You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them

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You can't even get Lemmings to leave Facebook because "muh marketplace" or "muh Auntie I haven't seen in a decade." Good luck. Y'all are addicted to this shit.

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There are multiple themes to choose from. People that already know how to use Lemmy will be able to do more with Lemmy, for sure - PieFed is atm more of a concept of what is coming up, hence exciting! Especially for onboarding new users who don't already know how to use Lemmy, i.e. from Reddit. I use PieFed as my daily driver, but I frequently have to fall back to Lemmy to accomplish certain types of tasks. So it's not yet ready for the masses who don't have an early adopter mindset. But it does offer tools to help with specifically those two things that you mentioned!:-)

Afaik, any proof of humanity depends on instance admin practices - same as Lemmy (and Mbin) too - but what PieFed offers uniquely along those lines is "reputation". This can either be used directly by a mod (or admin) - e.g. for the first 2 weeks after signing up I was not allowed to DM anyone - or even by the individual end-user, as I'll mention below with icons.

One really cool thing I see from PieFed already now is democratization of moderation: mods on Lemmy (and Reddit) have a binary choice to make between removal of content vs. allowing it, while PieFed significantly expands upon those options. One way is to auto-collapse, or even auto-hide, comments and posts below a certain vote threshold (different values provided for each of those, the first retaining the ability to always see the content just one single click away, the latter removing it from view altogether), thereby allowing people who want to avoid "controversial" content to do so more readily (related: there's also a NSFL option, on top of a NSFW one, attempting to maximize such features available to people), in a manner that is independent of a community moderator, and with the ability to change the setting at any time.

PieFed similarly allows people to block all users from a specific instance, without having to defederate that requires admin support as Lemmy does (Lemmy has a feature that it calls instance blocking, but it is horribly misnamed bc it does not in fact block instances as all, and despite being promoted by people as an instance block is really just a community mute, leaving users free to spam your notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after you no longer want to receive them - which is a real thing that has happened to me, TWICE, and basically caused me to leave Lemmy altogether as a result, although fortunately I found PieFed so didn't have to go all the way back to Reddit to avoid such).

Another cool thing that PieFed offers is user icons: either placed by the user (whatever custom one you want, to help you recall whatever you feel that you need to - like "be careful, this guy is wordy!"), or automated ones placed by the system. Examples include new user (who may not know how things work, so be gentle), account which posts >20x more often than comments (hence may be an unregistered bot account), someone who receives >50x downvotes than upvotes (highly contentious person, very insensitive to whatever community they are in) - and to be clear these are overall, not specific to a community or post/comment, hence still works to brand-new content offered by each user. Whereas previously I spoke to removal or posts/comments based on such features, note here that this feature merely places a LABEL onto these categories of users - ultimately leaving it up to the end user, rather than a mod, to decide what to do about it. You can ignore these icons entirely, seek them out specifically, or whatever. But those varieties of "reputation" scores are made available to you in a numerical capacity.

Another cool aspect of labeling, this one requires an instance admin, is to place a commentary below every post from certain instances, like for Beehaw it says:

This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

Note that link is to the exact statement from the instance admins themselves describing their policies in their own words. So this is far from "unfriendly", and rather more welcoming to describe for instances where the "normal" expectations differ, what their particular desires are. Can you imagine if for Lemmy.ml it would say "any post criticizing Russia or China or North Korea is subject to removal" or some such!?

Speaking of, note how the community "side-bar" text appears below EVERY post - while some apps hide that away, PieFed places it front and center every single time, so that users have access to the info that they may need.

Also, PieFed is written in Python, rather than Rust, so its future development should proceed forward more quickly than Lemmy, allowing it to reach feature parity soon and even exceed Lemmy, as it already does in so many ways (though crucially: not all yet, so again I'm mostly describing the future here rather than the present, even though all of the above already exists).

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That’s been the outcome of every war we’ve fought for 50+ years. We just lost a 20 year war against goat herders.

Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara is a good starting point.

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He traded his life for another. He showed the world that it’s possible. And “we” outnumber “them”. Making people realize that is an achievement in itself.

