christian

At some point about a decade ago I realized I'm much happier just paying the extra $8 every couple months when I go to get a haircut and otherwise just letting it grow out.

I found an explanation here. They're deliberately not including it in the main f-droid repository for security reasons.

I think it's extremely unlikely that there's a reason other than what they've stated here, but at the same time this isn't so important to me that I'm willing to begin making exceptions to my policy against installing any software that doesn't make it into official f-droid.

Everyone is going to draw their line somewhere. If I can't grapple with the idea of anyone de-emphasizing ideas that don't match their beliefs, I'm not going to be on the web at all and am probably going to be withdrawing from society. I'm drawing my line at having an underlying agenda that goes deeper than simply what a mod wants and does not want, based on genuinely held beliefs, to allow in a community. Some dude moderating an online community is very unlikely to be a master of manipulation without organizational backing, which for tiny communities isn't going to be worth investing in.

I'll explicitly say I'm fine with a mod silencing the viewpoint that immigrants are destroying my country. I genuinely don't want to read those viewpoints in my downtime, regardless of how that gives me a biased view of the world. I don't log onto websites hoping to find an oracle of truth, I'm shooting the shit as an outlet.

All moderation is silencing some viewpoints they don't want to hear from. I don't consider that problematic unless it's deliberately manipulative.

I actually don't really care about "content manipulation" per se, I'm just trying to avoid astroturfing. Every online community has moderators. I'd prefer that the moderators are people, and people have beliefs and viewpoints that they might want to push.

If Jerry the mod from Minnesota is removing posts that don't align with his beliefs I don't give that the same weight as when it's done by a multibillion dollar corporation whose belief is more profit. If fifty mods are influencing my beliefs in the exact same direction without coordinating with each other, maybe I was actually inclined to believe that in the first place. It's coordination that makes it dangerous, and there really isn't a return-on-investment for astroturfing a community of a few thousand users.

You could make an argument that this is a reason to be wary of admins of big instances like .world, but I'm skeptical even that has enough users yet for astroturfing to be worth investing in.

I actually think lemmy took off because the "content manipulation" the devs/admins were engaging in through the early years prevented it from becoming a toxic environment. Almost all the other alternative platforms were focused on minimal moderation and they became awful places as a result.

Yeah, I wasn't considering kodi and jellyfin as music players because they serve a broader purpose than that, but I guess they should count. I do have jellyfin set up for movies and shows, but I've stuck with strawberry for music because the player interface is a bigger priority for me than having a remote is.

I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it's the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.

Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don't understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.

I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don't know any other player that has similar.

I never knew there was a name for this idea! I came up with a silly science fiction idea based on this a few years ago.

All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn’t work anymore.

I love this.

I found an article here for anyone else looking for a source that's not just a clickbait image.

This kind of thing has been a long time coming, it's why I started looking into decentralized social media in the first place. It actually feels less dangerous today than it did before the plague of GPT bots that make everyone wary of whether they're reading something written by a human or not.

I left facebook for diaspora in the early 2010s because I felt like an algorithm could influence my opinions too easily. If I see a bunch of my friends voicing one opinion, but all of my friends who voice the opposite opinion don't make it onto my feed, that will influence my own opinions regardless of how mindful I try to be about that. I was kind of addicted and it took strength to delete my account.

I started looking for reddit alternatives a couple years later for similar reasons. I'm really glad lemmy has finally taken off but things had to get a lot worse for that to happen.

Yeah I like a few of these.

edit: I think it's the ones that are just generally silly with no real attempt at a punchline that appeal to me.

Nobody ever talks about banking fraud, stocks fraud, even when done by the literal president.

They absolutely do talk about those things, maybe almost as much, under full understanding of which discussions will lead to actual action and which won't.

My first reaction was that there's no way this tactic makes a significant improvement in sales, but then I remembered prime day is a thing.