Leraje

It’s difficult to convey to non Brits just how strong and deep the urge to place all citizens under total surveillance runs in the political classes. Its beyond party politics - all parties want it and have for decades. We have (I think) the largest CCTV system in Europe, possibly the world and the police use facial recognition as a matter of course and encourage private businesses to use facial recognition too.

Hate is too strong a word I think - I nothing them - but they produce the sort of soulless indie/pop ballad that you know will end up in the soundtrack of Hollywood paint-by-numbers romcom that would’ve gone straight to DVD a decade or so ago. The unending radio play rotation would force the song (and we could be talking about any and all Coldplay songs here) into your brain and then five years later you’d find yourself humming it as you suddenly realised a longe bar version of it is playing in the lift (elevator USians) you’re in.

The threadiverse tech is better (Lemmy/Piefed/MBin etc) and it is a great feeling to know I’m not getting tracked and profiled by big tech or inundated by ads, or force fed ragebait via an algorithm I neither want nor need. The users are better, mostly, although I have noticed an uptick over the last 3 or 4 months of reddit-style dickheads being dickheads - but I can just block them.

Niche content will come I think. If the threadiverse can resist the self-defeating drive to ‘grow at all costs’ and just let it organically grow, more people will come but a lot more slowly. But of course that will bring a change in the user culture too. Its quite nice being somewhere with low to no tolerance for right-wing shit.

As for Reddit, I don’t have an account any more. My main of almost Digg migration antiquity was deleted when Spez shit the bed over the API thing but I’d been on Lemmy prior to that anyway off an on. My alt got deleted about 6 months ago when I realised I hadn’t used it for months. If I absolutely have to visit a sub I use a front end.

Not to pour cold water onto any sort of activism but this has zero chance. We all know what the OSA is really for and the kids/terrorism thing is a front for spying on us but the gen population are totally bought into the kids/terrorism thing and there’s not a single MP with any sort of political ambition who’ll take the chance on looking like they hate kids and support terrorists.

We have to.

A lot of us are and have protested for years. The previous gvmt didn’t care and the current one don’t either because its not really about kids, its about control and surveillance. The ruling political class want to know what its citizens are up to and/or want us to know they can id us any time, especially those of us who are noisy about political issues.

Our right to protest is just about gone, including the right to wear masks. We are legally obliged to provide pins to our phones when detained and we can be arrested if a protest is deemed obstructive - which includes being too noisy. We can even be arrested just for discussing holding a protest of some kind.

At the same time, we are told that vocally supporting non-violent groups is now terrorism and can be punishable with prison time.

And the vast majority of the UK population sit on their collective arses moaning about immigrants and watching Love Island. They don’t care - genuinely, they absolutely do not care their rights are disappearing one by one.

You might personally think defence trumps all other things - I don’t. Its clearly not unimportant (and I never suggested it was) but defence is, we’re told, something we use to protect our way of life and our way of life includes not being called a terrorist for doing something which very obviously is not an act of terrorism.

All forms of protest are under a sustained attack in the UK right now and this is just another extension of that. Sabotaging reality to exert control over a populace is obviously a very much worse thing.

My own take on it is that growth is not very important in terms of how a network develops. The only truly successful growth is that which happens completely organically. Worrying about why one service has ‘stopped’ growing is pointless. Those who are unhappy jump ship - those who remain are likely people who are never going to and/or bots or influencers who aren’t interested in being part of a community just finding a way to exploit it.

I would propose so-called ‘smaller’ networks (such as the fediverse) concentrate on quality not quantity. That has the duel benefit of making the experience for current users even better and makes the network attractive to those who are outside looking in.

It is now - but yeah my heart bleeds for those poor RAF jets, they’re definitely what’s important here, not making the word ‘terrorist’ a meaningless empty word that can be used to justify anything at all.

They did wrong by breaking into an RAF base though

Hardly a terrorist action though is it? Breaking in to throw around some red paint.

I don’t know that it is objectively the best - but its the best fit for me right now (LMDE).

I learnt to speak French by living there for a year or so but I still cannot read it at all beyond short sentences because how a word sounds is different than how it looks.

As for English, I think both learning English and English speakers learning other languages is extra hard because English is such a hodge podge of random bits of other syntaxes and structures. Its a mess of a language in lots of respects making it hard to learn and hard for native speakers to get past the messiness and learn a better structured language.