no.

roflmao

As my previous post implied, socialism can refer to a school of thought/philosophy, or a movement, or a political position. China’s government clearly does not claim it has achieved a society with a socialist mode of production (which I’m assuming is what you mean by “real socialism”?), but that doesn’t contradict their claim of being a socialist, and further, communist party.

Furthermore, free healthcare is irrelevant. It’s not a precondition of socialism. The working class can control and own their means of production without having free healthcare. It’s a great policy which I support, but it’s not socialist.

Thinking of the projects I work on, I don’t understand the value in categorizing by language, rather than theme (~/Development/Web/, ~/Development/Games/) or just the project folders right there.

which depends on what qualifies as socialist.

This is the critical point in a lot of these online arguments. “Socialist” is such a vague term that two people can unknowingly be reading completely different questions from the same statement. It can mean anything from a person following a school of thought (“I’m a socialist”, “We are a socialist party”, “The socialist movement”) to a description of economic conditions (“That commune has a socialist economy”), let alone looser usage (e.g. describing social policies within capitalism, people who have no understanding of socialist theories calling things socialist, etc.). When possible, I find it’s best to avoid the whole “thats not real socialism” spiral by being more specific.

All the people trying to dissect you for science.

As OP mentioned, a lot of replies focus on loss, that friends will inevitably die and objects will break… we already face that reality with regular life! That’s hardly a downside of immortality itself.

It turns out, mods are gods.

I don’t see irony there. I think calling this FOSS community ‘filled with Linux-crazed people’ is a stretch, but even then, it’s very different to:

or even just hating a niche product whatsoever. It’s not like Linux is EEE’ing or being invasive, so it’s hard to equivocate being a passionate fan to being a passionate hater.

It was released (read: forcibly shoved down our throats) by Google and came out of nowhere when there were zero problems with the decades old and extremely well researched incumbent image/video formats that the web was already using (i.e. jpg, png, gif, mp4, etc)

I don’t agree with this. There are many things wrong with those file formats. GIF, for example, is over 35 years old and has a 256 color pallete. Now, if it’s good enough for your purposes and it “ain’t broke” for that, fine, but compare these formats to JPEG-XL and it’s clear that they deserve to be surpassed. WebM/WebP, despite my many issues with it (WebP and AVIF are bullshit formats), they did serve a legitimate purpose, and quite frankly you can even say it was good for the environment due to lowering filesizes at an actually meaningful scale.

In fact, if I’m reading Mitre correctly, there are libjpeg vulns still being found since WebP was launched. I’m not saying this to equivocate the two from a security standpoint, hell no, but to critisize the common view I see online claiming the older formats are unbackable.

• ZA/UM International
• ZA/UM (Marxist–Leninist)
• ZA/UM League
• The People’s ZA/UM
• Popular ZA/UM

[1]

Seriously, it’s one of those few bridge-crossing arguments which most people will agree on, from the communists to the liberals to the nationalists. Look at all that money going to the other side of the world. Look at the local living conditions. If the governments aren’t keeping people poor, desperate and dying on purpose, then the choice of where to spend the money is obvious!

Fragging is a proud American tradition which should be continued.

and then themselves

I have some empathy for those coerced into joining out of sincere ignorance (even though I believe they should know better). Eyes Left has an interesting example. The front lines radicalize some people into anti-imperialism, and if they have enough of a conscience to wake up and join the resistance, then I say have the potential to redeem themselves.

Not sure why this was upvoted, the blog says it’s theirs.

Moving Forward

­

With the new name, a few changes will be made in the engine and community. Obviously, all the repositories and community hubs will adopt the Luanti name in some form. You’ll be able to find the website at luanti.org and [snip]

On this note, another thing I appreciate is what they said about “Free” and “Libre”: those names are great for saying “This is a free/libre/open clone of [x]”, and that’s what I’ll think when I see it. Software like LibreOffice aims to support Microsoft Office documents, OpenRTC2 and OpenTTD are for people who want to see those games pretty-faithfully cloned, even if extended. Luanti is not OpenMinecraft.

IMO, the worst thing about “Minetest” is that it sounded like it was just a test creation, a prototype or experiment. It’s certainly well beyond that now. The announcement introduction mentions people associate it with being a Minecraft clone or alpha release, but even further, to me the name initially gave me the impression it was [still] someone’s small hobby project. ‘Luanti’ is much better.

Not communist obviously

I find it’s useful to select more descriptive terms than use the literal dozens of varying definitions of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. The terms by themselves can be so vague that I can truthfully state this - “communism is the goal of communism!” A communist society, for example, is different from a communist party or a communist state (aka. Marxist–Leninist state), which are only parts of the communist movement and the communist school of thought. Obviously no-one looks at the PRC and sees a stateless, classless society, but that’s an understandable (albeit condescending) interpretation of when people say “China is communist”.

(Pinging @xnx@slrpnk.net as I’m also replying to their comment)

Sure, I agree, but at the end of the day it’s useful to be able to search and watch YouTube videos so long as it’s a popular platform because it still has by far the bulk of topics covered.

No contradiction. Law is a dumb basis for deciding what you like and don’t like.

Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.

There’s plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn’t come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.

(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).

It’s possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn’t really care about those ideals (perhaps they’re only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn’t do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.

For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn’t require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn’t have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.

lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn’t able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.