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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Saskatchewan is the birthplace of the NDP (Canada’s social democratic party), universal public healthcare (ever heard of Tommy Douglas?), and historically one of the pillars of the labour movement. It’s now the most conservative province, but still has tons of new immigrants, racial and cultural diversity, good education, and well funded government services. The SK NDP ruled almost continuously from 1971 to 2006.

    SK is much more like midwestern farm states that were formerly pro-labour pro-union hotbeds but are now more moderate or conservative, like Iowa and Wisconsin.











  • You make it sound like the American left pushes a lot of symbolic issues. Which ones are you thinking of?

    Hot take: the American left loses on the material issues because it has lost on solidarity, symbolism, ideology. Don’t you know that healthcare and vacation days will “hurt the economy”? There are many poor working class people who still oppose Obamacare even though they directly benefit from it. The material gains matter a lot less if people reject the ideas behind them.

    I’m not sure if the timing of Labor Day is important, but I wouldn’t underestimate the power of symbols.


  • These are good points. But I wonder if the longer life really comes from it being a general purpose computer per se. The points you make are more about the internet connectivity of the device. You can use a DOS machine in 2023 because it’s almost like an appliance. It works just as well now as a text editor as in the 90s. But an internet connected device has to be supported, and good enough for today’s processor intensive web apps. That general purpose DOS machine, like the first iPad, is never running Discord or Netflix.

    Because they are a soulless profit-maximizing corporation, there will come a time when Apple stops supporting perfectly functioning iPads for no reason, but I’m not sure we’re there yet. The iPads they stopped supporting really do suck from a hardware perspective.


  • I agree the iPad is almost completely useless, but I don’t think comparing it to 13 years before the iPad is useful. My MacBook Air is 11 years old and it’s still great because it’s good enough to run YouTube, all the major websites, office suites, etc. It’s still getting security updates from Apple. I think that’s what 90% of people use a laptop for. A computer two years older than it, on the other hand, might be useless. It’s not really linear. Hopefully, iPads from 5 years ago can last over a decade.



  • I think you’re forgetting the other half of the slogan: decentralized social network. You want to maximize decentralization? Disconnect from the internet and type to yourself on textpad. What we want out of the fediverse are the advantages of bringing people together, with the benefits of decentralization. No one wants decentralization as an end in itself.


  • So, if cross-posts are not showing up in my feed, then I have to actively look for cross-posts separately in the communities? How would I even know they exist? That’s still not what I want. In other words, there are two kinds of cross-posts: (1) redundant posts to overlapping demographics. I don’t want to see more than one of these. (2) commentary cross-posts. I want to see these as separate posts.

    Sibling communities would hide (1) and not (2).

    I like that you’re imagining new ways to do this. That’s what I’m trying to do too. This brave new world of community created multi-communities honestly sounds a lot like sibling communities to me. There’s the question of who is making the multi-communities, and to me the natural response is “the communities themselves”. There’s less user friction if a community is just already affiliated with a bunch of other communities voluntarily.


  • I agree. I hesitated to cross-post this, but someone suggested I do so on the original post.

    But that shows a structural problem with the user incentives on Lemmy. The norm of discouraging cross-posting itself means that we have a system that actively discourages people from connecting with others. And if we’re actively incentivized to unsubscribe from multiple similar communities, that’s even worse! These are the opposite of the sort of incentives we should have in a healthy and viable social network.




  • This is a good idea too, but I do see them as different implementations with different advantages.

    • “Following” is much simpler to implement, because it uses mostly existing systems. That’s a big bonus.
    • “Following” is essentially automatic cross-posting, right? Presumably, everything from the followed community is cross-posted to the follower communities. I can’t think of when I would ever prefer that over getting selective cross-posts. Sometimes I don’t want to blast stuff out to all communities. Sometimes I want to post something in a local community, and other times I want to hear from all related (sibling) communities. Maybe it’s just too centralized for me.
    • Siblings are related to each other but retain their unique identity. A followed person doesn’t need to know or care about the follower, and doesn’t have to allow any input from the follower. “Sibling” relations are bidirectional, while “follower” relations are unidirectional (though both sides can follow each other). I think all this has a big functional difference.

    I suppose some of this is a matter of taste as well.