they can’t be solid, they’re literally just voids

this just in: poverty sucks

The way I understand it, no technical support questions (because there are other communties for that). Other than that any good faith questions about anything are okay, as long as it’s not considered discriminatory, hateful or otherwise disruptive. And the mods decide what those latter three are.

Like asking something about fishing or cooking or life advice or anything you might want to ask someone.

ah interesting, thank you for your help

Thank you. Yeah I found a Lemmy Support community on lemmy.ml, but for some reason I can’t find it from my instance. Even tough it doesn’t block any other instances as far as I’m aware. I did find if from monyet.cc for some reason.

Is there a sub for lemmy related technical questions only?

Would be nice for specific implementation questions.

I mean, it’s not just boomers, because it’s a world wide problem. But in general inequality is more or less the biggest problem. After every financial crisis birth rates drop and stay down.

All graphs realted to inequality and general quality of life have been steadily dropping since 1971 when we introduced the FIAT money system. Basically ever since then the entire system is set up to steal from anyone who can’t benefit from debt and give that money to those who can. Any savings and income is constantly eroded away steadily making the bottom ~80% poorer. Then we also started artifically lowering interest rates, which made the stock market and real estate markets go nuts, making everyone who already had assets rich and those who didn’t even poorer.

Boomers didn’t really cause this, they have no idea what any of that even means, they just passively benefited from it, because they already had assets. It’s more or less created by a tiny policial and financial elite conspiring to takw over our monetary system in 1971. The entire financial and monetary system were reengineered to benefit the rich.

Mark Blyth frames it as a revolt of capital in his book Angrynomics. Basically before that workers benefited hugely from the system, because wages were constantly rising in line with productivity growth and cumulative inflation was so low that you would actually save. There were no crazy real estate bubbles created by the central bank like we see today. That stopped after 1971.

I wouldn’t say Boomers did this, because they were way too uneducated to even notice what happened, because they got all their news from the same people that stole their children’s future. You can blame them for being to stupid to stop it, yes.

There’s some other factors too, like people moving to cities and social issues, but inequality is one of the biggest, if not the biggest. It’s pretty much clear as day in the data if anyone cares to even look. It’s not some big mystery, it’s just going completely ignored, because it would be a huge problem for the people in power.

Oh yeah, and the reason why this problem is world wide is because we exported that same system all over the world to pretty mich every country on earth. Ghadaffi wanted to break that system with an African stable gold backed currency and that’s why Libya was destroyed. It would completely invalidate our imaginary money like the Dollar or the Euro and the powerful couldn’t steal from the rest of us every single day.

depends on what channel you’re on

Almost all our social systems are built on the young providing for the old under the assumtion of generations growing. The population collapse we’re currently starting will be the biggest issue in the future. (alongside the loneliness epidemic, but that’s a different issue entirel)

We’re in for a like a 45% reduction in generation size each generation. And this trend is only increasing rapidly. All the causes of this are deeply entrenched economically and socially, so we won’t be able to turn them around on a dime.

Unless we find some social, economic or technological solutions, we are all majorly screwed. Eveyone who won’t die within the next 30 years or so will be majorly affected by it.

And no, immigration can’t fix it long term, because all the rest of the world is experiencing the same thing. They are just at different stages. India, China, the Americas, Europe are below replacement rate and dropping. All the other regions are are slightly above replacement rates and dropping, except Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan African women are having one less child every 10 years, so they will be below replacement rates within a generation. More and more people having internet access will only rapidly increase these trends.

So in 20-30 years, it’ll be a zero sum game who can most effectively steal each other’s populations.

The only groups that are still growing normally are highly conservative religious groups. Israel is one of the only developed countries that still have normal fertility rates, and they are slowly being taken over by the ultra orthodox.

Maybe life extension or AI can save us, while generally keeping the social order in tact. But all the other solutions don’t look very appealing. You could have A Handmaiden’s Tale, or government/corpo created babies with artificial wombs, like Bladerunner or Brave New World…

You can’t run a society on old people and for those saying it’s good because climate change, you won’t be able to fix climate change if everyone is in total chaos and only concerend with immediate survival. It’ll be like “everything is fucked and YOU want US to stop burning coal, yeah nah”.

Well maybe it won’t be that bad, but it’ll certainly be a huge social issue.

You habe to have both. People mold their behavior around incentive structures. If you give them the incentive to commit crime, they will commit crime. If you give them the incentive to do better, they will do better.

