Get a Brother. My simple black and white laser printer has very strong “ME PRINT FOR YOU. ME PRINT! ME PRINT ALL PAGE FOR YOU” energy. The only beef we have is when he is all “NO PRINT. FEED ME PAPER” and then when fed he goes back to printing no problem.

I feel like it’s more about money and international implications than whiteness. If China attacked a country like Taiwan or Vietnam, there would likely be a ton of press over it as well. An Ethiopian civil war has less economic implications globally.

Plus it’s a civil war. I grew up in the Balkans and I can tell you that people gave so few fucks about the war of my country, that when the Ukraine war started they weren’t bringing up Yugoslavia as a recent European conflict, they were talking about WWII. If your country isn’t gonna make a huge impact on the global markets, nobody cares (even if you’re blonde like many ex-Yugoslavians).

Humans weren’t ready for easily accessible sucrose, let alone an easily manipulated reality. My parents can’t tell the difference between Facebook rumors and reality. My siblings can’t tell the difference between YouTube conspiracies and reality. And I’m this boat, letting myself get personally affected by text on some website. We’re in over out heads.

One of my Linux people left Odysee recently. Can you guess why? He got sick of all the Nazi shit.

Reminds me of leaving my ex. Went from “baby I love you, don’t leave 🥺” to “fuck you, you’re nothing without me, you’re a crazy bitch” in the span of minutes.

Yeah, I guess it would put the pressure on instances to individually ban someone from participating in certain communities, but we’d have no real way to fully ban a person who is posting illegal things. But that’s kinda true if someone makes their own instance now and begins posting illegal stuff - I assume other instances have to ban that person anyway.

I mean it would still be decentralized in most ways that matter. Nobody would own the hosting of instances except the small groups or individuals that do, so if a surpressive party ever tried to control the narrative on a large instance with multiple communities, users could just focus on other instances that aren’t like that. Likewise, it would greatly simplify the moderation needs of other instances (in some ways) - instances would focus on blocking harmful users, but they wouldn’t have to worry about potentially replicating content from harmful instances. Sign up is also simplified, preventing the “where do I go” confusion.

It could also marry the different fediverse hangouts in different ways. Think about YouTube - they have a place for the main feed, they have a place for shorts, and those two places don’t even really give the same vibe. A good fediverse app could have different views between Mastodon, Lemmy, Tumblr (they’re either federated or plan to be), etc but one account that has a single access point for all of those. Sliding between the views gives you something like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, etc. Instead of 12 handles, YouTubers give 1.

There are pitfalls - who owns the big account instance? What if the owners of it somehow abuse their power over the community, can we create another account instance and link it up, good as new? How hard is it to screen individual users from the perspective of an individual instance owner or group? Do we want to have our activity linked across multiple different places on the internet - after all, Mastodon is more real identity meaning, but Lemmy is more anonymous like Reddit. Who funds the mega instance? Is there incentive to pay for smaller instances if they don’t hold your account as well? Will the big instances just… Own all the data eventually anyway (this could happen even without one login)?

I think the only way it could work is from some strange non profit Wikipedia type setup where it’s completely FOSS and nobody can ever have ownership to monetize or exploit the user base. Thing is, I’m not a tech person at all. I see shit like Linux as an absolute miracle and completely fail to understand how that even works (people collaborating on a project that’s totally free in most cases). I’m just kinda shooting the breeze and trying to think of how things could work possibly, but these ideas are probably bad for reasons I didn’t even realize.

Nah, I’m referring to one account (think like FB login or Google log in, but not awful) that accesses all the Lemmy instances without being on any particular instance. This means that users are independent of instances but still access the fediverse. Then instances block individual users if needed, users block instances if needed, but instances are still decentralized and owned by smaller groups than giant companies like Reddit, preventing a company from monopolizing things. It also removes the whole account migration thing. Could be as simple as one mega instance that hosts only accounts and all other instances host content.

It also removes the confusion. Right now I’m kat on lemmy.ca, but there could be kat@ any other instance and you’d never really know unless you memorized my instance handle.

Kinda glad I chose a lower key instance in terms of ideology and size (lemmy.ca). But it would be nice to have a single log in associated with the full fediverse.

My only advice is know yourself well. Know what you’ll use this computer for. I knew that I was going to use my PC as a glorified Stardrew machine so I skimped on the graphics card. I knew my real goal was digital art so I got a good CPU and tons of RAM.

Love my PC and use it every day.