Would you say people like Rosa Parks “didn’t accomplish anything”?

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"They" actually won the recent election meaning "they" are actually the majority. The only way for "us" to accomplish anything other than constant bloodshed and a near 50/50 civil war scenario is to convince a bunch of "them" to change the system with "us".

We're not fighting a dozen people like Brian Thompson, we're fighting tens of millions of idiots who empower them.

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Excellent set of resources - ty for posting them

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participation in local politics is one.

a handful of loud people can deeply impact your local community.

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Disagree. Calling leftists Nazis for not voting for Harris is basically the same thing as Stalingrad

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For those who are feeling disheartened or numb and want/need a little push to get things started, you should check out AOC’s video she posted. It’s like an hour and a half long but she does a good job breaking down the situation, acknowledging the challenges, but also provides examples of things you and everyone else can do to resist.

In her own words/examples, you don’t have to feel like it’s all on just you to rollback illegal FAA staff appointments, to stop musk harvesting USAID, etc. There are specific concrete actions you can take within your capacity to make a difference.

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First, people supporting Trump are not the majority by any metric. They are 49.8% of the people who voted, which is 31,8% of the eligible voters and 23,3% of the total us population. You could argue that the majority of people “don’t hate” Trump, and while that’s still a scary metric, it’s not the point that I wanted to make.

“They” aren’t Republicans or Trump supporters, they’re wealth-hoarding billionaires that actively make people’s lives worse. As it has already been said, support for Luigi is pretty much bipartisan. Nearly everyone hates those people, and even plenty of people who voted Trump did it because they see him as “one of the people” (for some godforsaken reason). They’re propagandized into voting Republican through all the culture war, misinformation and fear mongering, but when people like Brian Thompson die, no one is actually sad and a lot actually celebrate.

Trump does indeed have a personality cult, but from what I’ve gathered the great majority of people voting him aren’t part of that and they don’t actually like him, it’s just that they hate “the gays”, “the libs”, or “the immigrants” more.

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Anybody who didn't vote for the party who opposes Trump but was eligible is actively against the reform that caused these problems. If you're against reform but promote Luigi then you don't care about a single person who went into medical debt or died as a result of it.

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This is what cracks me up about the "your rifle won't fight a tank!" jackasses.

It's like, have tanks ever worked against a domestic insurgency? Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, I can't think of any time the U.S. military just wiped the floor and left.

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They’re not “against reform”, they’re disenfranchised, lazy or just… not the brightest minds.

They made a mistake (a big one at that), but that doesn’t mean that they like what’s happening. The upper class has been doing their best to keep us dumb, busy, tired and uninformed. And it’s clearly working.

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And in those circumstances, the loss of life was even less of a hit. For every American you ordered shot, that’s one less customer or soldier you have, if the soldier you ordered to do the killing doesn’t just turn on you or refuse. Your position becomes weaker, even if you gain ground anywhere.

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Let's see that package

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thanks for the links, looking forward to checking them out.

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I straight up hate that so many people are just now brushing up against the fact that everything is marketing. Everything is purposeful. Everything is sinister. Goddamn.

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in my workshop I keep safety glasses at each station, and then some more just around. I bought 6 pairs of the same model after trying out 8-10 different styles so they fit and work well also. I still need to force myself sometimes to take 3 steps to put them on.

The people who sit down to put together a solution for our mess will need to plan this way too. They will need to factor in how to make it easy for people. How to get the desired path of the chaotic group to align with the solution.

For an idea, I have been thinking a lot about decentralization like here at lemmy. What if, the government, was social media. What if each post was a proposal, and the up and down votes were actual votes. It could replace all politicians. No more lobbyists paying $5k for policy implementation. They would need to bribe us all, which would just be us getting better quality of life. A system without centralized power.

If it was in the top 3 apps in the mainstream repositories millions would stumble into it on their own.

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For better or worse, this seems to be way less of a problem on the Fediverse. I can't tell if it's because it's federated OR if it's because corporate America hasn't woken up to it (yet?!?). I find way more interesting discussions on lemmy than anywhere else on the net. Hopefully it stays that way!

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That’s what she said

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You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism | Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them