Then again you also shouldn’t have bullshit laws that punish people for things that hurt no one but themselves, like the war on drugs. If they do something to hurt someone while doing drugs, that’s what we have all the other laws for.

Viewing the comment history of other people shouldn’t even be a feature, or at least optional. It made Reddit so incredibly toxic.

Same, post history should be optional.

It’s such a childish behavior to stalk someones history just to be able to dismiss their argument. It makes nuanced discussion between different camps so much harder and is a big reason why Reddit was so polarized.

On YouTube, everything is much more self contained, you only see like 3 comments of the same person on the same channel. It is much more refreshing to be there in my opinion.

Being on Reddit is like fighting with your toxic ex who constantly brings up something irrelevant you did 10 years ago.

The features a social network has very much influences the quality of the discourse. I would much rather Lemmy gives users much more fine grained control over these kinds of features. Like give users the option to hide their post/comment history, but then perhaps also let communities ban those users from commenting, let each community decide. Same with anonymous posting etc…

Putting any other issues aside for a moment, I’m not saying they’re not true also. Cameras need light to make photos, the more light they get, the better the image quality. Just look at astronomy, we don’t find the dark astetoids/planets/stars first, we find the ones that are the brightest and we know more about them than about a planet with lower albedo/light intensity. So it is literally physically harder to collect information about anything black, that includes black people. If you have a person with a skin albedo of 0.2 vs one with 0.6, you get 3x less information in the same amount of time all things being equal.

And also consider that cameras have a limited dyanmic range and white skin might often be much closer to most objects around us than black skin. So if the facial features of the black person might fall out of the dynamic range of the camera and be lost.

The real issue with these AIs is that they aren’t well calibrated, meaning the output confidence should mirror how often predictions are correct. If you get a 0.3 prediction confidence, among 100 predictions 30 of them should be correct. Then any predictions lower than 90% or so should be illegal for the police to use, or something like that. Basically the model should tell you that it doesn’t have enough information and the police should appropriately act on that information.

I mean really facial recognition should be illegal for the police to use, but that’s besides the point.

There is a summary of replication attempts on Wikipedia, half of them don’t look good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts

Yeah, the nested comments section with up/downvotes is the most efficient way to structure a discussion. Infinitely better than the old forums.

There are a few issues with how up/downvotes can be undesirably distributed (like brigading), but the core concept is good.

It would make sense to have different filters on top of that.

Like rewarding high-quality comments (based on some metric like lexical complexity). Or maximizing diversity of opinion, like by rewarding comments that are different from all the others, would help with the circle jerking and brigading. Or categorizing comments as serious, joke, insult, by political leaning, etc.

Also with these LLMs, it would be interesting to try and summarize the entire comments section, giving you briefly the most brought up points or most interesting points.

Or by rewarding comments that have been made by people like you. Like if you are a nuclear physicist, you will preferentially see comments by other nuclear physicists.

And you can toggle between all of them like new, hot, too all, etc.

Perhaps you would even have a marketplace for these filters where anyone can post new ones, like an app store. Give users maximum control over their experienve.

It’s about trust. In a low trust society people show no regard for the society as a whole and will only act in their own interest.

There are various reasons why people loose any sense of belonging to a society, but the outcomes are always the same and you will see what you are describing.

I wanna say today it’s mainly caused by inequality and cronyism that’s been skyrocketing over the last 50 years.

Inequality at the levels we’re at destroys society from multiple angles, from making life completely unaffordable, to making dating harder to making different demographics blame each other for all the problems.

If you don’t feel your investment into the society is reciprocated, then you feel no need to follow any of its rules or make any sacrifices for it.

Yeah that is a good point. I think it would need some permissions managment, like “only community members can vote” or “only community members can see posts”. And those might be attached to every post or not depending on how the community is configured.

You also have the ability to restrict users based on certain rules or roles. Like on Reddit, no posting if your account is less than X days old, etc… Certain members may be allowed to upvote but not post etc…

You may set it so new users can only see any posts made after they joined or not. And then they are also exempted from forking those posts.

Automatic timeouts for when posts should be deleted would also be nice. Also togglable community wise.

Basically setting the platform up to be as public or as private as the community wants.

