Don’t hurt yourself in your confusion!

If you’re taking about OP, I get what you’re saying. It’s a lot to get mad at the ignorant or the struggling because of something that isn’t being widely reported. Many people are “ignoring” something that they don know whether to believe, if they even know about it at all. I do stand firm, however, that once you know about an atrocity that a company has committed, continuing to use it either indicates you don’t care or (if the atrocities are ongoing) are complicit in their activities.

Yeah, they really come off as an angry jerk when they’re telling us not to be jerks.

To be fair, what you’re asking is for normal people to step outside the media they normally consume and seek other (sometimes untrusted) media to come to these conclusions. Some would say, “If this really happened, why isn’t the media reporting on it?” I know why, you know why, but the regular person out there thinks it must be an extreme view if their preferred media outlets are not reporting on it.

How do you think we should attack the system? Isn’t boycotting exactly that?

What you are talking about is not the same as what OP is talking about. Following the analogy, it’s not like you should stop using shovels (or knives, or water) because someone bad used them (hell, Hitler was a dog lover, and I’ll be damned if I stop loving dogs because of that asshole). Rather, it’s that you shouldn’t just use the shovel you know murdered someone because the person murdered didn’t matter to you. Stepping out of the analogy, it’s not about the tool used (though the case could be made for some things) but about the companies who made them and how they used them or knowingly allowed them to be used.

Isn’t it difficult to initiate change to big companies without user pushback? What impetus do they have to change when their user base accepts what they are given? Sure, regulators and legislators should do something, but they aren’t going to do it on their own. People need to do their part, and mass exodus is something the media reports on. I’m not asking anyone to abandon these places entirely, especially if their communication with certain people relies on it, but anyone can move away from them to some extent. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not with doing. Also, in no way am I saying that it is the users sole responsibility to bring down or hold these companies accountable, but it usually takes some grassroots to get something started.

Some of that can be done with prosthetics and photoshop, but yes.

That was actually my first point of suspicion!

Yeah that part made me suspicious as well.

Good catch!

Is there proof this is a real cosplay and not an AI generated image?

This is what I’m trying to do. Be the change! And promoting those groups in !newcommunities, sub.rehab, and other related communities as allowed by the rules can bolster engagement!

I’ve still got two, and I like some features on each better than the other. Kbin for instance doesn’t federate with some instances very well, doesn’t have an app (yet), and doesn’t have some of the other features of Lemmy (like cross-posting), but I like the look of it better and some of the posting features are preferable (like when posting a picture post/thread, it gives you a box for alt text). On the other hand, lemmy has a lot of great apps (I have only tried wefwef and Memmy, but I’ve heard good things about at least 3 more), allows cross-posting, federates well with both search and posts from other sites/instances, but the /all needs some work and it’s not as attractive and is missing some features I’d like. Also, sometimes, one or the other is down, so I just switch. I’m active on both lemmy.world and kbin.social.

Ernest is running lemmy instance or you’re talking about kbin?

Memmy signed me out (covertly - only way I could tell is my subscription view showed communities wasn’t subscribed to). Re-entering my credentials fixed it. Let’s see if this posts first time.

So is this suggesting we need more instances?

I was thinking, aside from EEE, just getting access to all this free content that they can put their advertisements next to was a major reason for them to join AP.