Guilty as charged! Turning 30 soon, just shed the last remnants of my prior organically grown social circle, having judged so many people for their emotional callousness, sloppy thinking, and lazy ethics. Most of these days I don't even have anyone to talk to, which is why I've taken once again to that most inadvisable endeavour of writing my thoughts on the Internet!
I literally know one or two people who treat others with essential kindness and strive to make their lives meaningful. I wish I had more ways of giving back, because if it wasn't for being able to talk with them once in a while, I'd seriously be doubting my sanity right now. At the same time, it's just not right to lean too much on them - there's only so much anyone can do for your existential problems. So once in a while we share a moment of "yeah bro, I see it too, things are going downhill in a profound and horrifying way, but it's OK, we know we won't let it get to us and we'll figure it out eventually". And that's about as much relating to people that I do these days.
Could I choose to "unjudge" the people who I've held to what apparently these days is an unrealistically high standard? Easy, I've had many opportunities to try it! People can be quite forgiving of past misunderstandings, the problem is that they don't seem to learn from their mistakes a whole lot. I'm like, "okay, this person might not really be so great, but they're not a horrible person either, so let's give myself a chance to share some sort of meaningful experience with them!". It goes alright for a while, then I end up having to unilaterally struggle to maintain a basic mutual comfort zone while trying to dissuade poor attempts at gaslighting. (Apparently, it's considered "toxic" to tell others when their behavior is causing harm or distress?)
Somehow it's becoming very difficult these days to be a decent person - as defined by the bare minimum of not engaging in violence or manipulative behavior because you treat others like human beings - and be social at the same time. I remember when the Internet used to provide opportunities for just that. Right now it's doing the opposite; who would've thought that a marriage of mass media and the Cold War military-industrial complex would naturally act to set people apart. People are bombarded with so much emotionally charged but otherwise completely nonsensical information which has nothing to do with real life, that if you somehow fall through the cracks of that whole shared hallucination, you're effectively a pariah.
> Well, good luck enjoying anything when you're surrounded by environmental feedback that points to its futility.
You're only surrounded by this feedback if you already buy in to the ideology that if you're not The Best™ at something then it's not worth doing.
This is a very toxic perspective.
The millions of people who learn to program/woodwork/paint/cook/etc. by watching YouTube videos certainly don't buy into this ideology, and have no problem enjoying it. I think the issue less "environment feedback that points to futility" and more your own perspective here.
People have hobbies for many reasons, "socially acceptable excuse to interact with people" is just one of them, as is "demonstrate exceptional mastery".
> Picking up hobbies so that you have a socially acceptable excuse to interact with to people is ass-backwards.
It is and WAS most normal thing in the world. Some people did it subconsciously, them being interested I people lead them to be interested in the same things as those people are interested in. Others did it consciously "everyone seems to gather at pool, let's go to pool". Or just, "I am going to bake a cake to have excuse to give it to people and to get compliments".
Doing things and hobbies to be with others, to impress them was normal human behavior for millenia.
Each piece of content's full semantic structure (think https://xkcd.com/657/ but 10x-1000x more elaborate) should be published in a machine-readable format; then in your personal content blocker you can define as elaborate a filter as needed.
I actually admit I kinda like the idea ( and having just discovered IMDb' tags, it may not be as a herculean a task as I initially thought ) and I almost wonder if Youtube does not have everything of note categorized already.
It suddenly does not seem as impossible as it did a moment ago and it would actually benefit people, who are concerned about triggers ( and alleviate concerns of people like me, who don't want flags on everything ).
What stake do you have in either of the debates that you're referencing? When was the last time a politician's family member or a trans person did anything good or bad for you, personally?
If you didn't allow social media to get you invested in these manufactured pseudo-political pseudo-events, you'd be free to realize that Trump and Biden are both obvious idiots and crooks; that people's gender identities, biochemical makeup, and surgical history are obviously completely irrelevant to complete strangers; and that many other things that you waste your time constructing your tribal identity around are obviously complete bullshit that someone artificially planted into the discourse for their own benefit. That someone couldn't care less about your best interests as a person, anon291.
The problem isn't that Twitter and Facebook censor one side of those debates and promote the other. The problem is that people are using them in the first place! That way, social media is the thing that forces those debates to exist in the first place - by making you feel like you have a stake in events that are completely remote from your life. Whose agenda is being promoted is tangential to the fact that these unelected, unaccountable corporate bodies have entrenched themselves in a position where they can basically replace our individual world-models with this sort of outrageous nonsense. That's what's fucking democracy up, and in the most elegant way, too: your right to make free choices between alternatives is preserved, but only inconsequential choices are ever presented.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog; on corporate social media, nobody cares that you aren't a dog.
> that people's gender identities, biochemical makeup, and surgical history are obviously completely irrelevant to complete strangers
At least in the UK, this became a matter of renewed public interest for two reasons: firstly, a proposed reform of the law to remove all gatekeeping from the process of changing one's 'legal sex', and secondly, an appalling case of several imprisoned women being sexually assaulted by a man (Karen White) who had been incarcerated alongside them due to having a 'legal sex' of female.
It was left-wing feminist groups, who organised largely offline to begin with, that reignited this debate. This wasn't some artefact of social media raging, it was a grassroots effort to halt and reverse a change in the law due to its clearly negative effects on women.
This is also a debate that has been ongoing for decades, long before social media websites even existed. Janice Raymond wrote what turned out to be a quite prophetic book on this topic in the 1970s, for instance. Renée Richards was stirring controversy in women's tennis at around the same time. Much of what you'll hear on this topic these days has already been covered by radical feminists for many years prior.
You make valid points - but I don't think the author of the post that I was replying to would be able to appreciate the nuance.
By bringing up the Karen White example, aren't you basically saying it would somehow be less appaling if it wasn't a trans person perpetrating the assault? Because I thought this sort of thing was abhorrent regardless of the salient details of a particular case?
Social media only makes it easier to focus on "which cage should we use for transgender people", and so much harder to ask ourselves "why are we putting people in cages". Or, as per the other example, "did Hunter Biden really lose his incriminating laptop?" vs "why are we letting ourselves be governed by people with familial ties to criminals?"
Social media and the polarizing meaningless debates that it enables serve the purpose of precluding people from focusing on the latter kind of question. (Which is already hard enough as it is, because it involves actual thinking.) If the public conversation is retreading ground that was already covered in the 1970s like you say, doesn't that mean that our society is regressing? Shouldn't be worrying first and foremost about that, since that's where we'd find the root cause of all the more specific issues?
How many people feel good for having the correct in-group opinions, while their contribution to e.g. the trans rights debate only goes as far as canceling JK Rowling, or, conversely, going to a Jordan Peterson talk? How many people have even heard of the actual examples you mention, as compared to the number of people who only know "uhh, so there's a debate on the Internet about some abstract hot button issue, and I'm required to pick a side in order to participate in society"?
A couple years from now the topics may be completely different, they'll just find another scapegoat or another thorny bioethical edge case, but the medium of debate will still be largely the same ol' Internet, and the AIs will only have become more effective at sowing discord.
There is a lot of software that speaks the ActivityPub server-server protocol, but most client apps use the Mastodon client API or custom protocols, not ActivityPub client-server.
Likely because ActivityPub alone provides just a subset of what a typical social media client needs, and requires far more logic in the client than using the Mastodon API. E.g. if you use those APIs you don't need to care about webfinger and can treat the local server as the only API endpoint. There are few compelling reason for client writers to talk ActivityPub to the servers unless/until there's a far larger number of servers which does not support the Mastodon API
