As an European, I have never understood why so many American leftists don’t see that, even by simply listening to what he is saying or looking at what he is doing. I mean he literally has a picture of Eugene Debs on his desk and mentions how he is this political role model and hero any chance he gets, that alone should tell you where he stands on an ideological or philosophical level…

And of course, he has been involved in various socialist groups his whole life and literally still calls himself a democratic socialist. Why would he do that if it wasn’t true? To gain a political advantage, in America of all places, where calling yourself a socialist would have generally been political suicide?

And then are his policies, where many will focus on healthcare and say “he just wants healthcare” and ignore anything else. But of course, healthcare is a major issue because it makes the working class even more dependend on their employers because they lose tgeir healthcare if they get fired, so it makes sense for him to focus on tgat first. And of course, he also had other policy in his program, like transfering 20% of ownership over major corporations to their employees and having workers electing half of the board of directors.

You can call him a reformer, you can call his participation ineffective, but why deny his political believes?

He wasn’t even a social democrat. At the time, social democrats were democratic socialists, the shift away from reformist socialism happened around the 80s (some social democratic parties still hang onto reformist socialism, at least in theory).

He was a smart liberal who realized that in order to save capitalism from collapsing again, some regulations are necessary. In Europe, similar policy was often pushed by social democrats, which sometimes leads to confusion. But actual social democrats at the time went (or at least wanted to go) further, like nationalization and socialization of major industry, worker representation at companies, and increasing worker and union power in general.

Social democrats stated endgoal was a socialist society. FDR’s endgoal was to protect and maintain capitalism.

Edit: Also, Bernie is definitely a reformist socialist, I will never understand why people think otherwise. He literally mentions Eugen Debbs, one of the most influencial socialists in American history, as his role model and hero every chance he can… And he praises the nordic model because the nordic model was literally pushed by reformist democratic socialists… Here is Olaf Palme, one of the most important figures when it comes to the nordic model and prime minister of Sweden (until he was murdered), explaining why he is a democratic socialist:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7i2Ws1X5DSA

Just imagine a conservative politican, calling themselves a fascist, keeping a picture of Mussolini on their desk, saying he is their political role model. Would you claim that he isn’t really a fascist? It’s not even as if Bernie Sanders was dog whistling, he couldn’t be any clearer about his believes… Yet somehow, so many American leftists seem to sonehow doubt his intentions? Why? Because he isn’t radical enough? Because he isn’t throwing molotov coctails at the police? What does he have to gain from falsely calling himself a socialist??

The man’s presidental campaign was giving 20% of major corporations to it’s employees and having about half of the board of directors be elected by workers, among other stuff…

if you don’t even want to acknowledge his values and his ideology simply because he is playing the politics game and is a reformist, send him to Europe, we would love a genuine leftist like him with so much charisma. I don’t think you appreciate him…

Imagine dedicating your life to fight for a better life, involve yourself in the civil rights movement, work in various socialist groups, calling yourself a socialist and calling for major industry to be socialised, being constantly attacked by right wingers for your socialist believes, etc, only for fellow leftists denying that you are a “real socialist”…

Of course you can still be fired instantly for huge mistakes but it’s difficult to prove for them which is why I’ve never seen it used.

I have seen it a few times, but there have to be severe and generally repeated offenses, though you can get fired instantly for stuff like serious stealing from the company. But then again, there was once a dude who tried to start a fist fight with his bosses’ boss, which apparently wasn’t enough for him to get fired instantly.

As far as I know this is standard at least in western Europe, I believe it is required by law, but it could also be defined in general contracts.

And it’s not just for the employer, it’s mostly for the worker since if you get fired, the employer needs a good reason (repeated or severe breach or contract) to immediately end the contract. So unless you fuck up severely, they still have to pay you for 3 months while you are looking for a job.

And in practice, most are aware that during this time period, they effectively can’t really control you all that much. Sure, if you just don’t show up for work at all or obviously breache the contract, they don’t have to pay you, but otherwise, what are they gonna do, fire you?

In some jobs you can essentially get 3 additional months of paid vacation if they don’t need you to teach the new guy or if they are scared that you could be a pain in the ass, so they just send you home while they pay you for 3 months.

I’m not a law expert or anything like that, but as far as I understand it, personally identifiable information could potentially also apply to public comments or posts that contain personal information. For example, if I posted revenge-porn of you on lemmy (or any personal information), you would have the right to demand it being deleted.

Is that not a correct interpretation?

I mean those features are addictive, so it isn’t that odd that people want their fix.

No. States are inherantly authoritarian entities, but authoritarianism is not simply a synonym for fascism. Authoritarianism is essential to fascism and fascism is always authoritarian, but not all forms of authoritarianism are fascist.

who the hell comes up with some questions like that?

I mean the obvious answer is of course young teenagers, especially if their family has a uncomfortable relation to sexuality.

I have been playing squad on linux without any issues for a while now, I don’t think I even had to do any tinkering.

I mean I couldn’t do that either, not for very long at least. I have the tendency to walk around aimlessly when doing something like that (same when I’m on the phone), which means I have to clean the floor after. So mostly I either brush my theeth in the shower or I sit down/lie down.

