Software engineer, functional programming enthusiast.
they’re not really illegal at all, are they?
If a police officer commits murder but the D.A. covers it up and the officer is never charged with a crime, does this make murder by the police legal?
Yes, it is illegal, and the government does not enforce laws consistently. The point is, this is a moral failing of Starfleet/the US government. This is an injustice.
“Illegal?” DS9’s S31 was protected by Starfleet Command. They were completely untouchable.
They can be both protected and illegal. Sisko noted that the organization was completely antithetical to the laws of Starfleet, e.g. committing genocide against the Changlings of the Dominion (they used the actual word “genocide” to describe what Section 31 did in the show). But their existence was neither denied nor acknowledged by Starfleet. This is part of the reason why he asked Bashir to act as a double-agent.
It was clearly analogous to the CIA, which for decades has been collecting money from the illegal drug trade and supporting terrorist organizations around the world, all in the name of “national security.” It was a critique of the US government, like most of the Star Trek episodes that deal with the moral shades of gray within the laws of Starfleet. It is clear from their political commentary that the shows morality was staunchly anti-fascist.
And this new film on Section 31 completely reversing their former politics and joining with and celebrating the fascists is more than I can stomach.
Deep Space Nine made it absolutely clear that Section 31 is an illegal black-ops org with garb somewhat reminiscient of Nazi storm troopers, they were the bad guys.
Yeoh has described it as “Mission: Impossible in space,” and likened the tone to the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
Mission: Impossible, the longest-running, pro-CIA anti-socialist propaganda series in US history. OK… so now Star Trek is about making illegal black-ops Nazis look cool?
Fuck these fucking producers. I want my gay space communism back.
The Voyager theme song is by far my most favorite, probably of any TV series. I haven’t seen the whole series yet, but I like it a lot so far. Still, I think DS9 is my favorite.
And once they control the media, no one will ever again have to worry about learning the truth when military and/or police commit war crimes like genocide, or murder protesters at demonstrations, or when the cops murder people for not having the correct skin color, and so on.
Wow, I am impressed. I am just finishing up the entire Deep Space 9 series, this really adds to the ambiance for me.
I am so curious where they got all the 3D assets for the Defiant, Deep Space 9, even one of the Orb of the Prophets… did they actually do all that by hand? These aren’t just available on Thingverse or the Unreal Engine Marketplace, right?
And no, they don’t speak to one another / find one another or are able to follow / like / reply to one another as one is told the Fediverse works.
This is true, it is a problem, but maybe not as big a problem as you think.
Kbin combines the data model of both Lemmy and Mastodon so Kbin can interact with both of them perfectly. Mastodon can interact in a limited way with Lemmy. Frendica and Pixelfed also work fairly well with Mastodon, so Kbin should be able to interact with both of those as well, although I have never tried. PeerTube is probably the least compatible, although I can upvote and post comments on PeerTube videos using my Mastodon account, and follow PeerTube accounts on Mastodon. But I can’t create new PeerTube posts on Mastodon. I hope in time all of these different app services will be able to interact with each other more.
The most difficult thing right now is moderation tools. Right now, banning instances is very coarse, and it also deletes the entire social graph between instances, so people who were following each other lose their connections with each other, even after the ban is removed.
There are people working on solving that problem right now, but it might be a little while before the changes are spread throughout the network.
What I would like most is if I can create one ActivityPub account and use it on every ActivityPub service. This for me would be a perfect solution, because then I could use any app using a single account. I would also like to see it possible to ban instances temporarily without losing social connectivity, and I would like to see better moderation tools for individual user accounts being banned by an instance.
There are 500 million posts on Twitter every day. Do you read them all? There are 2.8 million subreddits. Have you browsed them all? The internet is big. You’re not going to be able to follow everything everywhere all at once.
That is not really the point though. Suppose there are 2.8 million forums on Kbin or Lemmy. If you join an instance of any ActivityPub app, can you talk to any of those 2.8 million? Can you interact with all of the precise subset of forums that interest you? You can choose an instance to join, but you have to know ahead of time all the instances you want to interact with, and your interests might change over time. Or you have to create and maintain multiple accounts.
This isn’t exactly sustainable for individual users.
This lack of a shared reality with the scores is going to hamper lemmy as a reddit alternative if there isn’t some kind of standard or attempt to foster a “true score” across all instances.
No, not really. You should keep in mind that the vote scores on Reddit and other similar forums are fake scores as well. All forms of online voting are fake to some degree.
Reddit also does various manipulations during vote counting prior to showing you a score. For example, they may not count scores from accounts that are too new or has too little other activity, in order to avoid scores manipulated by sock puppet accounts. And it is entirely possible, maybe even likely, that Elon Musk directly controls the vote count on X/Twitter posts to his liking.
So I don’t think voting is really all that important anyway. It may be important on centralized websites like Reddit, but it has always been something of a lie. It is just that on a federated forum the lie becomes more obvious.
