have you watched the video till the end?

I’m afraid it’s gonna be even more gimmicky than Civ 6. I hope they really change direction.

I’ve considered in the past the design of an open-source (possibly federated?) dating app and there are very complicated disincentives in a system that is not algorithimically mediated.

I believe the format of the dating app, let alone a dating app for platonic relationships, shouldn’t be proposed again unless you want to make money out of it.

The idea of a tunnel 1 to 1 across space to engage with another, isolated individual is not something that should be pursued further. This problem should be addressed by rebuilding social environments (even online, even through new forms of software if necessary) where you know you can meet like-minded people filtered by social dynamics that keep out toxic and predatory people (or horny people if you are in for a platonic thing) through swarm intelligence, social pressure and community values. We need a new grammar of online communities to build communities where flirting and getting to know people beyond a superficial level and with romantic or sexual intentions is feasible without attracting predators, groomers and other people that often target sex-positive or “dating-positive” online communities.

the state has no business deciding anything about aesthetics. Also incels.

For that you need different people and communities, not different tools

Mental health looks different for everybody. For instance, for me being too functional is the issue and I have to actively root myself in the world, intentionally connect with people, break the flow of work, union organizing, networking, building stuff. Alienation is the consequence and it looks very different from, for instance, my GF’s experience of ADHD+Autism related stress

Banners of Ruin. I guess I will be the only human in that world. Maybe they will kill me, maybe they will consider me a God.

I feel like the issue with these reddit alternatives, is the LACK of content and users.

You’ve just found out that software by itself doesn’t create communities. My teacher of Online Communities in university used to say that “you can’t create communities online, you can just intercept them”.

Reddit is successful because it managed to give space to plenty of communities that had no space before.

Lemmy won’t grow until reddit starts kicking out bigger chunks of people beyond nazis and tankies larpers that go too far or until it develops features capable of serving communities that reddit cannot serve (very unlikely, but not impossible even though I have no idea what those communities could be).

If you have a community that you think could benefit from lemmy, then go on. Hosting an instance won’t make a difference if you don’t.

at what stage are you in Satisfactory?

I play often automation games, management games and strategy games. I’m always looking for people to start a gaming group with, since I really don’t fit into gaming culture and I’ve left that world a long time ago.

Right now anyway I’m playing: Banners of Ruin, Timberborn (yeah no, I’m not a furry lol) and occasionally R6: Siege and Chivalry 2.

The Wheel of Time. A solid meter and a half of fantasy saga.

I can agree with this reading of SolarPunk and it’s kinda how I’m using it too. Nonetheless this doesn’t make it more of an aesthetic. You’re shifting the frame from considering SolarPunk as a model to considering it a tool.

Indeed SolarPunk is “used”, like every utopia, to promote a specific political model that is not necessarily represented inside the utopic model, in its content, in its narratives. There’s more than one layer. You call it “not being in your face”.

The author of the video, I believe, doesn’t make this distinction. For him, SolarPunk is a blueprint and taken as a blueprint, it lacks a lot of stuff. You might conflate the aestethic with the intentions and ideas of those using Solarpunk for a political goal, but they are not the same. In the world out there, most people take SolarPunk as a blueprint without looking at the broader “deeply anarchist project” behind it and think “it’s that easy”.

The video correctly highlight that it’s not that easy. The criticism I would make is that the video suggests to embed a set of values, considerations and narrative elements to the aesthetic that will inevitably make it lose its appeal as an utopia and fail in its purpose as a tool for agitation and the creation of desires.

why? I feel the same criticism has been developed more in depth by other people. The fact that there’s no social tension or politics implicit in the solarpunk aesthetic is a well-known problem. As is the general association of solarpunk with techno-optimism.

Also the video is not really criticizing the attitude or values of the “core” solarpunk writers and artists but more the reception in some internet circles. Let’s call it “base solarpunk”. That “base solarpunk” that exists in the mind of many is not a concept to be understood, but a forming ideology to be shaped that is just loosely coupled to solarpunk as an artistic aesthetic

better cross-instance user experience. Like now if you want to post to another instance you have to use the search bar and pray, right? Or is there a better way? If there’s a better way, I couldn’t find it. In general more streamlined “community discovery” features.

nowadays the core of leftist identity is in the form and rituals of disagreement with others that share the same identity. It’s fighting over the control of a house we used to live in together but the house has since burned down.

A bit late to the party but to add something: “socialist” in the USA means something and in Europe (but most of the world I would say) it means something else.

In the USA it means “anything left of Bernie Sanders” while elsewhere it can mean “achieving communism by taking over a state apparatus” or also “reforming the State and Society to incrementally get closer to a communist society”.

Given the rituals and vocabulary used on Lemmy we can safely assume the vast majority of the users are young Americans but it’s just barely left ambiguous than “leftist”.

it’s a niche product that doesn’t provide any advantage to the average user compared to reddit and can’t make up for the critical mass reddit has.

It’s just another case of hackerism without a strategy that goes beyond “we make a tool, we hope eventually somebody will use it”

the written word is dead, said a guy on the internet.

Our attention span is being robbed and that’s true, but it doesn’t look at all like what he’s describing.

I think it goes farther than that. All the anarchists that I know that have a strategy for change and they pursue it never define themselves as anarchists unless forced to. The ones too attached to the identity and symbols tend to be more ineffective and irrelevant. We call them “the targets” because they play the very useful role of making people believe anarchism is about reading and writing about irrelevant stuff and smashing some windows occasionally just to spend 20 years in prison for it.

