281–290 of 889 posts
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Block early, block often. Think twice before following someone.
People seem to get furious about being blocked. I’ve seen people post publicly the name of the person who blocked them demanding an explanation. It seems to escalate things rather than calm them down.
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So what? People should be free to discuss stupid and wrong ideas. Btw: I think conspiracy theories are good indicators for what certain people want to believe. I personally don't want to be disconnected from these indicators.
Recall that for at least 3 years, Reddit, here, and many other places were pushing the Russia collusion conspiracy theory. Nobody can fact check for you. You need to make your own opinions based on the knowledge you have, and suppressing information does not make you more informed.
I might be out of touch but isn't it fairly established at this point that - for certain definitions of "collusion" - it was factually true?
i.e. not "Trump got together with Putin and hatched a plan" true but "both sides obliquely acknowledged the interests of the other with a nod and a wink" true?
Will they allow a post claiming that the Mercer family also funds a major child theft and transport ring? In other words, will they allow blatant lies or slander to stand?
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2020, or more likely 2016 will perhaps be seen as a turning point in the fortunes of the US Republic, when the democracy began to unravel, the law was used as a weapon against enemies, and the rule of law was replaced by mob rule with different factions warring in the streets. The parallels between the US at this moment and pre-war Europe or Rome at the time of the Catiline conspiracy are striking - the centre cannot…
Why can’t the dissenting States just secede from the Union? It is a democracy after all.
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How does that work? Since most of the hate mobs are in Parler now?
There's no hate mob in Parler, they're all conservatives, why would they hate each other.
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I think it’s down to who you follow. First, never ever read “trends” or random tweets. Never trust Twitters official app to show you anything useful. Using third party apps also saves you from ads. Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology. Just…
>I think it’s down to who you follow. Isn't there the problem where your favorite "celebrity" you follow posts nice stuff but when election or some other event is happening they start posting a ton of "off-topic" stuff ?
Them posting that stuff isn't a "problem" just because you do not appreciate some of the content.
When "free speech" is the primary selling point of a social media website, it tends to only attract people who feel slighted by the platform they're migrating from. Unfortunately this has the opposite effect of Parler's stated goal of being "the world's town square" since it simply isn't attractive to people with opposing views of those who did move. I think free speech is important and I think that social media plat…
It's a shame, but it really does feel like "free speech" has become a near dog-whistle. Almost any time I hear of a service billing itself with free speech as a primary selling point, a quick visit is more than enough to turn me off of ever returning. Besides this, there's a clear feedback loop that happens regardless of the intent of the service's creators. The people most likely to get kicked off of social media pl…
How long until America starts putting limits on free speech? IANAL, but we already have laws against libel, slander, and defamation. Section 230 / communications decency could be modified. New laws could be created to prevent amplified spread of factually incorrect information. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to broadcast that speech. I'm not advocating for this, but I see it as a possibility.
In practice SESTA/FOSTA are serious restrictions on free speech, but nobody on the right cares about that.
The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research.
I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter.
For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.
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People seem to get furious about being blocked. I’ve seen people post publicly the name of the person who blocked them demanding an explanation. It seems to escalate things rather than calm them down.
Thankfully with blocking you don't get to see these people ever again...