I think partially but you missed a key factor which is that most new homes in California require rooftop solar. So the net-metering change only affects individuals adding solar since it’s optional for them. SF builds an extremely low number of new homes compared to the rest of the state, so they have less of a foundation to fall back on when individuals stopped installing systems.

I don’t know what to tell you. I am fully aware of the history and difficulties in migration out of authoritarian governments. Sometimes situations that are quite different in some ways nonetheless share common features. That is all I’m saying, but you seem to be too emotionally triggered by the differences to acknowledge the similarities. Maybe take a step back and think on it and you will see them.

As far as your second point… yes… that’s exactly the problem I am outlining. The current system will almost inevitably lead to non-democratically managed instances, regardless of intent. In order to change that, we need to change the underlying system. I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to. Again, ease of migration has an effect on the severity of the problem, but not the underlying dynamic itself.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch. Fundamentally, I lack the expertise to do so, though I’d be interested in a community discussion on how this could work.

This is very similar to telling people being exploited at work to get a better job or start their own business. Sure, theoretically, this might sometimes solve the problem, but it’s going to be a much better solution if we change the underlying system that creates these problems in the first place.

And?!

One could also simply move to another country if desired. I think there is a parallel. Obviously that’s much simpler with instances than countries but there is still a commonality here.

The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.

Again, I have acknowledged the problem is far less severe with instances compared to countries. But the power structures involved are quite similar.

I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.

So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.

In a shallow analysis, one could blame admins for not implementing democratic governance (as you claim LemmyGrad has done). But you need to remember that running an instance is typically an unpaid act of mutual aid done for the community—blaming admins for not doing more work to make a better system seems a bit harsh when it would take substantially more work to set up such a system.

A better solution would be to build democratic mechanisms into a social media platform itself. This would allow democratic decision-making in defederation and other issues by default, rather than forcing admins to create such a system from scratch. I actually think both Reddit and Lemmy were steps in this direction, with Reddit adding upvotes and downvotes to democratize content curation, and with Lemmy’s federated nature at least allowing user choice in which admins they want to be subordinated by.

However, both of these platforms were created by people who believe in authoritarian ideologies. These democratic elements were added individually to solve specific problems—neither Lemmy nor Reddit had an explicit goal of making a more democratic platform in all respects.

I am hoping that the online space will continue to evolve in this direction. Since I doubt Lemmy developers share this vision, there may come a time when people who want this will need to migrate to another platform, or create a fork of the current software. Since I’m not a developer, can’t contribute myself, but I will keep my eyes open for good ideas in this vein.

Sadly I doubt the US would ever go along with this even though our citizens would strongly support it. The wealthy have too much power here.

It seems like every voting system has pros and cons, but I’ve become interested in STAR voting as it seems to have a nice blend of positive characteristics without the worst flaws of other systems.

It’s effectively a mix of score voting and instant runoff (ranked choice).

You can read more here: https://www.starvoting.org/

It hasn’t been tested much, mainly because it’s relatively unknown, so I’d like to see more real-world testing before I say it’s the best, but it’s definitely intriguing.

We have a similar system in California called the jungle primary—basically there are no party specific primaries (except for president because this system is incompatible with other state’s elections), and the top two advance to the general election.

There are a few issues though. If a candidate wins more than 50% of all votes in the primary, they win the election and don’t appear on the ballot in the general election along with the president. Since there is generally higher turnout for the general election rather than the primary, you can sometimes have a generally unpopular candidate win in the primary with 50+% of the small number of primary voters.

We also have issues with spoilers—if a bunch of similar candidates run, and all split the votes between them, it’s possible they don’t make the final ballot, even if any of them individually would have won the final election. This seems like a fringe issue until you realize that parties have actually supported lots of minor candidates on the opposing side in order to eliminate an otherwise dangerous challenger.

So overall it is somewhat better than first past the post but it still has significant issues. In general I think elections that select a single candidate are somewhat undemocratic by nature and we should think about ways to give the minority a voice but not the ability to shut things down. This may be a difficult balance to achieve but it’s still worth aiming for.

Awesome tool, thanks for sharing. I wish they included STAR voting since I’ve become interested in that one.

Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.

Also don’t forget [email protected] for those unaware. It is quite active. Might make sense to focus content there even though it’s a separate instance.

Of course, if you specifically wanted a similar community on Lemmy.world, then feel free to ignore this.

I think you’re being a bit too generous. Despite the fact that this particular video was pretty good overall (though the potshot at environmental activists at the end was wholly unnecessary and the opposite of helpful) I didn’t hear any real admission that her past views were mistaken here. If what you say is true, then she needed to own up to that far more clearly than she did.

Although I have only watched a few of her videos in the past before stopping. I found them quite opinionated and misinformed. So I don’t have the full context of what exactly she got wrong previously.

No, no, they’re the good kind of murderers.

This is just referring to completely fabricated stories right? I assume very biased stories are a lot more common.

But what if I am a zoologist?

Yeah that’s true too, I was kind of focusing on the direct impact here but they don’t have a place in any conflict.

I know everyone’s here dunking on the hypocrisy of Russia making this complaint and that is valid but it’s still sad this happened and I personally don’t think the US should be distributing cluster munitions which are inherently more dangerous to civilians.

I don’t think it is failed. It has reached self-sustaining levels for many topics. It will need further growth to make smaller, niche topics self-sustaining. Whether this growth will take place is an open question. I know my instance is growing in terms of activity, but I’m not sure how others are faring.

But as long as it isn’t shrinking, I think it’s well-positioned to absorb more growth as users discover it or become disillusioned with Reddit or other sites in the future.

I just did but you didn’t answer. But I guess we can skip that step. I am mainly curious if you are naive enough to accept the statements of these authoritarian leaders unquestionably. Do you really believe Kenya is doing all this just because they believe it’s the right thing to do? I suppose Putin really just wants to protect Ukrainians from Nazis and western imperialism, and Bush just wanted to bring democracy to Iraq too?