There’s no major force pushing users to adopt federated software beyond privacy concerns and distrust for big tech. This means mass adoption won’t happen unless big tech collapses or gets regulated to death by forces external to the fediverse.

The only strategy I’ve seen articulated so far for federated social media is “be ready for when scraps will fall from the table of Big Tech”.

I’ve created a few at this point and I can give you some mixed advices:

• start with a clear path to impact: engage people only when you have a clear idea that goes from what you have now to a world changed for the better.
• avoid engaging with politicized people too early and engage with people impacted by the problem you’re addressing first.
• don’t go too horizontal too early: horizontality, democracy, fairness are a cost, a cost that most young organizations cannot sustain. Lay down a path from an early, efficient core to a more democratic organization with a clear transition process that triggers once the organization starts to be impactful. Transparency of intentions can make up for horizontality for a while.
• a small organization of like-minded people can do more of a big organization. Bring on board people that already agree with you on the important topics and share your idea and your plan.
• detach your public communication from your internal communication: what you say in public doesn’t have to be what you think or say in private. Learn how to play with it.
• structure your internal processes as soon as possible. Having somebody with experienced with setting up organizations, designing processes, automating workflows, picking tools and structuring informations is very helpful. If you don’t have such a person, reach out to an organization that seems impactful and ask them for help.

Be aware that the author of this blog is a well known Italian nazi-transhumanist that is famous for making shit up about himself, his expertise and the IT industry since the early '00. Don’t trust a single word that comes out of his mouth.

yeah but for what purpose? What new order would they try to install by committing such transgression?

This would be taboo maybe, but the kind of taboo that doesn’t get questioned, it’s just part of the new order, unchallengeable power. If you did actually violate such a taboo you would probably just be edgy

Yes. In a Solarpunk Society, not in the present.

isolate yourself and become irrelevant. Any form of “purity politics” inevitably leads to sectarianism.

Engaging with the world means becoming contaminated. It’s inevitable and it’s also good. If one’s politics is not able to deal with this simple fact, those politics will soon become irrelevant, as did many radical ML or anarchist fringes.

I see this argument sometimes and also debated it in a panel once.

The shift to remote work for sure damages traditional unionization practices and pushes towards systemic changes that might create different conditions. If these are advantageous or not can be up for debate.

There’s one thing that I believe, in terms of strategy, ends the discussion really early: workers are overwhelmingly in favor to their right to do remote work. This means that opposing remote work is not a viable option, especially in places where the worker movements are weak. Workers would see this as attacking their interests and there’s no amount of solidarity that can convince you to do two hours of commuting a day to prevent systemic shifts that might or might not damage the worker movement.

If opposing such change is not a strategic option, we are left with the possibility of riding this change and make the best out of it: ditch old-fashioned union practices that require a specific spatial setting and replace them with effective online practices that allow to find workers, bring them together and build power in their workplaces. Work changes continually and would change even if we defeated capitalism once and for all. Practices and organizations that aim at building workers power need to be fast, flexible and up to date with the reality they have to deal with. The pace of change of most existing union is too slow and this, among other topics, might be a positive push towards a more flexible union ecosystem.

Questo è un problema complesso da modellare in maniera rigorosa.

Tuttavia una regola spannometrica è che più un’organizzazione è giovane più ha necessità di evolvere rapidamente i propri processi e strumenti perché deve ancora capire qual è il fit giusto. In questa fase, spendere troppe risorse su uno strumento non adatto o non affidabile può essere particolarmente critico e avere costi elevanti. Questo è un problema nella scelta di qualsiasi software ma chiaramente un software libero il cui supporto costa troppo, che ha feature importanti non documentate o banalmente che richiede tanto tempo per essere installato e integrato con altri sistemi presenta problematiche specifiche. Poi ovviamente c’è la barriera iniziale di tirare su un server e trovare un sistemista affidabile, che non è per nulla banale.

Al crescere e allo stabilizzarsi dell’organizzazione e dei processi possono liberarsi più risorse per adottare strumenti liberi MA transizionare a nuovi strumenti è più complicato appunto perché i processi hanno iniziato a sedimentarsi e lo strumento deve essere fit rispetto ai processi. In più questi costi devono essere giustificabili di fronte all’organizzazione o la scelta non verrà compiuta: in alcuni casi ci può essere una leva politica e ideologica, ma chiaramente questo approccio non si generalizza. Se la scelta non conviene in termini di efficienza dell’organizzazione perché lo strumento è acerbo o malfatto, deve convenire in termini di costi. Questo talvolta è vero, talvolta no. L’ultima opzione è che convenga in una dimensione strategica: usare software proprietario crea minacce esistenziali all’organizzazione. Banalmente uno scenario del tipo: “mi bannano da facebook e perdo tutta la mia clientela, quindi ripiego su una mailing list o un CRM di qualche tipo per consolidare la mia user base sotto il mio controllo”. Però anche qui, non tutte le organizzazioni sono capaci di ragionare su questi “cigni neri” e non lo si può dare per scontato.

La risoluzione del problema può essere esclusivamente soggettiva e tattica: per ogni organizzazione e per ogni strumento libero bisogna valutare se e quando introdurlo per rimpiazzare strumenti proprietari più efficaci, perché il massimalismo o ammazza l’organizzazione o la allontana, senza portare alcun cambiamento concreto.