It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

That isn’t a useful definition of racism. It’s sounds alright, although it’s ultimately idealistic, it doesn’t hold up when applying to material circumstances.

As for why people think having different rules for different groups is good, I think one of the simplest ways to sum it up is: Equality of treatment will not give equality of outcome until there is already equality of conditions. Treating all people the same isn’t fair in the real world.

As a thought-experiment to demonstrate: If we have two people, one has $200 savings after rent and the other has $10,000,000, you can’t make them more equal or make the money more distributed by treating them the same: if society wants to reduce poverty (which is obviously a good thing for society, to have less people in poverty), it makes some sense to supply the poorer of the two with money, but it makes no sense to supply the richer: they already have more money than 90% of people! There isn’t a moral or ethical benefit in giving them more money, they don’t need the money as much as others do, it’s not how to achieve fairness or equality.

The generalised point of that being, if a group is disadvantaged and the status quo is keeping them disadvantaged, solving that will require special treatment. Treating Indigenous people the same way as always just keeps the systemic racist status quo, and to solve that, the Government will inevitably have to treat Indigenous people differently. That’s a consequence of trying to create a more equal outcome in an unequal environment.

The same goes for other types of disadvantage, of course. I am obviously not trying to imply that all people who aren’t indigenous have all the advantage they need! Ultimately, everyone who is not a mega-multi-millionaire is disadvantaged, but we can’t fix that all in one change. We have to start somewhere.

No, it is not just racism. There would have been an element of that, but it’s certainly far from the main reason. That idea is contradicted by the facts that a very significant portion of Indigenous people and Indigenous activists voted against it.

Linking to this useful post, explaining why various progressive groups were against it.

You’ve actually explained one of the reasons many Indigenous people rejected this: it is just feedback that could simply be ignored by the Senate. That’s powerless, and we’ve seen from royal commissions into Aboriginal deaths in custody that the feedback does get ignored. Why accept such a bad deal, pretending it’s a victory or progress?

The Black Peoples Union interview with ABC explains why they took the ‘no’ position.

Relevant: the Black Peoples Union position on the referendum (interview on ABC).

An aggregation of written statements collected from socialist, anarchist and radical Indigenous groups, showing the diversity of thought on the matter: http://old.reddit.com/r/AustralianSocialism/comments/161r8r1/megathread_of_leftist_statements_on_the_voice/

(PS: don’t just take all the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ summaries in that list at face value, a couple of them are misinterpretations or oversimplications)

Thanks for the detailed reply :)

I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I’m still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw ‘spyware’ around to describe anything and everything, so I didn’t realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it’s applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.

I do appreciate when a worker in a restaurant has a legitimate conversation and is social, if they can see when it’s appropriate and welcomed. And to add context, I’m not talking about the waiter hovering like you’re describing, I’m talking about something I’ve only ever seen from immigrant family restaurants where they’ve come from a culture where eating is still a social community activity, or possibly when a chef takes pleasure in knowing you’re enjoying their experience. The always transactional nature of eating in society has started to annoy me. But it’s very different to when someone is being paid to try and make your experience good, that’s inevitably plastic and coerced.

That website has a very strict, unusual interpretation of ‘spyware’. Even if all the telemetry and unprompted connections made by Mozilla Firefox are in good faith and legitimate features, that website still labels it ‘spyware’, as it is revealing unnecessary information without your consent.

The same website gives Tor Browser a ‘Not Spyware’ rating, as it (necessarily!) removed the default features of Firefox that concerned them.

Side note - I think you may have accidentally marked your account as a ‘bot account’ in the settings.

It’s Chromium-based, so I don’t understand how it could be “configured in the same way”.

That website is […] full of verifiably false information

Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn’t notice any last time I checked the site.

they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.

They’re very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn’t make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.

They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.

It says “Not Spyware”. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor

Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.

The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.

Honestly, brigading is still a valid thing that can exist here, but yes, people don’t realize that if a post gets popular on a popular federated instance, people who appear like ‘foreigners’ (for lack of better word) will jump in and flood it. It looks as if a brigade, but it’s entirely organic, non-malicious, unorganized and unprompted.

I’m not sure how to classify things like ‘dunk tank’ posts, where someone on an instance will say ‘lol look how dumb this post over there is’… it’s not really calling a raid but many people will go to the source comment and dogpile them. And sure, that’s just part of being a public website, but it’s a bit easier with federation to go over and interact, just like it is moving between subreddits on reddit.

In reality, it would be more like a series of lines on different topics weighted differently by an individuals priorities so no singular generic representation will ever be truly good enough.

In reality, there are no lines. And that’s exactly why I say, it’s not a step forward to add another vague idealist axis on top of a vague undefined idealist axis. Politics is not geometrical, there isn’t a concept of ordered values. The entire method of thinking is wrong, and that video helps explain what a more appropriate alternative model based on human history is like.

Adding an axis is just walking forward down a wrong path; a move in the wrong direction by suggesting the issue is about how much fidelity we have.

Maybe we will make groundbreaking leaps in cosmetic surgery. Or have Jackass-style elderly disguises become popular.

‘Authoritarianism’ is a bullshit vague idealist concept that can’t be linearized into ‘more than’, ‘less than’, ‘most’ or ‘least’, and make any sense.

The USA throw people in prison for decades and enslave them for being a victim of the drug trade. They have one of the largest proportions of imprisoned population in the world.

They also allow socialists to own guns and propagandize, to a larger degree than most countries.

Liberalism is complex, contradictory and idealist, so terms like ‘authoritarianism’ are basically meaningless to apply to the real world.