Technically, genderfluid is more a descriptor of the rate of change of gender than of gender when you think about it :p

So really, the answer to that is an ever changing subset of people ^.^

I mean the person in tye image has a fox news logo as well as an antifa logo. I’m mocking the absurdity of the concept of someone claiming to be antifascist while liking fox news xP

This is what the right thinks a joke is, folks. Apparently this person is an antifascist and also thinks fox news is good or something?

The soviet union was authoritarian state capitalist (as opposed to market-capitalist). It just called itself communist, even though the Soviets (worker’s councils) were suborned to the party very rapidly.

Marxism-Leninism as a term was actually created by Stalin as a sort of post-hoc justification thing. It was not made by Lenin, but Stalin. This is linguistic weirdness/controversy, in that the name can serve to hide it’s origins from casual readers.

The other commenter has explained the more concrete thing with the fact that lots of them are tankies or proto-tankies ^.^

I’m actually pretty pro-AI (and in particular, pro-FOSS AI), so I’m pretty unhappy about this myself ;p

If nothing else, this kind of shit will mean that only the existing “Intellectual Property” holders will have access to using AI. It would entrench things even more >.<

In theory, existing forum software could implement activitypub and link with lemmy & kbin…

I hope to see fediverse SufficientVelocity and Spacebattles one day ^.^

lol you really think I just parrot the US state department. Honestly this is another thing with tankies, they seem to be incapable of conceiving of geopolitics more complex than “arm of the USA” or “not arm of the USA”.

The idea of only partial-alignment even among nominal allies, and complex conflicting geopolitical interests, and the idea of spectrums and complexity beyond “US=bad” “not US=good” is foreign to them, or even criticizing actions of organizations rather than just deciding XYZ organization is evil or good and retroactively justifying or opposing every action they take (let alone consider that an action could have mixed consequences or ethics, both positive or negative ;p).

For example, I am still capable of criticising Ukraine’s actions (for example like using cluster bombs, even if last I saw Russia used them first I still am not in favour of them) and the propaganda they produce, or worrying about the effects of the significant debt on Ukrainians and their public services in the form of disaster capitalism, or also generally expressing my issue with States as a whole while still opposing brazen imperialism by Russia ^.^, or criticising the dehumanisation of Russian people in some of the conversations I’ve seen (especially the people who left Russia, when those are the people least likely to support the Russian Government’s actions and are often fleeing persecution themselves e.g. queer Russians).

I just don’t usually specifically say these things because in practise the conversations in which it comes up are already horrifically derailed by apologia for Russia’s actions and enlightened-centrism, so expressing the nuance is completely useless because the people I’m responding to just hate anything they associate with “the West” (which itself is not necessarily a fully coherent concept) and usually massively whitewash the shit going on in Russia, both about Ukraine and also other things <.<

“Gender updates” is the best term i’ve heard for transitioning in a while. I’m stealing it now, the bigots can’t have it. 󰱫

(also note for anyone reading: the term “tankie” refers to people who embrace authoritarianism and usually specific self-declared “socialist” states repressing civilians, often modern day states that don’t even pretend to be socialist like Russia, or the CCP, or North Korea/DPRK, or even just any nation considered “anti-West” regardless of their behaviour or internal political structure x.x

It started when parts of the Communist Party of Great Britain split off from the main party because the main party supported the USSR crushing (with tanks) Hungarian socialists trying to break off from the USSR, for a number of reasons - others were involved too, but the worker councils themselves were major parts of the uprising - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 - there were attempts at worker council parlimentary democracy and such, as well as attempts for direct-democracy ^.^

The most recent Tankie Thing is supporting Russia for invading Ukraine, or doing weird enlightened-centrism on it because the USA gives support to Ukraine. More broadly, tankies generally seem to act as if any act by another country is always less bad than the USA, and that only the USA can be imperialist, or various variations on this concept >.<.

It should be noted that the right wing have started to some degree calling all leftists tankies and IMO anyone should reject this attempted co-option of the word because it allows people to falsely conflate leftism with tankie ideologies, even though they are often a small minority in IRL leftist activism, with more common groups being anarchists, democratic socialists, some Marxists (even some Marxist-Leninists, which itself is a controversial term tbh), various libertarian socialisms and communisms, and the odd further-left social democrat ^.^)

Yet another vitally important front in the war on general purpose computing (it’s a short and important read imo)

Fuck Google, and fuck DRM.

those are usually the opposite of libsoc lol

I wish, but unfortunately am not very hopeful about this :(

Large parts of the world seem to be headed further in the direction of restricting self determination around your identity and your body. The worst part is seeing almost no-one fighting back. I live in the uk though, so some of that is related to the hellish media landscape here >.<

Vote with your dollar means rich people get way more votes.

<insert explanation of the fundamental contradiction vetween capitalism and democracy here> ;p

Your brain, use it.

Given that people are continuously trying to make existing in public as a trans person hard or completely illegal, or treat trans people as sexual predators and legalise the other parent kidnapping their kid, or any of a million other things I can’t be arsed to list, I recommend gaining a little perspective.

But I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith soooo >.<

Society doesn’t want people to be trans. In fact, it loves trying to get rid of us or subjugating us.

It means we do not see content from them, and any posts they make or comments or similar won’t show up.

Nope! :)

The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:

Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook’s Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups

I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume

The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I’ve used the phrase “Embrace, Extend, Consume”, to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.

Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.

They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they’re so big, most instances will comply in the service of “content”.

Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.

In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.

Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation

One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it’s users and non-users.

They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.

We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)

For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):

• Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
• Meta/FB could add “secure messaging” (lol, it’s facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it’s public).
• Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
• Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
• Meta’s algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-“paid”/“verified” Threads users.
• It’s already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.

Instance Admins, and the “Friendliness” of Meta

Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do “due dilligence”, but I’ve seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.

I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn’t make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.

Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta’s orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.

I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they’d probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).

Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!

Note on This Post

I’ve realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don’t have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p

Someone has explained the basic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy below, but I also want to comment on my own “Embrace, Extend, Consume” idea, as well as the other issues that come with Facebook.

Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others. They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.<

In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially borgifies them and renders people unable to leave.

The other component specific to facebook is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.).

They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users, and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the strings (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of both.

For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in specific, these are just illustrative:

• Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
• Meta/FB could add “secure messaging” (lol, it’s facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are so just use Matrix ;p, but if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it’s public).
• Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
• Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement.