The wealth disparity is the same, but the populace and circumstances are a bit different:

1. There was not a literal fascist propaganda news network brainwashing half the voter base (Fox news)
2. There wasn’t a significant population which believed any ol conspiracy tossed at them
3. His political opponents didn’t have a cult, comprised of anti-intellectuals
4. We didn’t have an enemy state attempting to influence our elections (at least, not nearly on the same level)
5. Had a serious left-leaning populist political opponent in Huey Long (before his assassination) preaching his Share the Wealth progam.

I don’t disagree that it was a hard fight for the working class to even get that much, even without those externalities

I’ve gotten an extremely similar comment on a couple posts I’ve made here on lemmy, in a video community no less.

Personally I just said something’s like “welp, sorry that’s not your preferred format.” and then just move on.

With how infrequent posts like that are, they don’t effect me at all, but It’d probably suck more if I was consistently getting negative comments like that,

With the current voting system, no real restrictions on billionaire funding, and a complicit mainstream media… I don’t think we’re gonna get much from electoralism at this point, we’re kinda on our own. FDR didn’t have all these obstacles back in the day.

The minute that the community is able to meaningfully rest control of ATProto away from bluesky and host fully independent servers that can intercommunicate, I no longer have beef with it. if it can be made too work with activitypub later and they can learn from each other and improve, I’m all for it.

the hesitation at the moment is that first step may not be achieved, from what I understand.

The Bluesky firehose throughput is massive and any home ActivityPub instance that tried to enter the network would easily be overwhelmed just loading the basic home page feed.

AKAIK, activitypub (on mastodon) only requests and receives content from individual users that have been followed by someone on the local instance, it wouldn’t load all of bluesky at once, it would just need to have an up to date database of bluesky’s users so they are easily searchable. With that model, even crappy PC’s can interact with the mega servers.

Plus, many ActivityPub folks don’t want to federate with big companies anyway.

With the OP’s point of ATProto being open-source, I assume the thrust of the argument is that at done point there would be a community hosted instance, which were it compatible, I think most activitypub se rvers would gladly federate with.

I don’t think ActivityPub is made for large servers

Ideally there doesn’t need to be any, as the conglomeration of all smaller instances should be able to act as a large server. Unfortunately as it currently stands, the UI of most fediverse software makes interacting with that wider pool more difficult than it needs to be, and thus punishes smaller Mastodon servers with more difficult discovery of interesting topics or people to follow. But I think that can be overcome simply with better UI design.

AP works well for following friends and family, it’s kind of terrible for the tailored topic based social media feed most people want out of social media apps these days.

Again, I think that’s a UI problem. I don’t use mastodon myself because of it, as I find it difficult to find people that interest me. However, Lemmy’s use of Topics, and more critically, the existence of Lemmyverse.net which searches across all instances, make finding interesting things possible regardless of the size of your home instance. It’s criminal that that functionality is not a native feature in the standard lemmy Ui, and I’m not aware of anything similar for mastodon.

I’d rather that ATProto was just compatible with activitypub to begin with, or allowed for meaningful federation.

The ability to scale up into a behemoth like twitter will only be viable for a minority of people who can afford the infrastructure to do so, and with that level of centralization comes a certain level of control and allowable viewpoints. Not the worst thing if the people running it are good folk, but that’s always reliant on luck, and your chances to roll a good team lessen dramatically with such a small pool of servers. Not to mention the inherent problem of adequate moderation on mega servers, where the ratio of mods/admins to users can quickly become overwhelming, especially if reliant on volunteers who don’t like the feeling of just being a cog in a greater machine.

ActivityPub, on the other hand, allows for anyone to host an instance with an old laptop, while still having access to the big picture.

The argument should not be to tolerate ATProto since it’s easier to use, it should be to rile up support to make Activitypub’s interconnections so intuitive and smooth to use by default, that it can easily offer those ‘big social media vibes’ to those who want it.

The potential social benefits of truly federated, Citizen Owned media cannot be overstated.

I was speaking more about Community (equivalent to a subreddit) moderation, as opposed to instance level moderation from admins, since for the most part a community mod is what users will be interacting with.

I wouldn’t worry much about .world being your home instance. The only real downside is you can’t post or comment on Beehaw, since they defederated from World due to a lack of moderation tools on their end.

.World is the largest instance, so if you wanted to help spread the load across the fediverse and prevent centralization, you could export all your subscriptions to a new account elsewhere.

If you go that route, I’d personally recommend looking for an instance that at least has Hexbear and Lemmygrad in their block list. Lemmy.cafe is a good choice for a smaller instance, while Sopuli.xyz is a solid medium sized one, both general instances. But if you’d like a more themed instance that appeals to you, by all means go for that instead. https://lemmyverse.net/ or the instance finder tool at https://join-lemmy.org/ are good places to find one. :)

on reddit, you have to hope an admin replaces a bad mod. On lemmy, you can create a competing community that’s well modded, and the user base will generally want to be where the mods are chill, and follow.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the idea of continuing to limp Reddit along until enough people switch, and only then torching it. That didn’t work for twitter, as Mastodon was available for years, but people only properly migrated away from twitter when it became unbearable to use. AFAIK, Digg died a similar death.

