“No you MUST uninstall Brave, the company is too shady!” -someone using a phone made by a literal advertising company

The two party system isn’t the only problem though, there’s also:

• Money being a form of speech – EU MEPs aren’t soliciting billionaires for money to spend on TV ads
• The 10th amendment – prevents any national effort where the federal govt uses a power not explicitly granted to it in the constitution. Obamacare tripped up here for instance, and Obamacare is far from national socialized healthcare. It was a feature when people identified more with their local culture, but in an era when every American identifies as American-first, and engages the political system accordingly by only knowing or caring about national candidates and parties, it becomes a bug.
• States that should have never been states – the US Senate took a heavy rural turn in the 19th century as vast, sparsely populated territories were given statehood. Nowadays this means to buy two US Senators you only need to gaslight ~600k people with advertising (the population of Wyoming). The founding fathers never really developed a solid plan for how the west would be settled, and it shows.
• Powerful and unaccountable Court – the Supreme Court is given authority over both other branches, serving life terms, with few guidelines or restrictions. A party with the Presidency and Senate at the right time can gain a majority of the court and undo (or manufacture) precedent at the snap of a finger. The resulting system makes it far easier to capture the court than to pass a constitutional amendment. Think abortion should be legal? Here’s a roundabout legal justification for that. Oh the new majority thinks it shouldn’t be? Okay now it’s gone. It’s a chaotic way to handle bedrock rights like access to healthcare and privacy (neither of which are mentioned anywhere in the US constitution). The constitution should be malleable enough that the court is strictly tasked with interpreting the letter of the law. The US shouldn’t be relying on legal gymnastics to legalize abortion and gay marriage. It’s unstable and undemocratic.
• Electoral College – the leader of the country, not just the Executive but the Head of State, is elected in a way that respects statehood more than personhood. It is more concerned with making sure Wyoming gets a fair vote than making sure John Doe in Queens does.
• First past the post voting – this is another oversight by the founding fathers that many European republics were able to avoid, and it’s the root cause of the two party system. But it also makes gerrymandering possible, which completely breaks both state-level politics and the US House. It makes so many seats into “safe seats” that the “money is speech” briberies become much easier to allocate.
• Racism – almost every dumb thing about American politics can be traced back in some form to slavery, segregation, or racism. Why is every state given 2 senators? Slavery. Why were some of those rural states admitted? Also slavery. Why did White Americans support progressive policies in the 30s, 40s, and 50s? Segregation. Why did the entire Deep South flip from Democrat to Republican in the late 60s? Also segregation. It’s America’s original sin and it’s still playing a role.

Every one of those things plays a role in the US not adopting stricter privacy standards, or leading the way in anything except military might. It’s why American politics is so broken that even a majority of voters wanting to fix it isn’t enough.

Well yeah, no one has ever used the term “only hope” optimistically lol

Wikipedia seems to suggest it was an original term, first recorded use in 1909, and mentions nothing about alternative terms or controversy. I call BS

That’s kind of an extreme example lol unless the game is asking for insane permissions. Still I get your point and hopefully the EU acts on it. Especially since they appear to be humanity’s only hope against shit like this

Yeah Android manufacturers been doing this since its inception. I remember having to remove the Blockbuster app from my Droid X lol

I use Youtube more than any other service. If you like video essays, documentaries, and other medium- and long-form content, it’s the only place on earth to get it. Cable television ditched intelligent content long ago. Nebula and Curiousity are okay, but most of the content that I couldn’t already get on Youtube has that shitty cable tv vibe.

The only downside with Youtube is it’s huge and the algorithm is iffy. It can take a long time to build up a library of subscriptions that provide high level content every day. But now that I have that, it’s basically my exclusive streaming platform. I watch 1hr of Netflix/HBO/whatever with my wife every night, and all the rest is history, cooking, science, etc. on Youtube.

Not sure why I said it that way, all I really meant was Instagram users

Anyone that cries “free speech” when government isn’t involved at all is a dolt

Yeah civil but also just a higher level conversation overall. And in a place like /memes. Just reminded me of old reddit. But maybe I just like logic-as-a-blade convos lol

Somewhat but reddit drew a lot of people in with celebrities. The people attracted to celebrities and image heavy content will be more drawn to Threads instead of Lemmy. At least imho

^ This is what reddit was like before it got big

I started reading your comment and thought “please be about Wave” haha. The funniest part about Wave is how they learned no lessons from it.

The invite-only model worked great for Gmail because it was an actual service with real utility and people wanted in (1GB storage was huuuuge). But with social networks, the courting ritual is reversed, because without a critical mass of users the product has no utility.

