is going to be shipping with the 3.0 release.

Did you manually set the icon theme in qt5ct/qt6ct? I recall having to do that on a fresh install.

You just download and put the theme files where it tells you to (and in the qt6ct folder too) and set the theme (and icon theme) in the app. Icons breaking is interesting; I just installed Dolphin and it had no problem using my icon theme. Does PCManFM-Qt also have this issue for you?

Did qt5ct/qt6ct not work for you? There's also Kvantum support.

But it’s getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems – global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order… how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.

Privacy as a cause is something that helps support other forms of activism. We live in a world in which hostile state actors routinely surveil activists in order to more effectively divide, subvert, marginalize, and intimidate them; privacy is important counterplay against this. It's like saying that you're not going to eat healthy because exercising is more important; one facilitates the other.