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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.

    Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won’t even need cell coverage.




  • I can speak as someone who thought they couldn’t do parties. Parties are incredibly intense, and can be the best or worst experience of your life depending on the smallest details. Eventually you will learn how to party best for you, what substances to take, what to wear, where to stand and what to do, which parties are just not going to work for you. Keep trying new things, but also if you’re not feeling it, take some time out or just leave.

    I think the older you get, the more you realize that everyone has imposter syndrome and anxiety all the time, but you just have to fake it until you make it. If you pretend everything is fine, it usually turns out fine.







  • Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

    We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

    In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.


  • Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

    I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.


  • Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.




  • But you’re dismissing all the scientific evidence that proves that resurrection is impossible. Even assuming all the anecdotal evidence is accurate, which I’m happy to do if it’s accepted by historians, the leap of logic from “some people 2000 years ago thought they saw a guy get executed then reappear a few days later, and they were surprised so they started a religion out of it” to “God is real” is unfathomable to me, and dismissed by any serious expert.

    It’s certainly a strange event in history and we can have a historical discussion about possible historical explanations. But this was originally a philosophical/theological discussion.

    I find these discussions interesting. It’s interesting to hear other people’s world view, why they believe what they believe, and to have my world view challenged.




  • Your argument is called Pascal’s wager. My main objection is there’s a lot of superstitions to try. If you want maximize the benefit of a strategy like you’re describing, you have to worship every god of every religion, obey every limitation on what you can do in every religion, superstition or conspiracy, take every supposedly magical medicine, ect. They all seem equally unlikely, but they are all believed by someone and if true would have huge benefits, so by your logic I should follow all of them completely. Except by doing that I am sacrificing most of my life for the tiny possibility of a benefit, rather than making the most of the life I know I have.