Walking into the interview and seeing everyone on the entire floor is Indian. This is for software jobs.

Income tax

Federal Reserve, paper money

People can riot and loot without being shot by police or their victims.

This is why the lemmy software is awful. If a site has blocked you, it just quietly fails instead of giving an error.

It’s pointless, because there are commies with alt accounts who are downvoting everything.

Speech is dangerous. If you have a large enough audience, you will get doxxed and then assaulted. People will start calling your job demanding you are fired.

It’s also an unnecessary move. Big Tech makes a “shadow profile” for non-logged-in users who browse the site.

You’re missing the point. It isn’t “oops, we don’t know how to block people and communities.” Their attitude is “People who disagree with us do not deserve to have a voice at all.”

They aren’t content to just “not visit those communities or block those users”. They’re only content if those viewpoints are completely banned.

It isn’t “If you don’t like it, don’t read it”, which is what a reasonable person would do. Their attitude is “If I don’t like it, nobody should be allowed to read it.”

That doesn’t always apply, because there are huge network effects benefiting the sites with the most users. That’s what was lost when we went from a model where everyone had their own website, to one where social media websites were the main way everyone interacted.

If lemmy users were equally distributed across all instances, lemmy.world acting like jerks wouldn’t be an issue.

The right-wing never really found a good alternate to rally around when they were kicked off big tech. Lemmy/Activitypub aren’t the solution either. It would only work if you could get everyone on the right to agree to migrate to the same website at the same time. But the right-wing websites do have to do a certain amount of censorship once they become popular, due to pressure from some combination of web hosts, domain registrars, banks, investors, and law enforcement. Big tech also kept a token amount of moderate-right viewpoints on their websites, so it isn’t obvious to a normie that there’s censorship.

I already said how this is going to end. Lemmy.world is the biggest instance by far. They’re going to say “Defederate from exploding-heads, or we’re defederating from you and your instance is going to be worthless.”

That’s why ActivityPub is doomed. It’s just going to fracture into groups defederating from each other. You aren’t going to attract enough right-wingers to make your niche viable, because all the right-wingers who were going to leave Big Social Media already left years ago for alternate websites.

Running a lemmy node that is defederated from everyone else is no different than just running an ordinary webforum.

It’s very hard for people on the right to be abusive in the way that commies portray them, because people on the right control almost nothing. They don’t control big media, big tech, most large corporations, universities, schools, most of government, etc.

It is the left that is doing the abusive things you mention: censorship of different viewpoints, extreme emphasis on race (BLM, criminal justice “reform”, race equity), glorification of violence (Antifa, assaults on right-wing people giving speeches), scapegoating and persecution (example: bike Karen), rejection of democracy (it’s anti-democratic when Republicans win elections; it’s a threat to democracy when people on the right can freely express their viewpoint).

This convinced me that ActivityPub/Mastodon/Lemmy are doomed and are not a viable alternative to Big Social Media.

All the right-leaning people already left Big Tech a few years ago when they started deplatforming conservatives. They’ve already migrated to sites like patriots.win or forums.red. The only people left to leave big tech in the Twitter/Reddit exodus are the leftists. This means that all the big Mastodon/Lemmy instances are controlled by leftists.

In 2023, standard operating procedure for leftists is to censor people on the right. That is NOT how Big Social Media did it. When they were new sites, they were welcome to everyone. Only once they had a monopoly market position, they kicked out the right. If Lemmy is alienating half the population from the get-go, that’s a nonstarter. It might seem reasonable for political discussion, but for niche interests, you aren’t going to get a critical mass of users to displace Reddit. Things I’m interested in like Godot or Retrogaming have WAY MORE users on Reddit still, and lemmy is now hopelessly fractured. I won’t go back to lemmy.world, and the other instances just don’t have enough users to support a niche interest.

On Mastodon, the big sites go to all the smaller sites and say “You defederate from the same sites we block, or we’ll defederate from you and your instance becomes useless.” Lemmy.world now has the same negotiating position for lemmy, and they’re now throwing their weight around and demanding other sites block exploding heads.

ActivityPub is the decentralized protocol that is controlled by a handful of large websites. I.e., it has zero chance of actually delivering on its promise as currently implemented.

ActivityPub is defective by design. The decision to block or defederate should be done at the user level and not at the site level. A site can and should maintain a default blocklist, but individuals should be able to override the settings. The fact that none of the implementations do this shows that it is designed to create echo chambers and not a true open network.

I can’t use lemmy.world, because it’s controlled by censoring commies. There’s no point staying on exploding heads, because there just aren’t enough users to make a difference. What does exploding heads offer that patriots.win or forums.red or reddit offers? For niche hobby interests, reddit is still the place to go. For politics, you won’t surpass patriots.win.

I also read about how Google killed XMPP. XMPP was an open chat protocol. Then Google started their own implementation of XMPP. Eventually, more than 75% of XMPP users were using it via Google. Then Google decided they weren’t going to follow the XMPP protocol anymore. They made their own proprietary changes and broke compatibility. If you were a Google XMPP user, the net effect was that a few of your contacts disappeared (and you may not have even been aware Google was using XMPP). If you were a non-Google XMPP user, this was a disaster, most of your contacts were now gone and you had to switch to Google.

Facebook is making an ActivityPub client. I assume they’re going to use the same playbook to kill ActivityPub that Google used to kill XMPP. Facebook could even offer the big ActivityPub nodes $100M each to buy them out and the network would then be dead.

Bottom line for me: ActivityPub has no future. Now that it’s fractured into a large group of commies and a small group of free speech posters, lemmy offers me nothing that other free speech websites offer. For niche hobby interests, it’s back to Reddit. For politics, lemmy has no advantage over established free speech forums.

Lemmy.world, the biggest lemmy instance, blocked exploding heads, because they’re a bunch of commies who can’t stand to hear different viewpoints.

It’s a huge fairness and safety issue. Fairness examples: swimming, cycling. Safety examples: rugby, volleyball, MMA.

That is necessary for the current left. In a real honest open debate, they just lose. They make excuses for it like “You’re an evil person using words to trick us!”

They accuse the other side of fascism, but they really are the most fascist. Fascism is “the merger of corporate and government power”. In the USA in 2023, almost all the institutions are on the same side as the left. The only things the right controls right now are some state governments, the Supreme Court (sort of) and the House of Representatives (sort of).

If they want Lemmy to be a serious project, alienating half the country seems like an idiot move.

Everyone on the right already quit Reddit a couple years ago and migrated to sites like patriots.win or forums.red.

The only people left on reddit are the extreme left. When they quit reddit en masse, they’re going to create a left circlejerk website. There just aren’t a critical mass of conservatives left on Reddit anymore, because they would have left already.

There’s a trope that says “If a website has a single antisemitic comment, then everything on that website is invalid and must be banned.” So if someone wanted to ruin exploting-heads.com, then all they have to do is create accounts and post antisemitic stuff.