Maybe they are, but as it turns out, getting them to show up and vote for you is actually kinda important. So maybe she should have done that.

Well, maybe they should have run a campaign of anti-genocide, not less genocide, especially because genocide is a fucking boolean value.

Whose job was it to win the election, the voters or the candidate? The Harris team looked at the polling, said no, and lost. Put the blame where it fucking belongs.

Do they think your odds get better if you’re get thrown down a metal tube on impact?

Did you read this? This article is about the pro-Russian separatists’ conscription of Ukrainians to fight for Russia.

From your source:

The Guardian recently reported that men in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine are being forcibly conscripted into the armed forces of the self-declared Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) and Luhansk Peoples Republic (LPR).

From the Gaurdian article they’re referencing:

Pro-Russia separatist forces have stepped up the forced conscription of men – including Ukrainian passport holders – in occupied areas of the Donbas region, amid mounting evidence of the scale of losses on the Russian side.

According to credible evidence from the region, forced conscription – already a feature of the Russian-backed separatists’ rule before the Kremlin’s invasion on 24 February – appeared to have picked up again in June, with checkpoints and patrols, some reportedly involving Chechen fighters allied to the Kremlin, on the lookout for men to recruit.

From another article cited by your source:

Russia justifies its invasion of Ukraine arguing it is defending the “Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.” Mere days before Russia launched its attack, when tens of thousands of Russian soldiers had been amassed on Ukraine’s border, these self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” beyond Kyiv’s control launched major mobilization drives. Men between the ages of 18 and 55 are no longer permitted to leave.

Even if Ukraine is using conscripted soldiers, you just proved that A) pro-Russian forces are doing the exact same thing and B) you don’t even look at the articles you’re sharing.

Well, there also seem to be credible leaks that it’ll have some sort of duel screen system, potentially functioning like the DS. It’s probably going to be more than just a bigger switch.

Might want to add, “Does it consent?” to the end of that.

I certainly hope so; I’m on Wolrd, and most of my favorite communities are located on World, but I often find the admins’ decision questionable, and I have just as many reservations about ml. I hope I could put together a good group of communities without either instance, but sometimes it feels like they’re necessary to a good Lemmy experience. But either way, I think you’re right, most instances won’t defederate.

Look, the question was, “Do you think Lemmy and other parts of the fediverse will eventually enshittify? I think this would be an interesting discussion to have.” I gave an answer explaining that I didn’t think Lemmy would enshittify, but pointing out another senerio where Lemmy could collapse. Sorry if you found it too pessimistic, but if you didn’t want to hear negativity, maybe this wasn’t the discussion for you. Also, if your solution is, “make multiple accounts to get around defederation, start your own instance, or GTFO,” that’s going to be a problem for growth, because most users will pick GTFO.

Also, I think hyper-specialized instances will only exacerbate any potential schisms. Tribalism isn’t necessarily political (although that is currently the central conflict on Lemmy). Admins could find divisions over rule enforcement, fediverse philosophy, or just get into good old-fashioned pissing contests. The admins on my instance recently created a real mess with the moderators of their own Vegan community, overriding their moderating decisions and then retroactively changing their own rules to justify it. Now imagine that conflict was between two instances, and you need to make a separate account just to talk about veganism. If anything, it seems like having an eclectic group of communities on each instance would be better than specializing, since admins would really have to consider whether it’s worth cutting their users off from multiple diverse groups over a conflict.

I don’t have the time or interest to do that, and it wouldn’t fix the underlying problem of tribalism that I’m concerned about.

Fair enough, but the point is that the instance would still be cut off from a large portion of most users’ content if it were to defederate from ml or world. And while tankies and centrists libs are the schism developing right now, it seems like that’s a symptom of tribalism people have around instances, which I think could undermine the entire principle of federation in the first place.

sh.itjust.works seems to be doing well, playing nice with world, ml, hexbear, and grad, I just worry that a culture cliqueish I’ve seen so far could keep fracturing Lemmy so it can’t develop a sustainable user base. But as I said, I haven’t been on the platform that long, and this is just my guess of what Lemmy’s version of enshittification might look like after being here a short time.

Right, and as long as I’m wrong about petty tribalism fracturing Lemmy, that’s good. But if your insurance winds up cut off from World or ml because of petty infighting, that will be a problem

Yeah, if I were ever to switch instances, that would probably be my next move. It’s still really small, though. Green Text seems like the only decently sized community.

I’ve only been on this platform for a little less than a year, but my guess is it will be brought down by petty infighting, not financial incentives. World and a few other instances have already decided to defederate from hexbear, and there’s enough tension between World and ml that defederation seems like a real possibility. While the goal may be a decentralized platform, the largest communities are on these two instances, and it they break apart their might not be enough content to keep new users’ interest.

Even if Lemmy gets past the infighting between the liberal Reddit refugees of World and the, “old Lemmy,”" communists of ml, users seem to tie their identity very heavily towards their instance. I’m worried that in the long term, that will drive people away from committing to cross-instance communities; even now, I hear people brag about how they’ve blocked entire instances because they’re full of, “centrists,” or, “tankies.” I think the downside of federation is that it leads to tribalism, and enough of it could kill the momentum Lemmy needs to grow.

