Greed isn’t the ultimate human trait. Cooperation and curiosity are. We never would have built societies without either. We never would have advanced to the point we have without both. Everyone has greed in them, just like everyone has the opportunity to be angry or sad. But the notion that it is the ultimate human trait or somehow stronger than other characteristics is truly capitalist propaganda meant to justify their immoral hoarding of our wealth.

After all, if greed is the most natural and strongest human attribute… well, the do-nothing takers at the tippy top of the food chain can just continue to suck our blood and deprive us of our agency since it is natural.

There is a reason we don’t live in libertarian hellscapes. It is because greed is not the ultimate human trait.

Those companies aren’t supplying telecom kit.

I don’t know what you mean by R&D “taxes.” Do you mean profits that go into R&D? Tax breaks which Microsoft and others exploit to the maximum under the guise of “R&D” to lower their burden to negotiable (for them) amounts?

Regardless, there’s a huge difference between a bad company like Microsoft and one like Huawei. China is absolutely notorious for modern day industrial espionage. Anyone who denies it has to be delusional. And they lose their shit when their own tactics, like forced technology transfers and requirements to partner with domestic firms, are applied to them in equal measure.

Let’s look at Huawei for example. They straight up plagiarized a huge amount of code from Cisco. This includes esoteric bugs and their error messages. This isn’t a Oracle vs Google “same name of API” thing.

Europe should really subsidize their own tech sector so they don’t have to rely on China or the US for vital infrastructure.

Makes no sense. Mozilla has no horse in the advertising race. But Google does. Almost all of Google’s profits are from ads. Ads keep the entire Alphabet house of cards afloat.

But not Mozilla. The largest connection there is them being paid for default lt search engine.

and since the state was not democratic

How do you define “democratic?” Because the “soviet” of “soviet union” is a type of council which was directly elected by citizens. The USSR was a democratic republic in that each soviet usually voted for a higher level soviet. Not that unusual, especially back then.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the books were never cooked. We know that Stalin rigged at least some higher level elections at the very least.

But “democratic” does not mean multi-party. It can also be “no party” or “three parties” or anything. In the USSR you could run for your local soviet or petition them to vote for you. Yes, you’d have to be a party member. But that doesn’t mean blind allegiance and no differing thought. I’ve brought it up before, but you had severe infighting in the party because of the diversity of opinions and thought, not lack of it. Sure, they were all communists or some flavor thereof at least superficially. But there’s a hell of a difference between Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev as examples.

And, Stalin aside given his prominence in the early years of the nation, the other prominent leaders were very dependant on entities like the Supreme Soviet which was elected by your elected representatives.

Different != undemocratic.

I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them

Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?

Capitalists need to remember that last point. They have a shared and reoccuring thread throughout their history of thinking they can treat people in a similar way and that a break will never come. Except they know it does, which is why they were literally murdering communists, socialists, and union folk in both the Americas and Europe (and likely elsewhere, but I’m not well versed enough to speak on other regions of the world).

The USSR, as a model, worked. Capitalists don’t want to accept it publicly because it threatens their monopoly on state and enterprise power. A young government, forged through raw power, is going to be a bit different than what we expect. But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points. People like Yeltsin. I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.

We know the USSR worked because the entire region went from nothing to world superpower in a single generation. It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading. They dirtied the word for a couple generations such that people wouldn’t and still won’t consider what the ideology means. And that, just maybe, a period of time under an autocrat doesn’t define the entire nation.

Btw, the dictatorship of the proletariat, aka communist dictatorships are just fascist states in disguise, concentration camps and totalitarian bullshit included.

You clearly are not educated in communist ideology and philosophy. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” does not mean a literal dictatorship of a singular person or even a small group.

The dictatorship of the proletariat means that the entire working class, as a people, collectively own and run the entire state. As opposed to what we have in the world today, which is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie–either outright dictators, monarchs, or increasingly the tiniest fraction of the ultra rich controlling everything.

One person controlling a state with an iron fist, like Stalin, is not a dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class controlling the state is. It is called a “dictatorship” not because a singular person controls it, but a singular class. The largest class. The class of almost everybody but a fraction of a percent of outliers.

No country on Earth today has a dictatorship of the proletariat, because only the monied elite get to control the government. Whether it be through bribery (lobbying), captured government, literal monarchies (even if “symbolic”, they still have massive sway given their expansive wealth), literal dictatorships, theonomic regimes, elite and rich leaders of military juntas, etc.

There’s a reason that only the rich attend summits like Davos. There’s a reason nearly every country has golden passport/golden visa schemes which let the rich effectively buy citizenship.

The ultra rich, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, have strong class solidarity. That is why the world is the way it is.

America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

It’s because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.

America didn’t change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.

People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don’t matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that’s how speak the dates.

I wouldn’t say it is us Americans who “find it hard to read” if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.

Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There’s no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.

But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let’s talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.

Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.

Like tablet-friendly UI.

And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.

Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.