So what do they do with G+? Invite only 🤦‍♂️

And by then they had something like half the world running Android, with Google accounts… and didn’t just let them in. Youtube should have been a simple “if you want to check out G+, your Youtube account will get you in, otherwise carry on.” Instead they make it invite only and then bully youtubers into registering.

It’s just mind-boggling how little they understood about social networks after building such a wonderful piece of software for it.

Yeah it’ll be hard to regain my trust after this one. I mean I’ll still use Lemmy but for now I’ll assume mine or any other account could be hacked at any time and act accordingly. This is a really amateur mistake even by FOSS standards.

Yeah

Literally just taking top questions from reddit and posting them here to help drive engagement and get the platform going. Like you said no karma here so not sure what the aggressive tone is about. Glad the post police are migrating from reddit too though lmao that’s a good sign I guess

If you really feel like getting sentimental, check out this Wait But Why, specifically the “Relationships” section. There’s also this awesome Kurzgesagt video which was inspired by it.

Then why close it to admins? Just make vote history public, period. And make it very clear that everyone can see it.

The biggest problem that I have with it currently is that the vast, vast majority of lemmy users, whether it continues to grow or not, will not know about it. And many of them will use usernames that are identifiable, thinking that as long as they don’t say anything controversial, they can’t get into hot water with their govt/church/family/whatever.

just be careful when upvoting your unicorn bukake fetishes if you’re embarrassed about it

Sorry but this is just trying to trivialize a very real issue. If this is ever going to be a place for serious discussion and not just memes, puns, and repetitive jokes, then we shouldn’t dismiss real privacy concerns by acting like anyone who has them is just embarrassed of their silly fetish.

The best thing that any of us can do by far is vote. Even moderately adhering to reddiquette (is there a lemmiquette?) really does improve the community.

Unfortunately on lemmy your vote history is accessible to any admin of any server in the federation. Really hope that’s changed sometime soon.

You only need a server if you plan to serve the content in a sophisticated way (like Plex). If you just watch movies on your laptop then it’s as simple as downloading the files and opening them.

Unfortunately, getting into usenet is actually not as technically hard as it is practically hard. First, some things to know about usenet:

• You pay for access to a usenet server, which has incredible speeds and doesn’t rely on uploaders. There are many out there, and good ones are easy to find.
• Because it isn’t P2P like torrents, there’s no way for the studios to know who’s been downloading anything. Typically the most they can do is send a DMCA to the servers, who auto-comply. Because of this near-anonymity, a VPN usually isn’t used. The corporations would need to subpoena the server to get any of your info, and they’re usually deliberately hosted in privacy-friendly countries.
• Now the hard part: knowing where the files you want to download exist on that usenet server, because even a small TV episode is often divided into 50+ smaller files. This is where NZBs come in. NZBs are small files that tell your usenet downloader where to find all the parts that create the bigger file. The usenet server you pay for doesn’t provide this service for legal reasons.
• Therefore, you need to also subscribe to an NZB indexer, which is where you search for NZBs for shows, movies, games, etc. Some are one lifetime payment, some are recurring. Good ones usually only open their enrollment during very small windows, so it can be really tough to get into one. This is the biggest hurdle for most people. Even finding out which indexers are out there can be tough, as people generally don’t blab about them in open forums, because they’re the most piracy-adjacent and vulnerable to being shut down.

That said, once you have a usenet server to connect to, and an indexer to find what you want, then it’s as simple as downloading the NZB file with a program like Sabnzbd, which will feel very similar to a torrent client. It downloads the various parts and combines them, so what you end up with is openable by windows (either media or exe). Everyone starts this way, and most users are probably content stopping at this stage too.

From there, however, some people get really advanced with it, like the person above running it on a separate server. There’s software out there that automates TV and Movies downloads based on your preferences and which shows you subscribe to, same with music and even ebooks. Then there’s Plex, which you may already be familiar with and which allows you to use your laptop or whatever to stream your content to phones, chromecast, etc., as well as share your content with friends to stream (requires paid sub I believe). It can be a little daunting to set everything up, but you’re mostly just following guides because it’s the same setup for everyone, minus changes in server URLs, username/password, etc. And once it’s running, it really is beautiful. A show that I subscribe to that airs on say, Wednesdays 8-9pm, is available on my Plex by like 9:30 typically, without me having to lift a finger. I even get a notification on my phone that a new episode is available.

But to be able to transcode streams to multiple people in the house? Requires a somewhat beefy processor. And to keep your huge library of shows for years and year? Requires a lot of storage. Even more so on both counts if you want everything in 4K bluray quality. And it probably needs to be a dedicated machine–can’t be gaming and transcoding from the same rig. But boy is it addicting building up your own enormous streaming service for friends and families haha. I hope you can see now why some people would get carried away with it.