Because that is the goal of any totalitarian regime. You think Putin has the welfare of his country in mind? Or Kim Jong Un? No. Money and Power is the only goal. There was an article recently on North Koreans saying how they’re starving and just waiting to die. The people are simply the means to generate wealth and exercise power. Their welfare has nothing to do with it.

I used to think the Republicans were wannabe dictators, but in the last few years they’ve demonstrated that they are actual fascists and a dictatorship is their endgame. There is no way to deny this anymore. If someone tells you who they are, you should listen to them. Republicans are no longer hiding it.

Listen, this is hard thing for me to type but I think is relevant to the Republican mindset. Hundreds of children are being murdered in their classrooms. Literal murder. Of children. This is not enough to sway Republicans on gun control. If actual murder of 6 year olds doesn’t have any effect on them, surely 6 year olds being hungry is not even going to make them blink. This is the reality with these people. They simply do not care about you, or your children, and everything they do is governed only by money and power.

It’s definitely an interesting selling point. I’ve always said you have to take the good with the bad on social media, but having independent instances who can curate things a bit means you don’t actually have to take the bad if you don’t want. Even though the Beehaw admin themselves said this is essentially a nuke and not how they’d preferred to have handled it (Lemmy doesn’t have the tools just yet to do it any other way) it’s still interesting and unique in social media.

Beehaw is creating an identity for themselves and sticking to it, rather than being a general instance. Some people will love that, some will hate it. But ultimately it’s whats going to make Beehaw a unique place to be for those who want it without taking anything away from those who don’t. This is all still early stages for Lemmy and there are growing pains for sure, but this sort of thing, to me at least, shows the possibilities of a Federated network.

you begin to feel like you have to also be toxic in self-defense […] Then you go somewhere that’s not toxic and it’s like a culture shock

This is exactly what I’ve experienced! I’m not looking to make any excuses for my time on Reddit but seeing the cause just laid out like that makes me feel… maybe not better, but differently, about why that behavior didn’t seem wrong at the time. I’m sure at some point early on I was downvoted and mocked and thus started the cycle of retaliation downvotes until it became normalized.

Then I come here to Beehaw and I can’t even downvote you. If I disagree, I have to actually engage with you. And in this instance at least, if I just treat you like garbage the mods are going to notice. That means if I want to engage, then it needs some thought behind it. All of this leans in the direction of starting conversations instead of silencing them.

I do not like disabling the downvote button because of this, but i think it is better to disable it, if we tend to abuse it

In theory voting things up and down for relevancy is a fine idea, a good one even. But human nature is often the reason why we can’t have nice things. It’s just way too easy to fall into that trap. Simply having an upvote button does allow the best ideas to rise to the top, but it doesn’t silence alternative opinions or encourage dog piling on someone with groupthink.

Yes, I completely agree with you. Reddit could become such a nasty place, and I fully admit that I was part of the problem. It didn’t feel like a problem because it was so socially accepted, even encouraged, within Reddit’s own culture, but I was definitely part of the problem down voting people into oblivion for “being dumb”. I never thought twice about it until the last two days. Now it feels dirty. Now I recognize I don’t want to be a part of that culture any longer.

I can’t say that I have. I’ve never used lidarr though so if there is an issue with that I’m not the person to ask.

I find Plex to be pretty bullet proof, and I have family scattered all over the US, and one in Europe, who all use my server and we don’t run into many issues. Very occasionally I’ll get a message something isn’t working and just restarting Plex always seems to fix it. I like self hosting but I’m not any sort of tech wizard. If it took a lot of work to maintain or had a lot of problems with multiple users I’d probably just abandon it, but I’ve been running it for the better part of 15 years now and it’s pretty solid/dummy proof in my experience.

Plexamp has completely replaced streaming services for me. Plex will now sonically scan any music you add and is able to give recommendations through Plexamp for sonically similar tracks, and also use that data to build mixes based on mood and style.