Adding onto that, the quality of Reddit content [in my former subreddits] has slid dramatically in my opinion. Sure, those niche communities will exist and persist for a while. But, as more tech pros move to the Fediverse I have to imagine that is where a lot of information will reside going forward. Hopefully it becomes or remains discoverable. I get some glimmers of this happening with the various Steam Deck communities here. It is already happening with the various programming communities.

I think a far more likely thing to happen is that you get people scrapping the Fediverse for content to repost on Reddit, like what happens with Facebook and Instagram users scraping TikTok for content to repost. Social networks these days seem surprisingly sticky now that it isn’t just a place where all your friends are at.

There are already some bots that essentially do that (perhaps not with that particular approach). Unfortunately, I think it has the opposite intended effect: organic growth doesn’t seem to take all that well.

Wait until the non-technical reddit exiles learn about defederation and start whipping themselves up into frenzies trying to purge things they mildly disagree with or flat out don’t like. Just like the good old days on reddit with banning people for participating in verboten subreddits.

Keep the worst of reddit and Twitter off lemmy, folks. Plenty of platforms for those types.

Most people don’t do that. Look at the donor count for Lemmy World vs DAU.

LJ (dev of Sync) has had a patreon for years. The patrons pale in comparison to the people who used Sync for Reddit, and I’m sure Lemmy as well. Patron-types are outliers among outliers.

If it is impossible to make a living and work on these apps with either reasonable app pricing or no ads, then why is Sync the only app for Lemmy with these strings attached?

Sync is a “professional” app. The others are mostly hobbyists. That’s the ultimate difference. Same as with Apollo. You had a bunch of open source reddit clients, but a hobby piece of software will seldom outshine a professional product. Sometimes it happens, but that’s the exception not the norm. Sync has been incredibly stable for me over the last day. Memmy on my phone and Connect haven’t been. No shade to the devs, but devs approach a solution differently when that is how they support themselves. Passion can only carry a project so far, speaking as a dev myself.

I’ve noticed that the people losing their minds over Sync and solo software devs trying to make a living while keeping apps accessible, aren’t the ones beating down the doors to contribute their time and skill and labor for open source. Most of them don’t strike me as devs at all. I’m used to it. It’s the lemmy equivalent of your one family member asking you to make them an app for free at a family Christmas.

People that are passionate about FOSS/FLOSS should definitely use those things. And support them financially. And contribute. But somehow the meta has become to dogpile on the first major third party app for our community that had a lot of users on reddit and which makes onboarding easy.

The key detail you are missing is that most people that left reddit did so on the backs of closed source third party apps. That’s what kicked off the entire firestorm of events. The reality was that, of those who used third party apps, most used closed sourced solutions.

FOSS is great. FLOSS is even better. People should support projects they identify with, just like people should support their home Lemmy instance via community funding. But far too many of the argument I’m seeing against Sync and others basically boils down to “we shouldn’t pay for software,” like our [software engineer] labor is just something to be had for free.

Closed source third party apps are no threat to Lemmy. The failings of reddit cannot happen to Lemmy so long as one instance does not come to define Lemmy in such a way that they can self-isolate and essentially turn into a proprietary model itself. Let’s all recall that Reddit was, once upon a time, open source.

Third party apps are about choice. I hardly consider someone using a closed source third party app–in a sea of many, many FOSS versions–a loss of freedom or an abusive relationship. Come on, that’s very hyperbolic. And I’d wager 99% of people can’t verify that trust even if they wanted to since most people don’t understand code, let alone software development practices. They just take the word of random strangers whom they have no right trusting saying “yeah it looks good.”

I think people are justified in having strong emotions on this topic. A good amount of us just came from Reddit, only to waltz right into what feels like another corporate power play. You install smoke detectors before you have a house fire, not during it.

Many of us have been burned by Meta and purposefully choose these more obscure communities, like Lemmy, to stay far away from them. Meta, after all, has waged a worldwide assault on democracy. Meta has aided literal genocide in at least one country. Meta has run undisclosed psychological experiments to see if it could alter the mood of its users and make them depressed, without regard for if children were among the swath of people.

A lot of people are old enough to remember similar takeovers of standards and open protocols, which is why XMPP comes up so often in these discussions. All it takes is one big player with God-levels of money in order to usurp a standard. Google’s done it twice now, for instance. First with XMPP and again with RCS.

Meta deserves zero benefit of doubt. They’ve always been a bad actor and parasite. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that admins are being paid by Meta. That does seem hysterical.

The most likely reason I’ve heard for Threads embracing ActivityPub (eventually) is to circumvent EU regulations. In which case we shouldn’t be fine with being a pawn and should resist aiding an objectively harmful company from avoiding due regulation.

I agree in spirit, but Meta is a known bad actor and wrecking ball that ran actual psyops against its own users and their networks just to see if they could make people depressed. They also engage in extensive, worldwide election interference to upend democracies. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore.

This article lays out all the problems with the wait and see approach. We’ve been here before, unfortunately, and it only has a happy ending for the huge corporations looking to end us.

Edit: for those looking to get away from Mastodon’s main instances, give Fosstodon a look. Meta approached its admin with NDAs just like they did with Ruud, but refused it and published the email for openness. Here it is, by the way.