I said that because they’re doing it, it’s not like I’m psychic lol

And Dems funneled money to MAGA fascists to split republicans. It’s art of war 101: divide and conquer; it doesn’t really reflect on the merits of anyone involved.

Green could be a false flag puppet of the Republicans or they could have a legitimate platform and genuine candidates working to better the world for all the rightwing cares, what matters is that they are popular enough to detract from dems.

Ironically, reacting to this as if Green is the enemy also plays into this tactic: dems become more isolated from other interests and therefore more resistant to change and adaptation to a changing political climate, which makes them less appealing and more likely to die out.

It’s just large enough, however, to spoil the work of those who put in this kind of work.

The big 2 parties haven’t put in more effort, they’ve just put in more person-hours… Because they have more people. Parties aren’t more worthy of votes based solely on how many people are voting for them, that’s tyranny of the majority. And if they can adapt their platforms to appeal to the small portion of undecided defectors from their primary rival party (each other), they damn sure can tailor their platform to the 100,000s that vote independent/3rd party.

Checking biases, the only other article by this contributor is explaining why it’s actually A Good Thing™ that the Harris campaign doesn’t explain their platform in depth… You know, like you would want a leader to do if you were subject to their rules and policies for any length of time.

Once again, the liberals are quick to assign blame for any of their shortcomings, and it’s just coincidentally never their fault nor responsibility to do anything. Their primary guiding principal for decades has been to change the status quo as little as possible to ensure they can’t be blamed for the changes, while accusing everyone else of destroying democracy.

If you think not having sex is so terrible it’s basically torture, the problem isn’t that you haven’t had sex. It really isn’t that great, and you need to stop idolizing these things

What you’re actually missing, and misinterpreting as “sex will fix me” is genuine human connection, and that is a skill that takes a loooot of practice, mistakes, heartache, and even at times, being “cringe.”

But it’s easier to think that sex is some magical experience that a secret organization is denying you.

That’s a very complex question with many, many answers. No individual life can be boiled down to a single phenomenon. A lot of the answers I’m seeing in here are great, ans definitely describe a phenomenon at play, but it’s important to remember that nobody’s just outright stupid enough to fall for a single piece of rhetoric. Instead, them coming into bigotry is the result of a complex web of ideas that brought them to that conclusion.

That being said, I’ll add my two cents that I don’t see anyone saying: privilege. Privilege insulates people from how cold and cruel the world can be; in doing so, they don’t learn the comraderie that grows out of shared hardship (aka empathy). They see others experiencing it, and assume they are weak, both for “allowing themselves” to fall into hardship, as well as for “getting conned” by others who have fallen on hardship. This too adds fuel to the fire that is all the other reasons people get pulled into hateful ideologies.

Imagine being excluded from some perceived secret club based on conditions you didn’t have a choice in, and seeing women or bipoc or lgbt or the working class supporting each other. You too would feel resentment towards those who won’t include you in their circles. Yet you never developed the proper understanding of the ties that bind them, so you only see it as hate towards you and your demographic; this then becomes a feedback loop: your hate hurts thode communities, making them even more interdependent on each other, making you more resentful and frustrated.

You fall in with people you don’t really like because of a shared disdain for The Others, and then, because that’s your only lived experience, assume all identity-based comraderie is necessarily just a loose collective of people that only get along because of a common enemy. This reinforces your belief that The Others hate you, only adding fuel to the fire of your own hate.

This is also why these people are so easily manipulated: all you have to do is control their perception of who hates them, and they’ll do whatever you say to make it stop. This is why politics and religion are such great examples, and no “side” is immune. Want to make a leftist out of a fascist? Convince them that The Jews are actually just the bourgeoisie, who must be killed for the good of ourselves and our nation. An anarchist who fears authoritarians will readily agree to being a part of an exclusive coalition of individuals that determines the way society is structured, so, y’know, the authoritarians don’t get their way.

Correction: you don’t work around dangerous things assuming you’ll make a mistake long

Bitwarden. Hands down the best decision I made in regards to web safety was switching to a proper password manager.

Close second is uBlock Origin.

Also make sure to use DecentralEyes for easy enhanced privacy.

I use NoScript, but that level of granular control isn’t everyone’s cup of tea

In the year 2025
if man is still alive
if woman can survive…

thanks for the red circle, otherwise i’d be illiterate and unable to see the only thing in the foreground

The choice of Rust limited the ability for people to contribute.