Personally, I never take voting on the fediverse seriously, and I don’t think anyone else should either. I mean, I do upvote, but I use it more as an acknowledgement, more than a means to try to boost someone’s comment over others.
I have no expertise in how ActivityPub works, but my guess is it works something like this:
You make a post on instance A, you can view it on instance B. People all over the fediverse, instances C through Z are voting on your post.
The venn diagram of other instances with which instance A and instance B federate overlap but are not exactly the same. There are instances federated with instance A not visible to instance B, there are instances federated with instance B not visible to instance A.
The vote count for a post is counted by instance A and B based on which instances with which they federate. That means instance A is counting votes from instances that B cannot see, and instance B is counting votes from instances that A cannot see.
Where the Venn diagrams overlap, both instances will agree on the vote count. But the vote counts coming from instances that they don’t both federate with will cause a difference in vote count.
I saw the “502 Gateway” HTTP error message, but I never even closed my browser tab. I refreshed again today and Lemmy.ml was back online! Thanks for your hard work!
you’re talking about centrists and liberals.
I suppose I am, though I think it is accurate to call centrists and liberals “right wing.”
Those are both good articles, I have actually read them both before.
These megacorporations are why we left for the Fediverse in the first place
Exactly! I do have hope that Mastodon, Lemmy, and the rest will be resistant to enshittification. As long as these instances are funded by the users in a non-profit capacity, there will be no need for ads and therefore no enshittification. Even if they federate with enshittified for-profit instances where professional influencers are pressured into creating more and more ads, I think most of the good instances will just block the annoying influencers, or defederate entirely.
But I guarantee, if Threads succeeds in halting Mastodon’s momentum and enough people leave Mastodon for threads, they will eventually end up enshittified exactly the way Twitter and Reddit ended up.
constant hysterical posts about Threads on here are worse than all the Elon Musk ones
Congratulations, you passed the test! You didn’t fall for the pro-Threads side of the argument or the anti-Threads side, you used your immense brainpower to transcend the petty debate and correctly called out both sides as “hysterical.” Well done! You shall be rewarded with a free cookie, or a free beer, whichever you prefer, and you can shove it right up your ass.
People who are right wing support fascism. Full stop.
I very much agree with everything else you said, but I can’t grasp why you would make the extra effort to pander to them like that, it’s bizarre.
You are right, and I also agree with you, so let me just clarify… there is a difference between people who unconsciously support fascism merely because they are apolitical, and people who are very deliberately fascist, as in enthusiastic supporters of the Republican party.
Most fans of US movies are indifferent, and do not think of themselves as political beings. They think of themselves as just “ordinary.” Like a fish not knowing what water is, “ordinary” for an average US citizen is about as close to fascism as a person can possibly be without enthusiastically actively waving around swastikas – but there is still a difference between “ordinary” apolitical people like Tarantino and all of his fans who think of him as edgy, and someone actively wishing to purge the world of all non-white people. That is what I mean by “right wing” and not fascist.
I think it is important to draw that distinction because I don’t like blaming apolitical people for being the victims of US mainstream cinema brainwashing.
Government bad, corruption everywhere, war for the sake of war, etc.
I’m certain Tarantino would double down on that and I just don’t want it.
Tarantino is kind of a bellwether for the mostly apolitical right-wing (but non-fascist) middle-class majority of the US population, the movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” convinced me of that. It also convinced me that Tarantino himself has lost the plot, or actually never really had it. He reminds me a bit of Beavis and Butthead, kind of just watching movies and TV all the time, sorting everything into the binary categories “cool” or “sucks”, except he actually goes out and makes films that glorify all he thinks is “cool” which happens to be a cross-section of all media that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity.
So he likes Star Trek. Congratulations Tarantino, your “geek” bona-fides are authentic, but like the rest of the right-wing (non-fascist) middle-class majority, you really have no fucking clue and don’t care about the political origins of Star Trek and are just itching to erase them so you can make it into another “cool” movie that glorifies violence and toxic masculinity. You can fuck right off, Tarantino.
In this reply you haven’t actually addressed any of the reasons I brought up for why federating with Threads is a horrible idea.
If you’re already up and running on Mastodon and can interact with people on Threads, there’s literally no reason to swap one for the other.
This is about encouraging new users to join Facebook instead of one of those other Mastodon instances. Realistically, what percentage of people who join Threads will consider joining Mastodon or an independence instance instead when Facebook decides to drop support for Mastodon federation? I would guess that number at 1% or less. In other words, 99% of all Threads users are stuck there for the entire term of their service, never actually joining Mastodon.
The point of Facebook investing all of this money into setting up Threads is to eliminate competition from decentralized services. They are terrified that they are losing all of the control over the Internet that they have slowly acquired over the past 15 years or so, they are trying to take it back and destroy the competing network of federated independent services.
I am upvoting this thread for being relevant to the discussion, but man, this article makes me sick. They are completely ruining Star Trek.