I don’t mean to sound down on Lemmy; it’s the most interesting platform I’ve seen in years, and I’m curious to see how it develops. But at this point, I’ve abandoned Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and MySpace; I’ve learned that social media accounts are not permanent parts of your life. I’m having a lot of fun with Lemmy, but I don’t expect to be using it in 5 years.

I really don’t understand why they’re simultaneously arguing that they need access to copyrighted works in order to train their AI while also dropping their non-profit status. If they were at least ostensibly a non-profit, they could pretend that their work was for the betterment of humanity or whatever, but now they’re basically saying, “exempt us from this law so we can maximize our earnings.” …and, honestly, our corrupt legislators wouldn’t have a problem with that were it not for the fact that bigger corporations with more lobbying power will fight against it.

I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one who saw that. Unless that’s a caricature of someone specific, that is…uncomfortable, to say the least.

The trees in the background are burning, and an increase in wildfires is definitely a part of climate change.

Almost everything you’ve said is just factually incorrect. We know why Calvin and Hobbes wasn’t franchised; in Bill Waterson’s own words, he wanted to, “write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration,” not, “run a corporate empire.” His publisher had no worries about copyright infringement though, and pressured him to franchise.

Also, there was no chance he would have run into trademark issues because that’s not what trademark means. Trademark is a name, copyright is the content. Trademark is why I can open a restaurant called Spider-Man, copyright is why I can’t publish my own Spider-Man comics. While we’re at it, Nintendo is suing Palworld for Patent violations, not copyright, so this has nothing to do with the similarity of the characters, it has to do with some game mechanic that Nintendo believes is proprietary technology.

Finally, the average working class person wasn’t writing, but they were consuming printed media, and that’s why publishers were making so much money off of authors. That’s why copyright mattered. Copyright only lasted 14 years, with the option to renew it for another 14, and its sole purpose was to break up the publishers’ monopoly. The idea that it was designed to create an artificial scarcity of ideas is an ahistorical conspiracy theory that you’ve dreamed up.

First of all, literacy rates were about 70% in 1710, so the average commoner could absolutely read (at least among men, but copyright law isn’t to blame for patriarchy). This is about 300 years after the printing press, literacy had gone up.

Second…I just don’t know what to say to this anymore. You’ve created a strawman artist who believes their work is entirely original, even though no artist would claim they had no influences. You’re pretending that copyright is an edict that says ideas can never be shared, as though the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and fair use didn’t exist, or Substantial Similarity didn’t have to be proved (which, by the way, is the reason that Hobbes isn’t infringing on Tigger). And worst of all, you’re acting like artists who want to be paid for their art are greedy capitalists, not artists that live under capitalism. How is an artist who wants make a living by creating art all day, every day, somehow less worthy than an artist who works 9 to 5 at a crappy job and then does art when they have free time?

You seem to think abolishing copyright will lead to some sort of artists’ uptopia, but it’s pretty much the opposite. Let’s say copyright disappeared tomorrow. First, anyone making a living on Patreon will basically be done. If their videos or podcasts are now public property, there’s nothing to stop anyone from uploading their Premium Content to YouTube within minutes of publishing, so no one’s going to subscribe. Some of them will keep producing things, but since they’ll need a new source of income, they’ll definitely produce less.

Then there’s the cooperations. They’ll gobble up everything they can. Sure, you’ll be able to make your own Spider-Man comics, but if any publisher likes them, they’ll just sell them, along with any original IP you have. Of course you’ll be able to sell them too, but since they can afford more advertising, higher quality printing, and merchandising, they’ll out-sell you easily. You’ll be lucky it anyone’s even seen or heard of your version, even though you’re the author. It’d be like trying to compete with Coca-Cola by opening a lemonade stand, and Coke is allowed to use your lemonade recipe.

I’m not saying copyright is being done well now; cooperations have an outsized ability to enforce copyright claims, they’ve manipulated the law to retain IP for an insane amount of time, and they have far more power in negotiations over licensing and rights than artists do. But your solution to that is, “What if artists had no rights? That would be better!” and I’ve just…I’ve run out of ways to react to that. It’s truly insane to me.

intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests.

It’s literally the opposite. The first copyright law was passed in 1709 in England to give authors rights to their works instead of publishing companies. The Stationers’ Company, a guild of publishers, had a monopoly over the printing industry, and they we’re deciding amongst themselves who would get to reproduce and publish books. They took the labor of authors, changed it however they saw fit, and reproduced them for profit. Authors never saw a dime, and instead had to find wealthy patrons to subsidize their work.

Yes, for the majority of human history, people used to create art with no expectation of ownership, but for the majority of human history, there weren’t methods to mass reproduce art. Owning the rights to your books didn’t matter when the only way a second could get made is if a monk decided to hand copy it and bind it himself. When the only way to reproduce your painting was to have someone create a forgery, ownership of the physical copy was all that really mattered. If the only way you could get paid for a song was to sing it at the local tavern, it didn’t really matter if you got writing credits.

We’ve already seen a world where the cooperations that control media production can use any work they want. They carved up artists’ works like mobsters dividing up a town and kept all the profits for themselves. Maybe if we lived in a post need, post currency society, you could make an argument for abolishing copyright, but in the system we have, copyright is the only protection artists have against cooperations.