I suspect we would get a more steady stream of migrants here if Reddit became so blatantly pro corporate that they censored posts in the way you describe. Then people would actually be motivated to switch.

If the mods are already behaving in the way reddit desires for fear of removal, would installing proper puppets make much difference?

Were I in their shoes, I’d prep my community to switch to lemmy, then wait to be removed. But I’m quite biased against reddit :p

I don’t see why they wouldn’t just let the reddit Admins deal with it, honestly. they’re unpaid workers, let the paid managers step in if they must.

Oddly enough I actually pre-ordered a physical copy of Primordia, and got a ways into it before stopping for some reason. I should really go back and finish it!

Mastodon is part of the same interconnected network as Lemmy and Mbin, called ActivityPub, but the experience they give is pretty wildly different, and how they interact with each other varies.

So Mastodon is it’s own app or website, but anyone can start their own mastodon on their own personal server/computer, and it can then interact with anyone else’s mastodon as well.

Imagine if you could host a brand new Twitter on your computer, and all your friends can make accounts on your personal twitter, but you and your friends can comment and interact with someone else’s twitter too, without having to create a new account! That’s mastodon.

Lemmy is like that, but for Reddit instead of Twitter.

Lemmy isn’t really designed to interact with Mastodon users, but Mastodon Users can follow Lemmy users or Lemmy communities, and leave comments and likes on Lemmy posts.

Lemmy can interact with Mbin just like it was another Lemmy.

Mbin can interact with Lemmy just as well as Lemmy can interact with Mbin, as they both support a Reddit style of forum interaction. But Mbin also supports making and interacting with Twitter style microblogging content too, so it can interact with Mastodon too, and mastodon can interact back!

Hope that helps.

Personally, I would say:

• Thief 1, 2 & 3
• Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis
• Mafia 1 (not the remake)
• Gemini Rue
• Deus Ex (Game Dungeon has a great video on why the story punches so high, link to relevant segment here)
• Disco Elysium (even though I personally didn’t really care for the game due to the setting, the writing is undeniably high quality)
• A Mind Forever Voyaging

All of those games have, IMO, a tremendously good sync between gameplay and story, where everything lines up to the point where you can become fully absorbed into whatever experience the writer/designer crafted. I would say Thief accomplishes it the best, while Mafia’s and Deus Ex’s clunky gameplay hold them back, but I can see what they were trying to achieve, and overall are close enough to my ideal.

I have a very similar experience to @Zarxrax@lemmy.world. When I was younger, I’d play just about anything I could get my hands on. But now, it’s like you, where 99% of what’s out there doesn’t interest me.

I think this happened for a few reasons for me:

1. Games are a pretty big time commitment compared to other media, and my time has only become more valuable as I get older. I’m just not willing to invest it in a game that isn’t really scratching an itch effectively
2. There are more games out now than ever before in history. Combined with the previous point, there’s never been a better time to be picky.
3. AAA games are stagnating pretty badly due to profit incentive. While there a still some that break the mold and show artistic value, most of them are so commodified and painfully derivative, it’s difficult for an older gamer who has already played things like it to get excited
4. I’ve become more attuned to my preferences in genre, and know what I will and will not enjoy, which is something I didn’t have as much when I was younger, since everything was still relatively new and therefore, interesting enough to play.

But this last one is the biggest reason for me: games are not reaching the potential they have locked within them.

I say that as someone who is a massive fan of storytelling, good writing, and immersion in games. Compared to books and movies, writers are still given extremely low priority in the gaming industry, which results in a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance, simplistic writing, and a lack of innovative gameplay inspired by said writing.

Indies have been the most willing to experiment, but that’s mostly with pure mechanics or themes, and writing is still often neglected.

There have been a few titles that I think reach that potential, but most of them are quite old now. With so few to truly tickle me in that way, I’ll instead opt for arcade type games that manage to create a tight gameplay loop, as it let’s me not lament the lack of a good story so much.

You can only subscribe to communities on Lemmy, no individuals. For individuals, you’d want to use Mastodon (twitter-like) or Mbin (Reddit-like with Twitter-like abilities).

If you’re new, I’d recommend installing Instance Assistant, then searching for communities that interest you either organically from your All or Local tabs, or searching across all instances with Lemmyverse.net

I dunno if people would post so much for upvotes alone. Comments are nice, and I get friendly ones pretty frequently on my posts, and try to leave just as many on others posts :)

Edit: wait, I think I just wooshed myself

AirVPN has a pretty good reputation AKAIK, and their 2-year plans are cheaper than Mullvad and Proton.

The bot is designed to be resilient against those attacks, the creator goes into more detail here.