There are all sorts of auto generated mixes that Plexamp will make on it’s own based on the music you have. You can also make a playlist of say, your top 20 tracks and when the playlist ends Plexamp will just start playing songs that match the sonic theme of what you’ve been playing so far. Note that I say sonically similar rather than of a similar genre. I love this because genres are often very subjective, and while Plex does take into account the tags you’ve given things, it also will group songs based on how they actually sound. You can control how many degrees of separation too if you want to keep the theme close to your playlist or just let it wander through your collection.

For me at least, Plexamp is every bit as good as Spotify. My music collection has grown to around 20,000 tracks over the years and it’s pretty easy to get stuck on the same handful of artists. Mixes and auto playlist generation in Plexamp has helped me rediscover music I forgot I even have.

The thing that sets me off is the sort of sparkly chime in the higher frequencies of badly compressed audio. It does something bad to my brain, literally gives me unpleasant shivers. No one else I’ve asked about it hears it or has any negative reaction from it. It’s like the worst possible ASMR response or something for me. It’s caused me to become a moderate audiophile, which is endlessly mocked by the internet at large. iTunes and Spotify are mostly okay, but once I discovered you can download FLAC on Bandcamp I’ve never gone back.

Yeah, exactly this. While I’m somewhat uneasy that a huge corporation has a bunch of data on me the most they can do with it is spam me. When the government has the same data their power is orders of magnitude greater and who knows how what you may have said 10 years ago can be used against you now.

There is a reason they’re not allowed to have this data without a warrant. Just because this data is for sale doesn’t mean they suddenly have the right to it. The power of the government is too great to trust with this, and we all know it, which is why those protections exist in the first place.

Yeah, I love AdGuard. There are definitely free options that are nearly as good, but I’m willing to pay for the huge amount of privacy related options they’ve added in over the years beyond just adblocking.

I think local AdGuard + network-wide DNS blocking (AdGuard Home/piHole/NextDNS) is the ultimate setup. This gets my PCs/Macs the more robust blocking from a local application, but also my phones/tablets/other devices get at least basic filtering and encrypted DNS just by being connected to the network. My AdGuard Home stats show me that 30-40% of all DNS queries in a 24h reporting period are blocked, which is just insanity. The majority of these are from mobile streaming apps on the tablets, and streaming boxes (Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV 4k) trying to phone home.

I have elderly parents who live with me and they’re as internet addicted as anyone else these days. For most of my natural life my mother has needed me to remove spyware/adware/infections on nearly a monthly basis (sometimes weekly!), but now that she’s here with me on my network we’ve never had a problem. These things are marketed on the basis that ads are annoying but the amount of badware they block is pretty essential too imo.

Personally I find AdGuard (not to be confused with AdGuard Home, they are different products) to be the best adblocker out there, both for MacOS and iOS. What’s great about it on MacOS is that it’s not a browser plugin, it’s an application that runs on the Mac itself. This means you can add any app you want to be filtered, not just the browser. I use a messenger app that likes to show ads. I added it to AdGuards filter and now it’s clean.

Also with all the changes that are potentially coming to browsers (chromium) not allowing adblocking this is a future proof solution because again, it’s running at the OS level and not inside the browser. It doesn’t matter if Google tries to stop you from blocking ads because it’s all done externally from the browser where they have no control.

You can add a bunch of other features as well like advanced stealth which randomizes your browser fingerprint, helps to avoid deep packet inspection by your ISP, encrypted DNS, encrypted Client Hello (in beta currently)… it’s really the whole package. I feel like it’s worth paying for because it does much much more than a simple adblock browser extension.

I’ll probably get roasted for this but… Pokemon. It just seems like endless copy/paste and might be one of the laziest game franchises I’ve ever seen. I’ve really tried to get into them. I was there when the Pokemon cartoon started, I saw it rise to the phenomenon it is today, but damn if it isn’t the most boring grindfest ever.