Damn, I just noticed that my theeth brushing habits are probably very weird, bit hey, at least that way I do it 2 - 3 times a day.

When it comes to cutting expenses, government institutions are always very interested, so it makes sense to outsource all sorts of things.

On paper, sort of. Government IT projects are often seen as cash machines by private businesses where I’m from because there is often a generous budget and government institutions tend to want to use those budgets completely because if they don’t, some will start wondering if they really need that much budget or if it maybe can be shortened a bit… There have been notorious cases where there were huge projects that ended up being even more expensive than initially planned because the private contractors just milked it. And there is of course a lot of mutual masturbation between government institutions and big tech.

And government institutions tend to follow the private sector. The private sector has been pushing to the cloud for a long time now to the point where virtually nobody is suggesting or providing support for on-premise solutions. When every IT contractors says that moving everything to the google/microsoft cloud is the state of the art (and that there are 0 downsides to it and everything is 100% secure), most will not question it.

some countries have decided that all of mining industry, railways, electricity and water must be kept in government hands, no matter the cost. Same sort of things can happen with IT services once you burn your fingers badly enough.

Recently there has been somewhat of a push for open source solutions and big tech independent solutions for government institutions as they start to notice the downsides and potential security risks. And I mean it’s absolutely ridiculous, there are entire IT projects where entire systems and solutions were developed to provide a secure software solution for the military (costing hundreds of millions), but then they want to share those files with sharepoint online…

You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.

Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it’s not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.

Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.

Well because “cloud is the future” and hosting your own instances is not “cost effective”.

For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.

Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that “they will take care of everything, you don’t need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything”.

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would “start the browser” and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a “hacked version” of firefox…

wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.

So that admin wants to actually make sure that there is only legal and ethical content on their platform? How is that “abuse”? How else are they supposed to protect themselves against legal accusations that they are hosting illegal porn? The admins here aren’t working for multimillion dollar corporations, it’s probably just a matter of time until corpo social media starts targeting popular instances by exactly this kind of legal action…

ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?

Yes and no. There are certainly concerns with “little dictators” hosting instances or individuals with an agenda manipulating content on their instance. The difference to a site like reddit or twitter is that this power and influence stops at the instance border, nobody controls lemmy, so people can always migrate to another instance if something like this happens.

And with reddit, admins don’t just control individual subreddits. There are of course admins that control all of reddit.

REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

This is just an normal characteristic of decentralized services in general and I think it will resolve itself over time. There are of course also many different websites that host similar content and there are similar subreddits that host similar content. Over time, one will establish itself and become the main community.

I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

Information tends to be more transparent and open on the fediverse. Stuff you post on lemmy is not private. Your personal information you provide when signing-up is of course readable by the person who hosts the instance or people who have admin access. However, at the moment at least, lemmy instances are not run for profit and don’t use/sell your data for profit.

There are privacy concerns, there are always privacy concerns. It’s important to teach users how to protect themselvs by consciously controlling what information they reveal about themselves. This is much more important and effective than trying to control what others might do with your information.

This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases.

Here I have to speculate because I just don’t know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.

Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable issue.

I think you might have replied to the wrong person?

If you seriously compare socialism with opensource then I’m sorry for you.

This is how big tech saw free software until quite recently. Microsoft used to call linux communist.

FOSS basically goes against the concept of private property of software and embraced common ownership of software. Without private property, there is no capitalism. I wouldn’t call FOSS communism or socialism, but there are elements in it.

You wouldn’t have react.js without capitalism.

Ok, and what’s your point? If you read Marx, one essential point he claims is that without capitalism, there cannot be socialism.

They could have used different library for js. one made totally by volunteers, but they haven’t. Why?

Probably because they saw no use in reinventing the wheel? And why should they?

It’s as if you told a revolutionary during the French revolution “You used weapons that you looted from the Bastille, weapons that were produced by the king.”. What exactly would be the argument here?

the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”

Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site “child friendly” is because content for children is incredibly profitable and because advertisers don’t want their ads getting related to “controversial” content.

Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.

This is the reason why I don’t like equating socialism with “workers owning the means of production”. Worker-cooperatives can exist in a capitalist economy, which means they have to follow capitalist rules (including the drive to generate profits).

When leftists say “workers”, they generally mean “the 99%” or “the working class”, not individual workers. When leftists say “the means of production”, they mean the economy/industry overall, not individual companies.

If youtube was owned and operated in common, it would not be bound to profitability, but to use.

We can also look at something like peertube, which is essentially a commonly owned version of youtube. Instead of being guided by profitability, it is used based on many different use-cases. There can be peertube instances that are completely private, there can be peertube instances that are used for a specific topic or community (for example kids) and there can be peertube instances which are not for children at all.

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Yeah I’m not sure why it’s nowadays common to simplify socialism as “workers owning the means of production”. It’s not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it’s employees is not necessarily “socialism”. In today’s global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don’t orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about “workers owning/seizing the means of production”, they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means “the working class”, which would be pretty much everyone (“the 99%”). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.