Andreas

No, it’s 100% economics. Why do you think that having “careers, lives and travel” (as if having a family is not having a life?) is more appealing to modern first worlders? Because it doesn’t impact their finances severely. Having more children in impoverished countries is a financial gain because children are free labor and lottery tickets to get the entire family out of poverty. In wealthy countries, children are only a financial loss.

I have two phones as daily drivers, one Android and one iPhone. Compared to Android, the iPhone is very restrictive and locked down. Adblockers don’t work and you’re forced to use whatever iOS interface it throws at you. Buttons and gestures move around with every update. There’s no way to view and manage internal files, no sideloading, lots of options that are just not accessible to normal users.

The positive side is that iPhones are very optimized and I can get similar performance to my Android phone despite the iPhone being older and having worse specs. The closed ecosystem also has its benefits, because it makes data very hard to get out, so I use the iPhone as a device to sandbox all the Meta crap that I’m forced to use.

Im not sure its so much learned helplessness as, and I know this will be an unpopular opinion here, I don’t want to understand how it all works behind the scenes.

“Learned helplessness” isn’t meant as an insult, it’s just a way to describe… well, this. The idea that the internet is too complicated and you’ll never understand it so don’t bother trying. This is not the fault of the “normie masses” but rather society not treating digital competence as a necessary skill. Society has many more complicated systems like law, finance, insurance and property that people can still navigate!

I brought up the social system because you can see that everyone in this thread arguing against you is saying that your “excellent welfare system” is the reason why your income is lower than the corresponding American programmer’s. The massive taxation is obviously a big factor to your reduced income, but let’s look away from that for a bit and just focus on the American companies.

American companies in America pay more because the costs of doing business in America are much lower and there is a greater availability of loans and funding.

American companies in Europe pay more because they have the advantages listed above that local European companies don’t have and they have the resources to invest in a global expansion.

That’s it. That’s the answer.

It’s difficult to come up with an onboarding solution that doesn’t give overwhelming power to the hands of a few people (who operate the onboarding platform), leading to centralization again.

If everyone was directed to one central onboarding platform, the operators could choose to advertise and censor instances as they saw fit – which is why I don’t recommend potential Mastodon users to the join-mastodon.org server picker, because all of the instances there are hand-picked by mastodon.social admins.

I didn’t expect security and outage threats to be the factor that keeps big instances in check, but I’m kind of glad for it.

The feature is there, but it’s glitchy. Whenever I try to post with a language tag to lemmy.world and other big instances, the post screen stays loading forever and the post is never submitted. It only goes through when I remove the language tag, so I avoid posting non-English content on lemmy.world because I can’t tag it…

I don’t think that you, me and OP have different values on this issue, actually? We all agree that the state is supposed to provide us with a structure to live in that we couldn’t have on our own, and as payment for this safety net, we contribute taxes. My and OP’s argument is that with the current projection of the economy and population growth, the state cannot provide the current generation of tax payers with the structures and support that we will eventually need, and therefore many of us would rather pay lower taxes and lose the benefits, because we won’t be getting them anyway. We know what’s coming and we don’t want to be the ones “holding the bag” when the system collapses.

I’m trying to explain OP’s point to the Americans in this thread who don’t understand that European social security systems are currently under severe strain and are on the road to collapse, and how OP feels to have to sacrifice so much of his potential income to support a failing system. The 80s stereotypes of reliable, high-quality social security no longer hold true in Europe in 2023.

And I’m sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.

I’m trying to advertise my country’s instance, feddit.nu (Sweden). feddit.de got a headstart with Germans by having been created before the Reddit migration and providing the first federated community discovery tool.

Instances that were created after the migration started on the other hand? It’s frustrating with Redditor behavior, because they expect the Lemmy community to share the same name as the Reddit community (/r/Sweden) and only subscribe to communities that use the same name.

If you don’t want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can’t understand, please make sure to annoy their users about it as much as possible, in English, that they should move to the country-specific instances instead of centralizing on lemmy.world. It’s healthier for the Fediverse in general with everyone on many instances, in the long run.

It’s Estonian (.ee is the country code for Estonia) but it’s also a cool domain hack and the owner opened it to everyone.

1. The sign-up process can be improved. But the reason people think choosing an instance complicated is because they’re so used to having choices taken from them by social media companies, so when they’re given the choice back, learned helplessness causes them to freeze.
2. You do bullet points with a dash or an asterisk, like - This is a bullet point or * This is a bullet point.
3. Click on your profile picture in the top right of the screen and click on “Settings”. There is a section named something like “Default Homepage Sort”. You can change it to view the All feed instead of Local.
4. We don’t think having dumb people in the Fediverse is enshittification. Many of the current users would be considered dumb depending on who you ask. Corporate control of the Fediverse and companies milking users for money while making the user experience worse is enshittification.
5. This text formatting system is called Markdown, which is what Old Reddit used to format text before New Reddit introduced the graphic text editor. This page has a guide on all the formatting tricks you can do with Markdown.

