RoundSparrow

“Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine, page 56, February 28, 1966.

I have never done LSD or any other illegal drugs, but I have read FInnegans Wake: www.LazyWake.com

Lemmy tester, “RocketDerp” is my username on GitHub

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  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • This basically shuts my idea down

    it’s not very difficult to modify the code for something like this… and closing off registration wont’ let anyone else login and create new content form your istance.

    Personally the load on the major servers by having one more instance that subscribes to everything is why I think people should back off from creating more than the 1500 instances Lemmy network already has. Delivery of every single vote, comment, post 24 hours a day just so one person can read content for an hour or two a day.

    That makes sense for email systems where all that content doesn’t have to be sent, but for Lemmy it’s a huge amount of overhead.






  • I use that periodically to compare feeds, and like I said sometimes a post or comment is missing, actually I often see a comment that looks like it’s responding to a another comment, but I cannot see the parent comment.

    There have been bugs in Lemmy not sending comment deletes to all the instances. And lemmy.world and lemmy.ml were not communicating fro Saturday through Tuesday. Lemmy.world had some significant outages. It gets pretty tricky to track down and identify exact causes while things are unstable.


  • I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world

    The BBS and early Internet days were dominated by people who read non-fiction books. RTFM was a common saying in those days.

    does anyone else feel enslaved?

    “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”
    Neil Postman
    Amusing Ourselves to Death



  • This year has been dramatic. I’ve seen a big increase of users with quality content doing deletes in protest of Reddit. And the shift to sites like Lemmy that are not as favored by search engines.

    Reddit should have gone the other direction, become a non-profit, eliminate advertising, go back to open sourcing the code like they used to, and run on donations. Cut their staff of people that had anything to do with advertising and trying to market the platform.




  • I find it is hard to understand. Because now we all carry around a smartphone and can look at Wikipedia and a variety of other sources. On almost any topic, it is accurate with citations. And it really does not take that many people to create accurate sources of information. Truth basically is singular, you can detail it backwards and forwards. We have public libraries full of accurate information.

    What I do understand is that oil companies spend a massive amount of money on branding, marketing, sports, etc. The information people believe isn’t just random theories against how fire burning produces CO2 and warms up the Earth. They very specifically believe things the marketing and advertising tells them to. It’s a basic business formula to spend x percentage of all your income on marketing. It works across every field, for every $100 income you put $3 right back into keeping your customer “educated” from a voice outside the product material (such as product placement in a film, or a sponsorship message between news stories).

    I find people will sell their souls for free songs, free websites, free TV channels. They just don’t see how artificial changes in group behavior can become popular through marketing/advertising. They can’t face that marketing companies measure increases in sales, and sped precise amounts of money marketing a hamburger shop that everyone knows is there, but still the signal directs customers to change their choice of meals.

    Even religions that are not their own. It’s taught. They can’t face up to the fact that a person who is raised with no religion does not believe the book they believe. And if you take them to a country with a different religion or human language, they can’t make the connection that it is all learned.

    I can understand not having a skill from experience. Spending 8 years to learn how to do surgery correctly. But there really isn’t a reason for humanity to poison itself with marketing and advertising that climate change isn’t real - just to keep a specific set of billionaires in power.

    We could pay for our TV shows, songs, films, website. Not poison our minds with falsehoods in advertising. That chain hamburger shop doesn’t need to remind us it is there, if it’s good, we will go get a burger. It’s the motivation systems of misinformation that seems the hardest thing to understand and change. People can be incredibly attracted to things they find “funny” or “odd”. humanity can be sold all kinds of products that are not good quality or even cheaper… just by branding/marketing/logo things. I can’t understand why people haven’t had ENOUGH of it. Like even the Reddit API change was about adding more marketing and cutting out apps that didn’t do Reddit advertising.


  • It’s like religion people who believe the Earth is only 6000 years old or something. They know about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution… but I’m like, dude, that’s done by walking around and measuring plants, animals, insects. We have microscopes and DNA now. We know the DNA difference between two kinds of birds. We know how a single cell from female and male come together and follow DNA patterns to create the whole animal, even humans! They just won’t accept that DNA was after Darwin’s time and proved he was right!

    Cut down all the trees and put roads and buildings everywhere since year 1800. Start burning whale oil and then petrol oil as fast as you can. Make everything powered by oil. it’s burning, like burning wood at a campfire. Do you see the smoke and gas? Do you think a car is not burning petrol? A power plant isn’t burning petrol? Fire! It burns carbon products, wood, uses oxygen. It makes carbon dioxide. “A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year.”

    Here, can’t we take something like a fish tank and put a burning candle in it, and show you the smoke and gas it creates.

    Oh, they are dumping pollution into the river and you think the town downstream isn’t getting poisoned? Who is the town upstream from where you live.

    But the advertising and marketing of the oil companies ‘inform them’. You can’t convince them how fire works, making smoke and gas. And start counting up how many fires you see driving around on the roads of the world, and how many power plants are burning petrol, etc.

    Advertising and marketing can convince them of anything, the stuff they believe just because snazzy presentation.




  • I turn the question around… people who are clearly liars, deceivers… politicians and businessmen that people line up to vote for with their money or public votes. You really wonder what people think an “asshole” is when you see the kind of politicians that get massive support in a population - to a point people have their photograph on the wall of their workplace or home, put stickers on their cars, etc. to support people that are clearly monstrous. A lot of people do not seem to like to study the crowds of Europe 1930’s terrible leaders and just how many lined up to cheer on such persons.

    The scientists a person believes also is a huge indicator of who they consider to be an ‘asshole’. Just passively listening to people who support denial of climate change, denial of microscopic germs and virus, etc. The enthusiasm that followers to non-factual science seem to be very high, and they draw crowds in ways that fact-based science does not seem to do.





  • Up until early July, Lemmy was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Federation had massive performance overhead due to some bugs and each additional instance that went online and subscribed to the big 4 popular servers was causing an even worse load problem than if say 30 users had joined directly. Especially instances that wanted a fully populated All listing, that meant every single thing was being sent to the server even if nobody was really reading that stuff.

    And things like searching for topic content are going to be pretty limited given these newer servers don’t have much history.

    The aftermath of this attempt to scale is that there is also likely a lot of duplicate data, conversations that are mostly repetitive and posts to the same topics. Let alone the bugs Lemmy has federating deletes and moderation removal that doesn’t impact direct users on the main servers as much.