Would be pretty complex though and not that essential. And might break the whole fork model.

deleted by creator

I think social media designed like “Reddit” is just THE logical way to structure social media. That’s why I think there is just an inherent demand for a platform like Reddit. Because of the network effect, social media platforms strongly tend to centralize. More users > more content > more users > more content > … it is a self-reinforcing cycle favoring centralization. So that is the reason why reddit is popular, it was “the first”, it is big. The only reason why people would ever leave is if Reddit themselves screw themselves over. Luckily for us, they do all the time.

Where Reddit really fails is how powerful admins and mods are, and regularly abusing that power. To fix this, you need to change the incentive structure so that power goes to the users themselves. Lemmy is already better at this because of its federated structure.

But I would go a step further and make communities work more like git. Anyone can fork any communities, meaning they create a new copy of a community but under their management. If enough people switch over to that fork, they get to keep the name of the sub.

That way mods and admins are incentivized to act in the best interest of users at all time, because if they don’t, they are easily deposed.

As a bonus it would also result in making new communities from two groups who shouldn’t have been together in the first place. Essentially creating more and more specialized communities more closely matching the wants of the users.

This is different to Lemmy or Reddit where you would have to create a new sub, with zero content to depose a mod/split the community.

You essentially make the process to switch out mods as low cost as possible for users. Thereby massively increasing competition, increasing quality and user satisfaction.

Ideally this would all be built on top of some base data storage layer like IPFS or something, so you don’t have to literally copy over all the content any time you fork a community, but you just copy the references to where the content is stored.

Also hosting should be as simple as possible, ideally on some decentralized hosting service, like some of these crypto solutions.

This would basically remove all barriers to creating and maintining your own communities, except for hosting cost and moderation.

If you had to design the perfect social media platform, I think that would be it.

Source: https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet#networking

Freifunk is a non-commercial initiative for free decentralised wireless mesh networks. Technically Freifunk firmwares are based on OpenWRT and OLSR or B.A.T.M.A.N. Funkfeuer is, just like Freifunk, a non commercial initiative for free wireless mesh networks.

Funkfeuer is based in Austria and uses OpenWRT as the firmware for the Routers. IPOP (IP-over-P2P) is an open-source user-centric software virtual network allowing end users to define and create their own virtual private networks.

LibreMesh includes the development of several tools used for deploying libre/free mesh networks. The firmware (the main piece) allows simple deployment of auto-configurable, yet versatile, multi-radio mesh networks. LibreVPN is a virtual mesh network using tinc plus configuration scripts that even let you build your own mesh VPN. It’s also IPv6 enabled.

Loki net is a privacy network which will allow users to transact and communicate privately over the internet, providing a suite of tools to help maintain the maximum amount of anonymity possible while browsing, transacting and communicating online. Netsukuku is an ad-hoc network system designed to handle massive numbers of nodes with minimal consumption of CPU and memory resources. It can be used to build a world-wide distributed, fault-tolerant, anonymous, and censorship-immune network, fully independent from the Internet.

NYC Mesh aims to create a free, resilient, stand-alone communication system that serves both for daily use and also for emergencies—be it power outages or internet disruption—running software that helps our community with hyperlocal maps and events.

OpenNIC Project is an alternative DNS provider that is open and democratic.

PJON is an open-source network protocol able to connect devices using most physical layers and media, such as wires (PJDL, Ethernet, Serial and RS485), radio (ASK, FSK, OOK, LoRa or WiFi) and light pulses (PJDLS). It is released in a single portable implementation that can be easily cross-compiled on many systems like ATtiny, ATmega, ESP8266, Teensy, Raspberry Pi, Windows X86, Apple and Android. It is a valid tool to quickly build a network of devices. People’s Open Network is a community mesh network in Oakland, California.

Project Meshnet aims to build a sustainable decentralized alternative internet. Used by Hyperboria and built on CJDNS.

Skywire is the Skycoin Project’s communication primitive (analogous to MPLS, open-flow, TOX, mesh networking, darknet, i2p) that facilitates mesh networking both on traditional internet service provider infrastructure, and on individually owned wifi and radio equipment, allowing for a phased, incentivized approach to decentralization. Skywire Overview | skycoin.net

Yggdrasil is an early-stage implementation of a fully end-to-end encrypted IPv6 network. It is lightweight, self-arranging, supported on multiple platforms and allows pretty much any IPv6-capable application to communicate securely with other Yggdrasil nodes. Yggdrasil does not require you to have IPv6 Internet connectivity - it also works over IPv4.

ZeroNet enabled decentralized websites using Bitcoin crypto and the BitTorrent network