Older than 30 nope, tech enthusiast yes, Linux user sort of, because my self-hosting servers run Linux but my personal daily driver is Windows. Windows native art programs have a lot of responsiveness problems and other random issues when running on Linux, and it’s annoying to have to boot up a separate OS to use specific programs.

Taking the extremely tech-unsavvy fanartist community as a reference, it’s not that federation and choosing a server is that difficult, that’s just a lame excuse. Their usual social media platforms do UI redesigns, A/B testing and introduce weird limitations all the time. They just learn to cope with it.

People who don’t care about tech don’t think about the websites they use at all. In their minds, websites are just omnipresent things that exist naturally, like the sun. They only care about whether the website is able to connect them to their friends and showcase their posts to other people. They will only pay attention to the website if it introduces a change that affects their daily usage of it negatively, just like how people don’t consciously think about the sun unless it inconveniences them.

That’s more of an Instagram thing. The calling card of the teenage zoomer on Reddit is the nerd emoji and the moai head emoji.

Hardware companies have much deeper pockets because the initial investment for hardware design and manufacturing is much higher than software. This also helps them keep their profits because new companies can’t enter the industry and compete as easily.

I also realized that I didn’t mention the elephant in the room, selection bias. US companies in Europe are those who have already “made it” in their domestic market and are looking to expand globally, of course they’ll bring money that Arnes Webbyrå AB doesn’t have. I follow CS industry discussions that naturally end up talking about the US a lot, and there are stories about how retrenched developers with experience had to accept terrible wages like $30k a year with all of the lack of safety nets that living in the US comes with. Those positions exist, but they don’t hire foreigners, so we never hear about them.

But I agree with you that a high minimum wage also reduces how much a company can pay its top employees, because their expenses on lower-paid employees like customer support and janitors will have to be balanced out somehow.

I think it has to do with the higher rate of investor funding in the US that allows companies to spend above their actual assets by a huge margin, because of the significantly lower capital gains taxes there. The risk is much higher that US companies go bankrupt or investors stop funding the company during times of high interest rates (such as now), which is why US tech companies are disproportionately affected by the post-Coronavirus layoffs. Even Reddit itself (according to Spez) has not been profitable through all 18 years of its operation, but someone was clearly pouring money into it to keep it running. European companies on the other hand have a lot more administrative overhead when it comes to loans and investment than US companies, so they can’t use money they don’t have to offer attractive compensation on the level of US companies.

I’m not Danish (I’m the resident foreign invader on the instance), but if you are, you should come over to feddit.dk to complain with us. Privatization and the social system destroying itself is a hot topic right now.

I must admit though, the way you described your country made me think you were from Greece or somewhere that is bleeding citizens because its social systems are beyond salvaging at this point. Is the public pension in Denmark really unliveable? I would assume that it’s much worse here in Sweden but old people are generally still able to get by.

Oof, it sounds like your country is further along than mine on the “broken down social system” scale. My country is already dealing with reports about retirees who can’t survive off their pension despite working for an average income their entire lives, old people who are not able to find caretakers and people who have to wait in line for an unreasonably long time to get public healthcare and subsidized housing. All while politicians slash budgets and make privatized systems the only way to get timely and high-quality services. I can only see it getting worse from here and it makes no sense to pay so much for something whose quality only gets worse with every passing year.

You’re right that healthy, young working adults without children have very little to gain from socialized systems. I’m going to assume that OP, like me, is an early Gen Z who fits this description, and is about to enter the job market or has just entered it. For our generation, this statement

The state is not here to rob you, but to provide you with a structure to live in that you couldn’t have in the same way on your own.

does not check out mathematically. The taxes we pay today don’t get locked away in a box to be spent when we are sick or elderly and need them. They are spent on the sick and elderly we have right now. This means that at the age that we start needing benefits more than we contribute to them, it’s not going to be us, but our children’s and grandchildren’s generation who are footing the bill. But the birth rates across Europe are below replacement level and none of our countries have come up with a system that either raises birth rates above replacement level or successfully introduces foreigners who will be net tax contributors for all their lives. That means that despite paying high taxes and receiving miserable salaries (compared to American salaries) today, we won’t even be able to enjoy benefits from the state in the future because there won’t be enough tax contributors by the time we need these benefits.

It absolutely feels like getting robbed.

The history is that Lemmy was originally created as an independent forum for communists. Later, the devs experimented with ActivityPub federation and created the first federated Reddit alternative. The software itself is neutral and can be used by anyone, but the original communist users of Lemmy before federation was implemented are still around. The politics of Lemmy’s original community scared off a lot of potential users from exploring federated Reddit, but bringing more users and awareness to Lemmy will also attract politically neutral developers who can maintain a good alternative.

An alternative is not even necessary if the devs are able to leave their ideologies out of the software’s design, which I believe they are doing well.