I’ve found the biggest thing isn’t any real resource. My instance runs on a core 2 duo with 4GB of RAM, and I really try to get it to waste memory and barely fill the 4GB.

The thing is your instance will be blasted by all the other instances you subscribe to. If you subscribe to too many big communities you might find you’re locked out during peak times, but it should be just fine as long as you’re not crazy with follows like I am lol

One big difference between the json requests and a user callling for the site directly is your instance pulls all the data all the time, whereas a user only pulls the data they use themselves.

I don’t use RSS for lemmy or kbin communities. I’ve got nextcloud news for RSS feeds, and lemmy for communities I can interact with.

Depends on the specific instance. Some services run where they are natively accessible through tor, but most don’t.

Just remember that ActivityPub is a sharing protocol, and individual admins are fully capable of seeing everything. There is no end to end encryption, everything is stored in plain text.

I think the concept of an ideal may be flawed. What is ideal changes based on what the current situation is.

That goes for the ideal human body as well as the ideal human philosophy. We need to evolve constantly to fit with our current situation.

People get fat because famines killed people a lot. People have sickle cell anemia because sickle cell traits protect against malaria which killed people a lot. A lot of cancers are caused by mechanisms that protect against things that kill people a lot. Different personality traits that look suboptimal exist because those strategies were successful over time. Yeah these traits look bad when that situation doesn’t exist, but they’re much more likely to help in the aggregate than to hurt particularly with stuff like cancers which tend to kick in after an individual has reproduced so don’t have as much of an evolutionary impact.

A lot of the same goes for philosophies – people tend to follow what works, and what works at one time doesn’t work all the time – ask gen z as they’re given advice by boomers.

All this is one good reason to be wary of genetic engineering. We’ll get rid of all the “bad traits” and be wiped out because some of them were there for good reasons we don’t understand.

Stuff like wealth tax is being sold as a way tomfix inequality

That’s not really true though. You can choose between the blue uniparty and the red uniparty (and occasionally an orange or light blue or purple uniparty)

Its a false choice. You get to choose between different colors of corrupt establishment who become rich off of their time in government because it turns out when you give someone that level of money and power they’ll definitely find ways to get some of it for themselves.

Literally thought of it in the shower.

You’re not entirely wrong, but you’re not entirely right.

You can use a screwdriver to stab someone, or you can use it to fix something. It isn’t about the tool itself, it’s about what you’re doing with it.

Some people take social media and use it to connect to others, or they use it to help build something they wouldn’t have otherwise. Many people take social media and use it as a weak simulation of what they’re missing from their lives. It’s all about what you do with the tool.

That’s a good point too.

Honestly, the anti-establishment left and the anti-establishment right have a lot they could agree on if there wasn’t so much media pointing out the few things they disagree on (or inventing things to disagree on)

100% legit criticism.

I’ve been preferring new or top X hours ago, then just choose the X for the last time you visited.

I’m actually happy to see the reduction in echo chambers for myself because it does 2 things:

1. It reminds me that the people I think I disagree with have good points I need to remember, and
2. It reminds me that the people I think I agree with have terrible points I need to remember.

For someone who thinks for themselves, seeing extremism in some cases actually makes you less extreme because you see it and realize you don’t agree with it at all.

A bunch of people who have only been on lemmy for two months are telling someone who’s been here for years how things are.

Apparently you’re not aware that science is in a deep crisis right now on several fronts in part because academic researchers know full well they have to give the “right” results in order to advance their careers.

I was going to say this, I’m glad you did instead.

People’s opinions have changed a lot in the last 25 years. In the late 90s we got to see the last gasps of the real power of the religious right, in the early 2000s we got to see the dominance of the neoconservative right, in the late 2000s we got to see a massive shift leftward as a backlash against the religious right and the neoconservative right, then from the more chill hippie left wing we got to see the rise of the authoritarian woke left, and right now we’re starting to see a backlash against that. It isn’t always from different people, it’s often from the same people changing their minds.

