No, what makes the poor majority choose to voluntarily vote against their own interest and shoot themselves in the foot is not the fact that there’s a powerful minority, it’s the manipulation.

Are you not aware of how popular capitalism is with the masses? the poor majority is primarily capitalist in all the capitalist countries. The majority disagrees with your idea of communism being the solution.

Manipulation is the name of the game. Appeals to compliance and stability, pushing narratives to vulnerable people in ways that is hard for them to examine them critically, politics being intermixed with social psychology, group-thinking and sometimes even reaching the levels of religious belief.

Manipulation is a tactic used by Nations of all colors… and it’s specially obvious with governments that explicitly seek lack of transparency, opaque systems, suppression of political opposition, silencing dissent, censorship… and… yes, lack of separation of powers (which does help with all of those). Like I sad before, the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in.

The moment you punish people for expressing being unhappy is the moment you can no longer trust that people will be honest when asked if they are happy. This adds extra levels of complexity, it only seems simple if you only look at it from a very superficial surface level.

what if, instead of a group of old men wearing weird wigs, it was actual representatives of the people chosen through democratic centralism?

You are assuming that people will never ever choose the group of old men… or that the group of old men isn’t gonna create an alternative progressive looking group that actually is just as bad, but happens to be very good at propaganda, marketing and appealing to popular social media poison trends / manipulation.

And I say “never ever” because the most dangerous thing is that a malicious group only needs to gain power once, in such a no-barriers system, to impose a dictatorship.

If electing officials were that easy, the people in Berlin would not have needed a referendum to push for this law, the elected officials would have pushed for it instead.

Of course, you can advocate for having direct democracy at any step of the way, but then you are essentially also doing separation of power, since you are essentially translocating the tribunal to the entire population, and it would be just as separate and varied as the whole country itself. I’d argue that direct democracy is the opposite of centralization of power.

It’s so much of a hurdle that all fascist regimes have been forced to weaken the division and ultimatelly break it completelly in order to build a fascist regime.

A “progressive law” is easy for a fascist in power to overthrow if they actually are able to weaken the division of power.

Why do you think Trump has been able to do a lot more in this term than in the previous one? Because he has been able to weaken that division, the judicial system is on his side, and he has a lot more connections with people inside the state now.

Ok,. so lets imagine your example from Berlin: would the situation have been better if there was no division of power and the same group of old men in a tribunal were the ones deciding the referendum should be made, deciding what laws should be passed, how should they be written and in which manner should they be executed, with which level of strength?

Division of power also means that if a group of old men in the legislative dictates a horrible anti constitutional law, there’s a chance the law can be repelled due to the judiciary being compelled to do so.

He didn’t say that separation by itself is sufficient. So naturally just having separation is not enough.

However, it’s a fact that a dictator needs, by definition, to break the separation of power in order to truly become the authoritarian leader with control over the country.

So NOT having separation of power is actually necessary to destroy a democracy.

I feel that trying to defend those things that someone would need to break in order to remove democracy is not a bad idea if we want to maintain democracy.

There are also a lot of other things that are necessary for a dictatorship… such as the dictator not being held accountable (meaning… transparency and mechanisms for accountability would be another principle to maintain democracy), or the dictator suppressing political opposition or dissent (so protecting opposition, whistleblowers and dissent, instead of prosecuting it would be another one). And I’m sure there are many others.

I mean… sure, you can, in theory, have a democracy without those things… but the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in…

Their instance has an individual identity they wished to protect.

If the intention of the separation were to prevent any interaction from anyone who isn’t an existing Beehaw user they would have closed the sign ups. But they didn’t do that (https://beehaw.org/signup is open).

The reason of Beehaw’s defederation has more to do with moderation hurdles, and how they don’t trust content coming from other instances, see Beehaws own statement about this: https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/important-questions-decisions-and-reflections/on-defederation/

Like I said: the way the federation works, it’s a moderation nightmare to be fully open. Not because as an instance host you wanna hide the content you have in your instance from the wider public, but because you have to deal with (host, mirror, cache and display along with your own content) content that is coming from a different instance which might not share your same moderation strategy.

I feel like the discussion assumes an individual users wish for seemless interactions is more important than the wish of other users to have the choice of non-interaction.

