Fascism is going to win.

As people leave these platforms - permitting a welcome space for lies, hate speech, bigotry, and zealotry to flourish without consequence - history will recall, this was when the spark of fascism was given the last breathe of oxygen it required.

I don’t mean to excuse Meta for their unforgivable ElonTrump-influenced actions but running away is not going to win the fight you think you’re avoiding. That is, unless you all really commit and make it economically unfeasible for Meta to continue this policy.

Meta is successful because people can promote their small and local businesses. Because money can be made from ‘likes’. Because of the algorithm. Because people can get their news inline with their family photos. It’s everything. The fediverse has a long way to go to offer a seamless migration for users’ addiction to these platforms.

I would, again, encourage you to read the article.

I don’t know how you could possibly argue that reducing nicotine in tobacco won’t benefit anyone. I would encourage you to read the statement I linked to.

I fully agree with you that these “gas station products” are potentially even more harmful. What actually scares me about this is the marketing on social media around these products. Over the past few years, people have come to trust influencers (and their feelings) more than science. I just don’t understand how we’ve become so gullible over the years. It’s could suggest that it’s the government’s lack of investment in these important agencies, the public’s lack of trust, and the influence corporations have over them; but people these days seem more in favor of a company or a billionaire telling them what to do rather than the government agency or an academic.

You’re absolutely right. Any president (or former president) claiming to have accomplished something when either someone else did it or because it’s a wholly fabricated lie or something never materialized at all is a danger to democracy.

We need stronger standards for our press (and our DOJ / courts) to hold elected officials accountable. It’s also on the people to be more intelligent and not believe everything they read (especially with the loss of fact checking). The lies and misinformation that have become prevalent in nearly all reporting by all media outlets over the past ~8 years is a threat to our democracy and seeds for the unraveling of the nation.

Being that the efforts to reduce nicotine from tobacco began under the Obama administration and have stalled for a variety of reasons, I would say that it’s not fair for any president to claim success with this matter. This is the FDA doing its job. We should give them the 100% of the credit. And that credit given should reflect on the fact that it has taken far too long for them to reach this conclusion. Government moves too slow. Politics gets in the way of making our lives better. We really have o do a better job of paying attention and rejecting conservative (small “c”) ideologies.

I think you bring up a good point about college and high school classmates. I don’t personally care about this but I imagine millions of others do. IMO, these groups should maintain their own social platforms. If you want to keep in touch with your classmates from Harvard, Harvard (or a private student counsel board) should maintain a forum for you.

Right - you want to post a picture of your kid for family, classmates, friends, coworkers to see all at once. Well, that’s (supposedly) where the fediverse comes in.

The fediverse, of what I know of it, is still lacking a lot of these tools that would be useful to people. People are pushing it really hard but it is not ready for the masses.

Personally, as someone who hasn’t had a FB account for well over five years, it’s super weird to me that you need it to “keep up with family and friends”. You’re using a data harvesting, advertising, and propaganda platform to conduct personal communications. There was a time when this was done using nothing more than the United States Post Office and the telephone. So, we probably have the technology to keep in touch today while excluding Facebook.

In response to your concern with privacy controls: it’s not federated and I can only assume they’re being honest about privacy, you might consider looking at Vero. It has up-front tools to control who sees what.

Still, I would encourage people to minimize their reliance on any platform owned by someone else to maintain relationships. At someone point, something will break, will be hacked, will go out of business. Do you think Facebook will exist for 25 to 50 years from now? When it goes, all your photos and videos and conversations go with it. When someone dies, all the memories they’ve captured are gone. Hashtag: bring back photo albums.

I simply suggested that you use the resources available to you before calling people out. The appropriate response would be, “Oops. Sorry, I confused empathy and grief.” It’s an easy mistake and an easy apology that would have been respectfully accepted.

Instead, you’ve chosen to double down on your attack and have continued to treat me as an aggressor.

It’s apparent that you’ve been indoctrinated by modern internet / “Karen” culture. I offered to help you but you’ve been unwilling to acknowledge your mistake. You’ve made it my fault that you misread, misinterpreted, and misquoted what I wrote. This is something that could transcend your own real life and affect the relationships you have with people. The next person you misquote may not be as generous.

It’s become a common and accepted practice to twist the words of others to drive a narrative, to misinform, to bully, and to gain power. Given the opportunity, I will call it out.

