I meant alternative browsers, like vimb or surf, but on Gecko and not WebKit.

Yes, and social media deliver on that wish by punishing nuanced opinions and anything which is not the lowest common denominator.

And they did that from the very beginning.

In the olden days what was acceptable on a web forum was defined by its owner and some mods. Everything had an alternative, people would communicate over few systems simultaneously - the forums themselves, ICQ, mail. When you were banned on some forum, you didn’t lose anyone of the people there.

It was certain that you can’t silence someone just by banning them. And conflicts were regular, so somebody and their friends would be banned or leave some place, but they were still part of a larger social fabric on some subject.

Social media style hate storms and insularity actually were discouraged. They bothered the mods, other people and in general were stopped by banning all participants for a month or so in the specific place the argument happened.

And what’s the normal behavior for social media today was unambiguously considered trolling back then. All of it.

When normies came to social media, they realized that now yes, you can silence anyone you don’t like, just have more friends or gaslight more strangers and that’s it. And you can troll as much as you want if it attracts more attention. In a social network there’s only one authority.

It was false in the beginning, people were not effectively silenced, and disinformation wasn’t that strong, but with more people moving to social media it became true.

I don’t think so, because what I said didn’t mention anything about already having totalitarianism. The means today’s governments have at their disposal allow to achieve most of things done by classic 30s totalitarian regimes without visible violence.

Also Gecko’s development is led by people thinking that it being usable outside of Firefox\Thunderbird is a bad thing. There was a time when Gnome’s browser was based on Gecko, not WebKit. And in general it’s influenced by bad practices.

SerenityOS is an amazing project, of course. To do so much work for something completely disconnected from the wider FOSS ecosystem, and with such results.

So it’s cool that they’ve decided to split off the browser as its own project.

The bad guys know this too, they’ll penetrate your organization (if it’s decentralized, they’ll still poison it with plenty of agents, they’ve got taxpayers’ money), they’ll use your inaction to communicate apathy, they’ll even have something false flag to still cause the effect you’re describing without real people using force. And their media doesn’t need anything real to happen to report it.

Any revolutionary movement will need to hit a point of critical mass that allows it to succeed. It’s hard to gauge just when that point is reached, but if you misjudge, you’ll end up another failed insurrection.

Not hard for a government, no. Anything predictable and organized will not succeed. As chaotic and brave as possible or not at all.

Anything touching your texts is a wildly dystopian idea.

It’s like boiling a frog, now EU is already trying to do things which would be considered unbelievable dystopian shit in Russia, year 2008.

They got here by accepting smaller steps in the direction of unbelievable dystopian shit, because “what, are you a sovereign citizen”, “dura lex sed lex”, “we are not a libertarian institution and we need to catch criminals”, “we need to regulate society for a better future”, “our institutions and bureaucracy are built to prevent such erosion, we won’t go down that slippery slope”, yadda-yadda.

One thing people should realize is that common sense and dignity are above any law, no matter how correctly passed. Concentration camps in Nazi Germany and wherever else were perfectly legal. Those people will build in the future will be perfectly legal too. Hell, those they are building right now are legal and your government (any on the planet) doesn’t argue with that.

And not only that, but you don’t even have to argue against laws invading your freedom, they are simply negligible. You don’t have to prove that you don’t need something, “I don’t want this” is sufficient!

Also read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog .

I’m afraid this can be similar to saturation of air defenses.

They haven’t passed this particular package (quite scary, yes), but what have they passed lately?

What has happened?

What would we see if we look not for threats to fight against, but for something that we have already missed?

Jules Verne’s moment about electing a judge?..

I live in Russia, I’m having flashbacks of explanations why all the opposition is doing is peaceful protests.

Nah, it doesn’t work. The faster you get to throwing Molotov cocktails, the better.

That’s in some sense getting back to the “open protocols” idea of ~2005, with federation and common identities. You’d still have 1) bothersome process of maintaining such a site, 2) problems how to find such, 3) an identity provider which can go down with your identity, like a Lemmy instance can.

It’s insufficient. Facebook and others have used an existing demand for a recommendation system and automatic moderation and search and all this junk.

I’m enthusiastic about Locutus.

I would argue that this culture would possibly be good to learn from them, first. It didn’t come to existence as some kind of social evolution, but was impressed by power.

Second, at least they are behind Europeans in the culture of genocide.

Oh, so 200+ years ago it wasn’t so bad. LOL

Dunno if it’s interesting to you, but communists in Russia often say that it can only get democratic again when the “against all” variant is returned to ballots (CPRF is usually not considered something genuine).

I don’t see what this sort of blatant denialism is supposed to accomplish other than demonstrating in-group loyalty.

That loyalty is a goal in itself for people not knowing any better.

For others it’s a way to make Trump win.

What I don’t get is how RFK Jr is still seen as something worse than a senile man and a man with terminal stages of neurosyphilis. He just has brain damage and some overvalued ideas, very well known and clear. While these two are simply not functional.

But then maybe it’s good I live in another part of the world.

How can someone even expect him to not be senile at this age.

I can’t help but think it’s a coordinated campaign,

Social media with bots and shit allow for such, yes.

By the way, I don’t think the organizers of this campaign want Dems to win. They want Dems to lose.

It may not be seen from the US and the EU, but Trump’s presidency has helped quite a few disgusting things to start happening in various parts of the world, though they continued during Biden’s presidency.

In ex-USSR it was pretty intentional.

It is still a thing, but nobody wants to use it, because the flaws of other systems they want to use for themselves.

Starlancer was nice I think

Well, how can one speak about some thing’s author, the person who has built it from scratch, as of someone who can ruin it or not?

That said, it’s hard for me to read her in English, and I’ve read HP mostly in at least three translations to Russian, one official and two unofficial ones. The former sucks, and from the latter two the one which reads the best is by the least professional translator (actually she’s not a translator at all), and I mean Maria Spivak (the original one to circulate in the Runet and samizdat versions, not the abomination published much later).

It communicates the feeling of mad and a bit hooligan-ish fairy tale, I suspect that emotionally it’s the closest to the original.

Anyway, it’s pretty normal for an author to have a magnum opus and the rest of their works to just not make sense.

Some were standing before me, but TBH they likely had acquaintances working in one government embezzling money.