is all knowledge based on faith

It’s based on assumption, not faith. If we can trust our senses, and if things will continue to be as they have been, then the things we are learning have value. As long as you can recognize that everything could in theory end or completely change at any moment, it’s not blind belief.

Nobody wants a burger that’s one 1/8th pound patty and 3 inches worth of solid lettuce.

Had regulars when I worked fast food that would order the kid size burger with a fuckton of lettuce and tomato. Just way too much.

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Assuming you mean “Can Mastodon instances defederate with Threads?”: Yes. Mastodon (and similar services) run on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows them to decide who they do and do not federate with. Many instances have chosen to preemptively block Threads, many have chosen not to. Pick what works for you.

by adding features you can only get if you are on their platform. Their goal is to make most people prefer the Meta version of the fediverse

Why is this a bad thing? This is the system working as intended: a company forced to make a service people want, rather than just taking users for granted. You resist enshittification because you’re not being held hostage through access to content, so the company is forced to make the service good. And this will attract other companies to produce competing services.

And besides, most people already prefer the Meta version… they already have the user advantage. There’s already way more users locked in their services than there is on the rest of the Fediverse.

I am optimistic about Meta’s investment in the Fediverse. If you don’t believe the Fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don’t think you believe in it at all. You don’t want an open web, you just want to be the one in control. The goal of a decentralized internet - in my opinion - is to separate content from service. And if you believe that is the future, then you have to accept that companies are going to build new services that will try to monetize that content. But the beauty of that paradigm is you get to choose the service that works best for you without sacrificing access to the people or media you’re interested in. And really, it’s not much different from say, Google, being able to monetize Chrome because it can access your website. I mean… yeah, but that’s kind of the point?

Pre-0.19 I assume you would need to be on an instance that is blocking them.

Post-0.19 you can block them as an instance, meaning “any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden”

So, the answer still varies depending on your goals for blocking.

For clarity:

• The 41% number combines both instances that have actually blocked Threads and those who have pledged to do so at some point, so “have blocked” is a bit misleading
• As stated, this is a percentage of instances, not users. Roughly 24% of users are on instances that have limited, blocked, or pledged to block Threads.

This does not apply when you can move or make your own instance. It’s like complaining about tyranny inside your own house. Like, what?

I think a perfectly acceptable line to draw is “Is it reasonable to expect a large majority of the people on this instance would want this other instance blocked?” If the answer is yes, block them. If somebody has a problem with that, move to a different instance.

I don’t really understand what the problem is.

I added that to sort of admit my own hypocrisy; I tried to exaggerate my opinion a bit for the sake of spurring discussion. I mostly believe what I said, but my real thoughts are much messier and less well thought out.

Many Marvel films, for example, are actually competently written plot wise. I also believe lots of them have basically no value.

Gonna try to phrase this an inflammatory way:

People who like bad movies have been conditioned by consumerism to not appreciate art. They believe spectacle, humour, and a tight plot are ‘good enough’, and they don’t value thoughtfulness, novelty, beauty, or abrasiveness nearly enough. Film is more than a way to fill time and have fun. Film is more than an explosion, a laugh, and a happy ending.

On an unrelated note: Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favourite movies.

I think you’ve correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.

It’s true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it’s kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.

tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions

Cadence or intonation depending on what you mean.

Edit: This would seem to sum up the various parts of speech pretty concisely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)

while yes it’s cool that I can talk to Lemmy from my Mastodon account, it’s quite a clunky experience

I do wish they were slightly more interoperable. It’s currently very hard if not impossible to discuss Mastodon posts directly within Lemmy, and likewise you can’t make a Mastodon-style post to your personal Lemmy profile. These may seem like unimportant changes, but I think much of that stems from still viewing these services from the frame of the limitations of what they are based on. They could be so much more!

Lemmy itself has big problems with the interoperability of servers. There are two major issues I see with the way communities are structured. The first is that listed subscriber numbers are for your server only, which makes the entire ecosystem seem way less lively than it actually is, which has the effect of making it even less so. Subscriber numbers should be fed in from a community’s home server.

The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics. That way community leaders have the ability to easily aggregate similar content, rather than leaving it to the user to figure out, and you could opt-out as a user by simply not subscribing to the super-group community.

https://subscene.com/

If you’re looking for an alternative, I’ve had luck with https://subscene.com/

I don’t really know what the best or most popular website is because this one has never really led me astray. That said, I don’t need to use them too often, so your mileage may vary.

I’m sympathetic to the view that artists should be paid for their work. Collectively, artists have produced so much, and these tech companies are funnelling all their work into a machine and recycling it into new works, and profiting off that, without any compensation for the people partially responsible for this new reality. I’m also not interested in people who argue “but actually it’s not copying that’s not how the technology works it’s actually a really complic-” yeah I don’t care. Without the artists you would have nothing.

BUT

Don’t confuse the business practices that make this technology a reality with the technology itself. These tools are incredible, and will result in things that could have never existed previously. I just believe we need to have serious conversations about what they mean for our future.

Does it flush automatically? Could just be a sensor of some kind.

If not I’d report it to the hotel.