Both are reasonable asks. If a community wants to control who is allowed to access, there should be moderation tools that limit interaction to anyone who’s not been approved. However, this is a different thing from straight-up disallowing in your instance access to all users that happen to have registered their account in a particular instance. I don’t see why the identity/account provider cannot be separate from the access management and content moderation.

In fact, I feel that it would make access control EASIER for Beehaw if all new accounts actually were accounts from other instances, because that would let them audit the person applying for access in a more reliable way than they do currently in their signup form (https://beehaw.org/signup ). They would be able to check the post/comment history of the user, how many years has it been an active member, etc. before deciding if the user should be allowed to post content in their instance, and it would be protecting them from malicious actors / bots that might be pretending to be someone else. It would also potentially allow to use tools to check automatically the user for common bad patterns, which could potentially minimize a lot the human work in moderation and make the process much faster and convenient also for the person applying, so I feel this is a Win-Win if anything, not an “X has priority over Y”.

I think granular access control for communities and some other things that are coming will help when it comes to moderation tools. But it still cannot avoid having to deal with all the content from other instances in the federation, since that’s something fundamental in how activitypub works. There would need to be a new separate protocol for decentralizing the user identity between instances that don’t federate their content. Maybe something like OpenID.

Is that really what people mean by it being easier?

In Bluesky you are asked to choose a “Hosting provider” when you sign up… it;'s just that it’s set by default to Bluesky and actually trying to set something else makes the experience of signing in much harder… so actually I feel Bluesky is the one for which the process is harder, if anything.

I can’t even get a direct url to the sign up page of https://bsky.app/ …but I can link https://lemmy.ml/signup

Nobody is being forced to seek an alternative Lemmy instance to whichever they found first. In the same way that nobody in Bluesky has to use Bluesky as their hosting provider or even choose to self host their PDS.

Nice! It also seems to be under discussion on lemmy’s github here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

It does not have to be something mandatory…

I mean, there could be some form of “metacommunities”, something like being able to group multiple communities together in a “view” that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated. Bonus points if everyone can make their own custom groupings (but others can subscribe to them… so there can be some community-managed groupings).

In theory you could have multiple “metacommunities” for the same topic still… but at least they could be sharing the same posts if they share communities. I feel grouping like this would be helpful because small communities feel even smaller when they are split.

I think reddit has something similar to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.

That’s the problem: the protocol pretty much requires explicit relationships between instances since they are forced to proxy/cache each other’s content. I think there’s too much responsibility on the instance… I feel it would be a moderation nightmare to host an instance with truly open federation (potentially even result in legal trouble!). So I totally understand why so many instances want to be conservative on who they federate with…

The ideal situation would be to be to be able to interact with third party instances directly (at least when the 2 instances don’t wanna agree on caching each other’s content), instead of having to use your home instance as proxy/cache… so the home instance would not need to have the burden (both legally and in terms of hosting resources) and it would just act as a way to identify the user, not necessarily as the primary content provider.

Potentially, using some sort of predictable hashing to get the same id across instances might also help in the detection of duplicate links so that they can be aggregated in a single place (sort of what was suggested at point 2 here).

I fear this could be too much of a breaking change though.

3. A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

This would be great… also even if the “restore” part were not possible (yet?) I feel offering a way to extract your data might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL), reddit does allow you to download your data after all.

Oh… ALL housekeeping? initially I thought you’d only want the video you are playing to be updated with missing extra content (subtitles and intro-skipper audio fingerprints).

Do note that if the library scan does not run, you won’t see any new videos that you might have added since the last scan, so you won’t even be able to see them in the Jellyfin UI to be able to play them. So at the very least, the library scan needs to run independently from the playback of any new video you’d wanna play that wasn’t detected in a previous scan.

It looks to me that it makes more sense to make it run automatically in a time range when you know you won’t be doing something important (I think you can tweak the schedule from the dashboard as admin). And perhaps combine that with manual library scans when needed.

I assume you’d want the scripts to run right before playback starts, not on start.

Otherwise, updates (on subtitles, chapters, intro skipping, etc.) won’t be reflected on the video, since it would be already playing and the remote player does not get those updated mid-playback.

The playback would have to wait for the script to be finished before it actually starts playing. So this can potentially introduce a lot of delay. However, it’d be a good idea as an optional add-on.