That’s unfortunate. I think rust is particularly tailored to big projects with many contributors that need the performance boosts of a “low level” language. This goes especially for web apps, since they’re likely to grow in size directly correlated to number of users and use time.

I get that the compiler is viewed as “training wheels” by the C and C++ coders, but it’s nearly impossible to ensure memory safety on a large project without something or someone checking and enforcing it, since no one can be reasonably expected to parse thousands of lines of code and keep the data flow in mind at all times while considering edge cases and also trying to add on to it while other also grow it.

Do you mean anonymize as in hide which specific mod took a particular action? Because that makes sense as an anti-harassment feature, and doesn’t conflict with everyone who’s retorting about transparency.

Mod actions should be publicly available, but not necessarily which mod is taking the action. That can just lead to witch hunts and ignores the complicity of other mods

There is this desire to be as widely federated on an instance and the idea that everything on the Fediverse is something they want to be able to see.

Reminds me of Geek Socual Fallacy #1

Here’s the journal article itself

This whole thing stinks of advertising. They use a sample size of 24 people. The results are underwhelming: “Each disease cohort concordantly demonstrated increases in the NAD+/NADH ratio but did not reach significance individually” (“when we massaged the numbers, the result we wanted popped out”). Looking at the graphs, it looks like the upper half (highest baselines) of the patients worsened over the 12 week study.

My favorite lines?

“The objective of the Phase 2 REPAIR-MS and REPAIR-PD clinical trials was to investigate the effects of CNM-Au8” and “CNM-Au8® is a suspension of faceted, clean-surfaced gold nanocrystals” and course:

“Clene Nanomedicine, Inc., funded this study.”

None of the above. This study is as fishy as they come

So we’ve extracted so much gold from the earth there’s not enough left for our bodies?

I know this probably isn’t the case, but the image of extracting precious metals from human tissue solely to squeeze every last drop out of nature is hilarious to me. Plausible, but hilarious nonetheless. Mine owners leaving toxic lakes in the middle of Parkinson’s patients when the earth runs out of gold.

Right next to the Yarb Sale

It’s like if Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky all were the same behind the scenes and gave you access to read the posts and follower the on the other sites. “Mastodon” is just the collective term for all those sites that are linked together.

Also you can have a lot more control over what you see and who you interact with, but you don’t have to if you just want to login and look at memes. You can also run your own site ti have even more control, but, once again, you don’t have to.

If you mean you just don’t get the appeal of the “microblogging” format, or the culture that arose online surrounding it, I can’t explain that. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

As someone who’s not familiar with federated services, I don’t know what to base my instance decision on.

As I said elsewhere, many people just want a place they can go to share memes, news, opinions and misinformation. But on the other hand, there are plenty affiliated with interests/hobbies/identities/ideologies where you can to share topical memes, topical news, topical opinions, and misinformation (as long as it’s on topic).

Snark aside, I’m on two instances: one for socializing, and another for my interest in cybersecurity. So I’d start with: do you want an experience that’s more typical of social media with a more general pool of people, or do you want to focus on a specific interest but with the understanding that entails a smaller userbase and a slower feed?

If the latter sounds best to you, what communities do you find yourself most active in on other platforms (e.g. reddit, lemmy, facebook, twitter)? If not, we can find a relatively well-populated instance that’s likely to have staying power.

Your point about Joinmastodon is too true. It’s a terrible starting point for someone who just wants to test the waters: “I have to learn about an entirely new type of digital networking AND commit to an instance? I bet Bluesky doesn’t have all these layers of obfuscation.”

It would be easier if the community would just agree that there is a default instance with open enrollment—preferably the biggest and mosy popular, or at least one that’s maintained by a group with staying power—and just send all the newbies there. If they want to dig deeper, nothing’s stopping them, but that way their first impression isn’t analysis paralysis.

To your other points:

1. for discovery, there are the usual methods: trending, hashtags, the search, and people sharing their usernames elsewhere.

2. I assume that people who are making the hard decision to leave the site where they know all the people they want to follow already are, are also prepared to accept some amount of loss to that pool. It happens all the same whether it’s Threads or Mastodon

I mean, that’s fair, but it’s not relevant to usage. I go to mastodon.social, I sign up, I use. At no point is the concept of federation necessary in that process, that’s for the owners/operators/maintainers to figure out.

If people want to know more, they will seek out that arcane knowledge, but it’s not something someone who’s just there to satisfy their FOMO ever needs to know.