cacheson

No defense, then? Lemmy is just intended as a delivery vector for shitty politics, shackled to the rotting corpse of the USSR?

Fair enough, I hadn’t been keeping track of their pace of development. Doesn’t look super active.

I’m operating under the assumption that for a while the bulk of new user growth will happen on the existing larger instances, which are all running Lemmy, rather than Piefed or Mbin instances growing faster than them. I think that’ll remain true even once Piefed and Mbin are more featureful than Lemmy, unless the gap is really significant.

If that turns out to be true, then for Lemmy to no longer be the dominant software, the existing big instances would need to switch, which wouldn’t be a trivial task. Piefed or Mbin could add the ability to migrate an existing Lemmy database, but I assume that it would be overall easier and less risky for them to move to a Lemmy clone than to a different system.

You walking away would be a net benefit at this point.

It’s not that obvious.

At the very least, we’re at the point where the counterargument to mine is merely damning with faint praise.

I haven’t tried Mbin, and as a Piefed user I agree that it’s not there yet. I’m not suggesting that they should replace Lemmy as the backbone software of the threadiverse. However, Lemmy will continue to run in the absence of active development.

I expect Sublinks to eventually overtake Lemmy since it’s being designed as a drop-in replacement, in a language better suited to web development than Rust. The dev team also aren’t pathological authoritarians, as far as I know. If development on Lemmy were to stop, the threadiverse community’s attention and resources would significantly shift towards Sublinks, which would benefit us all in the long run.

I’m not saying that the work you’ve previously done should be undone. Ideally you would abandon your shitty politics instead of your development work, but I assume that’s out of the question.

From the perspective of those trying to advocate for people to actually use lemmy, the instances that you run, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad, are a serious problem. Together with hexbear, they’re the “missing stairs” of the threadiverse. We’re constantly having to tell people “Yeah, it’s understandable that you don’t want to associate with tankies, but it’s really not so bad if you just block those three instances, and don’t mind that two of them are run by the lead developers of lemmy”. You walking away would be a net benefit at this point.

Ah yes, I sure am making any effort whatsoever to conceal my identity? Weird dodge there, guy.

At this point even someone as ideologically blinded as you should be able to see that the presence of you and your tankie friends is a liability to the project. Why do you think OP is looking to avoid a “lemmy.ml type of situation”?

Wait, when have I ever denied any genocide?

I don’t have receipts handy for that right now, though the company you keep does say something about you.

I do have you on your weird transphobic conspiracy theory, though.

Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted your usage of “last line of defense”?

These aren’t regular conservatives that we’re dealing with. MAGA is a fascist movement. The MO of fascists is to gain and hold power for their in-group by *any means necessary*. While it should never be our first option, we need to be willing and able to violently resist them, because they sure as hell don’t have any qualms about violently subjugating us.

Interesting, this is the first I’ve heard of the “reputation rehab” angle on the guy. Do you have any further reading you could link me to?

Rather than going full Inglorious Basterds, I think it’s important to have both “carrot” and “stick” options for these people. It doesn’t really do us any good if there’s no way to come back from having been involved in hate groups. Just make sure to keep the Richard Spencer treatment available, to provide them some motivation to get their heads right.

public shaming is the last line of defense we have against these types of people

Wait, really? I know liberals tend to like weird pseudo-pacifism, but have y’all really committed so hard to it that you think “public shaming” is our last line of defense?

Get armed, and get trained. You may end up needing it. *We* may end up needing it.

It’s their second favorite thing, right after vegan cat food!

the Sub is supposed to be the one that’s actually in control

This is a myth, presumably meant to be reassuring to subs that are new to BDSM, at the expense of risk awareness. In principle the sub is no more “in control” than the dom is, and in practice they are often significantly less so.

Arend also highlighted the former Soviet Union’s perceived “strength” to “stand up against Western pressures” and its ability to shield their family from ideologies they found objectionable.

“Other countries are under the Western influence and wouldn’t be able to stand up against it,” he claimed.

“Western chauvinist” to “eastern chauvinist” speed run any%

Alright, fair enough. Keep in mind though that this comment thread started with an assertion that Bitcoin didn’t get it quite right, and Monero did, which is more of a big-picture analysis thing than merely “can I buy something with this”. My responses have been in that vein.

It seems like you’re arguing against a position that I don’t hold? I’ve been invested in Bitcoin for a long time, and I’m quite familiar with its technical and socioeconomic dynamics. I’m skeptical of altcoins specifically, not of cryptocurrency as a concept.

Scalability isn’t quite as simple as “how much data can a well-off enthusiast from a developed country store”. You need to consider the behavior of your lowest common denominator users.

You want as many users as possible to run fully-verifying nodes, rather than SPV (“simplified payment verification”) nodes that can be tricked by a malicious miner. The more transactions are being done through SPV nodes, the more potential payoff there is for an attacker, and the more resources they can dedicate to an attack.

Further, if your number of full nodes gets low enough, it becomes feasible for state actors to track down and compromise the remaining node operators. At that point, you may as well just be using a centralized, government approved payment system instead.

IMO, you shouldn’t be investing in cryptocurrencies or any currencies for that matter. Currencies should be
used, not hoarded with the expectation of gain. If you’re buying cryptocurrencies as an investment, you’ve already lost.

Cryptocurrencies literally cannot function without speculative investment. Even in the absence of formal investors, *someone* has to be the first person to accept the tokens in exchange for something of value, in hopes that they will have value of their own in the future. Until then, the tokens are unusable.

Further, the market cap and liquidity of a cryptocurrency impose practical limits on what it can be used for. You can’t very well conduct a billion dollar transaction through a cryptocurrency that has a market cap in the millions. Investment raises the market cap, “unlocking” these higher-value use cases. Conversely, loss of investor confidence will reduce the market cap, and effectively reduce the utility of the coin.

This is why ability to scale is so important. The current market values of Bitcoin and the various alts are based far more on speculative investment than they are on usage. Those investors believe that the coins will see far more usage (and have far more natural demand) in the future than they do today. If that turns out not to be the case due to an inability to scale, investors will start to flee, and the vicious cycle will start.

Oh damn. When I first looked into Session I was really excited, until I found out that the anonymity layer was based on an altcoin. Which means that you’re only anonymous as long as line goes up. I didn’t expect it to fail quite this quickly though.

I’m not interested in spending a ton of time on this, but I did go and watch this short interview with him about scaling misconceptions.

Wasn’t convincing at all. For one, the guy comes across as kind of dishonest. Not scammer-level dishonest, but more like a politician. The main thing though is that he’s just a big-blocker, which is just a total dead end. Having everyone store every single transaction that was ever made until the end of time is just not realistic.

In order to scale to any globally significant number of users, a cryptocurrency needs a second layer to aggregate transactions, such as Lightning. Monero seems to have nothing in this regard beyond “However, academic and industry research is ongoing and promising in this area.”

they are a hell of a lot smarter than me

You should not be investing money in something based on this level of understanding, and you *definitely* should not be advocating it to others. Scaling is an existential problem for cryptocurrencies. Their utility is based on their monetary value, and their monetary value is based on investor assessment of their future utility. Without the ability to scale, there will be no growth in utility, which means no investment other than temporary dumb money, which becomes a vicious cycle.

Monero will not scale. All attempts at “improved” altcoins have just sacrificed scalability in exchange for features that look good in the short term to investors that don’t know any better.

There is a “Knife Rights” organization that works to overturn these laws. From what I hear, they tend to be pretty successful, since there isn’t a ton of attention on the issue and there isn’t much in the way of entrenched opposition the way there is on the guns issue.