For quite some time I’ve thought of it like steering a car. If you steer hard to the left you’re going to hit the ditch, if you steer hard to the right you’re going to hit the ditch. Really what you need is to course correct at times just stay on the road. Sometimes you need to turn the wheel pretty hard in one direction or the other, other times you want to just nudge the wheel, and get other times you don’t really want to move it at all.

Some regions voted hard for Clinton, then voted for bush, then voted for obama, then voted for trump, then voted for Biden. Such a thing might look completely inconsistent, but politics is a dynamic system where circumstances change, certain movements win and then we get to see the consequences of those movements, new movements form, and maybe old movements collapse.

This isn’t a new idea. Hegelian dielectic proposes that in politics, a dominant idea (thesis) eventually leads to its opposite or challenge (antithesis), resulting in a resolution or synthesis of the conflicting ideas. Such an idea predates Marx, so it’s been around for quite some time.

There are quite a number of examples historically of people completely changing their mind on a topic. The father of Canadian universal healthcare, Tommy Douglas, was a powerful advocate of eugenics when he was younger, and as he got older he realized that he made a terrible mistake and changed his mind. Solzhenitsyn apparently early on in his life believed in the Soviet project but once he learned of the gulags had his views fundamentally change. A lot of people like to pretend that national socialism died with Adolf Hitler in that bunker, but a lot of people believed in and supported national socialism in Germany, and those people continue to exist after world war 2, but I think it’s safe to say that for the most part they learned the error of their ways. I’m sure there are lots of people who supported Putin internationally in the 90s who wish they could go back and change that decision now.

To me it’s one of the deepest dangers of the purity spiraling we are seeing from the left right now. The fact of the matter is, as you kick more people out of the left, it becomes a less and less viable movement. As the left acts as if people become irredeemable the moment that their opinions are wrong, it becomes something that will inevitably fail.

I feel like the modern left would take a look at post war germany, and post to japan, and would just immediately start implementing genocide. “Nope, they were Nazis they are irredeemable they need to be pushed into the sea”. The most amazing thing about the end of world war II is the incredible wisdom with which the world powers helped to rehabilitate Germany and Japan into some of the most powerful nations in the world today, but for the most part lacking in the qualities that set them off to war and atrocity way back when.

Thanks to Big tech censorship, there are lots of people who are more anti-establishment right on the fediverse. Lots of fairly large instances. Some of them are real nasty pieces of work filled with folks dropping n bombs and swastikas, some of them are filled with some of the sweetest religious right folks you ever met in your life.

I think one of the biggest differences is that you don’t have the Jerry Springer algorithm trying to match up a bunch of black people with a bunch of KKK members. Most far right instances don’t defederate anyone, but many of the far left instances defederate the moment anyone looks at them funny so despite sharing a platform, typically there just isn’t that much engagement between the two groups. In the middle of there are instances that are more than happy to federate with both as long as they aren’t too big of jerks.

That’s just wrong. Totally ahistorical.

There’s a good chunk of the rest of the fediverse that’s more right leaning, for the most part they’ve actively avoided Lemmy because Lemmy was actively hostile to any kind of wrongthink. It was one of the things that really limited it’s growth because you could only be on Lemmy if you believed exactly what you were told to believe.

I stayed on the threadiverse through lotide despite it all, and despite having some pretty limited takes, I quickly found myself banned or defederated from many instances. To this day I don’t participate on those instances because I’m not welcome. Wolfballs and exploding-heads came to exist, but were similarly rejected and even now the very first thing to be done by many instances is defederating from those instances.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that some of the people who run fediverse instances are considering starting Lemmy instances now that the platform is growing.

Because the internet is not your friend and something exactly like this will happen. Then someone will take something you said totally out of context to try to get you canceled.

Yes. This isn’t big tech where tech daddy is sitting over your shoulder reading your messages to sell your info to advertisers.