Probably not. US international relations is heavily driven by an amoral power calculus.
Israel is a major foil to Iran. Iran is an ally of Russia and China and a threat to US interests in the region. Barring an extreme amount of pressure from constituents, which has not reached that threshold as far as I can tell, most US politicians will tolerate almost any human rights abuse from Israel.
I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances.
It’s the largest by far, with five times the monthly active population of #2. One of the main things people want out of federated systems is decentralization, and having one huge dominant server goes against that goal.
I should note .world wasn’t the biggest when I signed up. I picked it because mastodon.world was a known quantity, which led me to believe the same team would run a stable server.
If you have millions of people on a social network, and you go looking for toxic shit there, you will find it.
Well, on Mastodon, you might not because by default it doesn’t have a useful text search feature. If you’re on a server running a modified version, or something else with decent text search, you might. My self-hosted server was on a relay that briefly pulled in content from a famously toxic server. At first, I didn’t see it because I didn’t follow those accounts, but later, I added an improved search feature and tried searching for some terms of abuse. I did find a few absolutely vile posts.
Bluesky has had a working search from early on. Turning off some of the default moderation filters and searching for terms of abuse does, in fact find people using terms of abuse.
It’s kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.
That’s pretty much what I wrote in the comment box. The options for the multiple choice questions don’t really acknowledge that as a preference people might have.
It’s absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.
It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.
ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I’m not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don’t think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.
Yes. I think it’s good not to form opinions about subjects you don’t know much about.
When it comes to voting in an election, it’s possible to make good decisions about candidates without forming opinions about every policy issue. That’s kind of the point of representative democracy.
That’s enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.
It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.
It’s almost certainly the number of candidates. On the other hand, top three out of a much smaller number doesn’t present voters with a lot of choice.
I’m inclined to agree that’s a problem. Everyone’s first encounter with a social media content recommendation algorithm was one designed to manipulate them into clicking ads, so it caused some backlash. Recommendation algorithms can be tuned to show things people care about and want to engage with.
You can’t middle-click them because they aren’t links. That is to say, they are not a elements but div elements with an added click event handler that navigates to another page. There’s a case to be made for doing things like that on a website that’s trying to behave like a native application, but Ebay fundamentally behaves like a website and building its navigation this way is bad design.
The story buries the lede: there were 19 candidates on the ballot for mayor and 16-30 for each city council district. Several of the experts cited speculate that the number of candidates overwhelmed voters.
I always go over a sample ballot in advance and research each candidate. I would not have liked to do so for that election; local elections are difficult to research in general with many candidates getting minimal press and some not even bothering to put up websites.
People who are upset about high prices and stagnating income do have a point. People who think that prices will go down because they were lower last time Trump was president fail to understand cause and effect at a fundamental level and have me thinking some undemocratic thoughts.
Having moderated a number of online spaces over the years, sort of. It’s usually the harshest thing a moderator can do, but it does not have very much real world impact on most people. In many parts of the internet, it isn’t even very effective at keeping the same person from coming back with another account, which isn’t a big deal if they don’t come back with the same behavior.
I’m not particularly shy about reaching for the permanent ban if it seems like someone is being an asshole on purpose. I’m not getting paid for it, and I do not have much patience for dealing with people who don’t want to be respectful toward their fellow humans. There’s usually a way to appeal if it’s a misunderstanding. That’s especially true in systems like Lemmy and unlike traditional web forums where one account and UI provides access to many communities, leading to drive-by comments.
I’m also fond of somewhat ambiguous rules like “be excellent to each other” or “don’t be an asshole”. Without that, if a community gets active enough, someone will show up, act like an asshole, and argue about the rules when they get banned.
It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn’t have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be “I disagree”, but that option should have no effect.
It’s not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.
Persuadable voters seemed really focused on prices. It’s hard not to be condescending here. Eggs are expensive because of bird flu. Rent is high because not enough housing is being built, mostly limited by local issues. Gas is high because of Putin’s war. Anyone who thinks electing Trump will bring those prices down because they were lower last time he was president is fucking clueless.
I’m interested to see how much of a factor unenthusiastic Democrats were. Trump got about the same number of votes he did in 2020, but Harris got far fewer than Biden. It looks like a bunch of people who voted last time didn’t vote this time. For them, the concerns the author dismisses might have been more important.
A bit of that, a bit of ordinary inflation, and a bit of Putin’s war. I find it unlikely the current president had reasonable options to prevent any of that.
It absolutely is up to the senate to determine that. The constitution says so.