It’s also a sad and common practice to reject the meaning of words. We have the world’s information at our fingertips yet people often prefer righteousness over facts.

Be mindful of the words you chose to use.

Perhaps you should open a dictionary before you make such assumptions about people in a public space.

Empathy: The ability to identify with or understand another’s situation or feelings.
Grieve: To mourn or sorrow for.

I can empathize for those who have lost their homes but I’m not able to grieve for them all. My brother’s dog just died on Christmas. I grieved for the loss of the dog and empathized with my family.

Respectfully, I have a hard time wrapping my head around someone grieving over the loss of a home for someone they’ve never met strictly because they’ve seen them in a few movies. I don’t know how many thousands of people lose their homes every year but the vast majority of them are not in a position to purchase another over night.

No doubt, losing a home is a horrible traumatic event for everyone. Personally, if I don’t have the space in my heart to grieve for every family’s loss, I don’t have the room for one celebrity.

Perhaps we could take this time to reflect on the importance of a stable home and the opportunity to create family memories and consider those who’ve never had that to begin with. In fact, I’d venture to guess this is exactly what Crystal would want us to do. As host of Comic Relief, he’s helped to raise awareness and money for the homeless like few celebrities have.

I’ll admit, the buzz around FB Marketplace has tempted me to sign up again. Mostly because ebay fees are insane. I’ve resorted to either putting things out for free pickup or using hobby-specific websites with buy/sell forums. Plus the occasional sidewalk sale. Life existed before Facebook. It was a slower life. So, just have to be more patient sometimes.

There’s absolutely a need for a public space for friends, businesses, venues, city halls, journalists, et al to congregate. It used to be a literal town hall, radio, newspapers, and weekly periodicals. And then AOL, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. All of these need some sort of funding to operate efficiently - either by tax payers, subscriptions, or advertising. This need for funding is what screws everything up.

There also used to be a time when Instagram was relevant. Then they introduced the algorithmic timeline, which meant I wouldn’t see event announcements for days after they occurred. Advertisers want results so engagement is more important than informing the public. If someone finds what they want at the top of their feed and clicks out of the app, that’s less opportunity to show ads.

Twitter used to be the best way to find out what was happening in real time in my immediate vicinity. Places stopped posting on there, the algorithm took over, then you know who took over. I’m hopeful about Bluesky but I’m not sure how they’re paying the bills.

This might not cover all the venues but you might be able to find booking agents with newsletters you can subscribe to. Promoting concerts should be one of those things where venues are desperate to use all sorts of platforms to get people in the door. Local radio stations are usually pretty good at promoting smaller shows on their websites too. My local newspaper is actually one of my best resources for discovering new venues and pop ups.

One of my local breweries was publishing an rss calendar feed for their weekly events. This was awesome until their “subscription” expired at the end of the year (not sure why they don’t just have a google calendar). I should speak with the owner to see what her reasoning was. My suspicion is that they want to track engagement on Instagram and the newsletters.

On the other hand, we have the essentially donation-funded fediverse. I’ve been wanting to see servers pop up to host certain things. For example, something like montreal-gov.social and montreal-shows.social where there’s dedicated federated instances for public congregation. I’m not sure if there’s a calendar function in the fediverse but it would seem reasonable to invest effort in. I’m really hoping this is the direction we’re going in. It just makes a lot of sense.

The problem is that Facebook isn’t just about keeping up with your friends and family. It’s an engagement platform designed to keep your attention by showing you memes and “news” and videos and ads that it knows you like. Most people have become addicted to this slow and steady stream of dopamine. You’re not going to get people off their crack addiction by substituting it with marijuana.

As these social platforms become more powerful, it’s up to each of us to personally find the strength to wean ourselves away from these platforms that once promised socialization but have quickly become little more than propaganda and influencing and ad-serving machines.

It’s great we’re seeing some alternatives but, aside from a small cohort, most people are not going to find the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon, or Lemmy engaging enough to give them that hit that they’re used to.

All hail the algorithm.

Personally, I used to be the early adopter who was on all these platforms well before most of the public heard about them. In recent years, I’ve either deleted or stopped using my social accounts (or have chosen to use less engaging ones, like Lemmy). This has given me more time to live a life.

Boredom is something I embrace. Rather than turning to a screen to occupy me; I’ll take a nap, make some tea, journal, go for a walk, do some cleaning, build something, practice something, read a book or comic. It’s not as dynamic, for sure, but I get to experience and learn more about myself instead of needlessly observing the lives of others. Boredom offers a renewed sense of self and humanity. Frankly, I’m afraid younger generations won’t know what benefits and beauty boredom has to offer.

I haven’t really been using it but I wanted to throw a shoutout to https://spacehey.com/

Half of me wants to start keeping a personal tally of all the bullshit that comes out of this embarrassment while the other half just wants to cancel my internet to avoid the emotional trauma.

You can thank the Supreme Court’s ‘Loper Bright’ decision in June https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Raimondo

Edit: Actually, you can thank Republicans. The agenda to privatize everything (for the benefit of Wall Street investors) has been in place for over 50 years. Essentially, the constitution says nothing about providing people internet access so that means either the states can do it themselves or it can go to a private corporation. I’m telling you, the next four years are going to be apocalyptic.

I’m not shaming anyone and wealth inequality has nothing to do with this.

Anyone who believes the average salaried worker should be able to afford all the subscription services, a $60k car, a three bedroom home, and everything available at a grocery store is delusional. Marketing and corporate propaganda and influencers have made everyone to believe it’s your god given right to make $50k and live like the upper middle class. That’s not wealth inequality. It’s delusion.

No one has any concept of living within their means. If you make $50k; you should be shopping at farmers markets, you should have very few subscriptions (if any), you shouldn’t be buying a brand new car, you should be renting and living with a roommate to split the bills. That’s not wealth inequality. That’s personal finance 101.

You want to talk about shaming people, point your finger at social media and influencers. They make it seem like everyone should be taking on more debt to buy shit that won’t last one season. My 16 year old nephew wants a $250 hoodie he saw on TikTok. My 7 year old niece wants to do a shopping challenge she saw on YouTube. People are being manipulated to be consumers. To consume far beyond their means.

People have lost all concept of personal fiscal responsibility and what the value of things are. It’s really basic math and economics. No one wants to talk about that though. They want to play the victim card and blame everyone else because they believe “luxury” is owed to them. And then, when given the choice to put people in power to actually make these systematic changes you speak of, people explicitly vote against them.

I do have an abundance of time when it comes to meal preparation. I work ten hours a day but I wake up at 5am to prep for the day. I take half of my Sunday to walk to farmers markets and other local shops. I prioritize food because it’s literally of vital importance. The weeks when I don’t have time to make food; I eat poorly, I feel bad, I have a lot less money.

Your argument is that 70% of Americans have no choice but to buy the cheapest things possible?

Judging by the success of companies like Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and DoorDash, that seems like an unreasonable argument.

People have more money than they like to admit. They just don’t want to skimp on things they believe to necessities but are actually luxuries. Fresh food is cheaper than processed food. It’s cheaper to buy ingredients to make cheeseburgers than it is to buy them at McDonalds. I buy food from the farmers market because I can’t afford the grocery store. If you’re truly struggling to buy food, you should register for food stamps. Every farmers market I’ve been to accepts them.

Sadly, you’re not wrong. I’ve found that when it comes to food though, most small businesses stay small. You don’t get into regenerative farming to get rich - you do not because you want to be the change you want to see in the world. Frankly, we need a lot more people to embrace race these sorts of values.

We had a local butcher who survived for seven years but closed their doors last year. The pandemic really hit everyone one way or another. https://share.inquirer.com/tnXDXl | https://heathermaroldthomason.substack.com/about

When it comes to other stuff, I’ve been going second hand or just abstaining all together from buying things. I’ve already got a lot of shit. A lot of it was actually really quality stuff from upstarts on Kickstarter - all of whom were out of business in a few years. We justify purchasing things we don’t need because they look pretty and they “support local businesses”. It’s so compelling and it feels good to support humans over corporations. Maybe we really don’t need more stuff to begin with.

Other times, the tried and true makers - the corporations - are the way to go. For instance, it’s tempting to get a trendy new MadeIn cookware set but a used Calphalon might be a better product and last longer and doesn’t generate new waste. There was a subreddit for stuff like this which I can’t remember right now. There’s buyitforlife but I think there was another one.