who do you mean with pagans? It’s an exonym so do you mean everyone who is not a christian? Because that is an easy bar to pas, since history has been long and religions have been many. Did you have a specific culture in mind?

Edit: The point I wanted to get to, is that if we start looking around at historical cultural/religious practices around the world, it won’t take you long to find pretty questionable practices (from a contemporary humanist perspective) including all of the things you mentioned both in and outside of Christianity

Edit: You know what, you probably already know all of this, I guess the word pagans just tripped me up. Have a good night haha.

Would you say that you need qualifications to form opinions about a topic? That seems quite restrictive, specifically for politics. Lots of people have and share political opinions without qualifications. You yourself just shared a political opinion, do you have qualifications?

The official response is “To be better prepared for a potential crisis” Gold closer to home is easier to liquidate. The unofficial speculation is that the national bank is worried that the US could easily disrupt the NL financial traffic, hence the move.

My 2 cents: They probably don’t want to signal complete distrust like France did in 1959, so they just withdrew some.

Local article on the topic: https://nos.nl/artikel/2629369-nederland-haalt-groot-deel-van-de-goudvoorraad-weg-uit-de-vs-en-canada

welcome welcome, do you know your way around?

I don’t think that we should be wary of them. It is only natural that when the whole web is overrun by bots, these gated communities will pop up. It’s an easy way to keep a lot of bad traffic out, while a space for users to interact and be authentic.

And yes, I think the open web is truly over.

You are kinda right with the solutions. Another problem is that some people have no idea how bad candles and gas stoves are for the indoor air quality. Once I brought a quality gas sensor to a home where they cooked with gas and despite using ventilation they massively underestimated how much PM was still in the air. Depending on your situation, you really need to ventilate your house,

PM is not bullshit though and if you can prevent it you should prevent it. Because then you don’t need a hepa filter.

Source: Am asthmatic, have a gas sensor, work with exposure scientists.

no thank you, offer is appreciated though 🙏

You have a lot say on this. Its good that someone thinks about these thing. I’m sorry that I can’t really provide you with a good discussion. I don’t know enough about markets etc and I don’t want to spend too long online.

I agree that can’t really stamp out openness and anonymity online (which is beautiful in a way) but I think that will mostly be reserved to technically capable users in the cracks and niches of the web who can navigate the restrictions. This is a massive tragedy.

This brings us to the current state of the web with age restrictions popping up everywhere, deanonimization etc. I think that we are in agreement regarding where it is going. Where you think we should be heading. I’m sure you have opinios on that

I read one of your blog posts about empathy this mornjng. It resonated with me and my recent views on the world.

Thanks for explaining your thoughts. So to paraphrase you: you are saying that the market and by proxy, nations too, Are still adapting to the concept of the internet. One way to cope with the effects is to restricted access?

The internet can mostly die as far as I’m concerned. Just roll it back to file servers again, or something like gemspace. But being able to talk with people across cultures, borders freely is really important. It’s a tragedy that all these people will be hurt by the dystopification of the web. The new web needs to have a safe way to converse socially that is safe and easy enough to use for lay people. I have so much more to say on this, but real life is calling so I’ll leave it at this.

I don’t really get your point about markets though. I’m genuinely trying to understand, so bear with me. This is what I got from your post:

Our market has coexisted with an extremely fast global communication network for decades now. Given that the market feels like a quite organic thing, on what authority is the market not meant to coexists with the internet?

I think that internet access is restricted because of technological constraints, a technological lag in rolling out higher speed infrastructure, and a the lack of demand for that access which is driven by technological and practical constraint. Some complex function of those factors haha. Still, I don’t really know what you are trying to get across.

It took me an embarrassingly long to get the joke. I forgot what the original thread was.

Everyday the internet gets a little worse. I hate it here in this technological hellscape. I have more to say, but this bullshit makes me so so tired. Goodnight.

After contemplating on this: These companies that seek to eliminate thinking, spit in the face of agency. They call themselves agentic yet seek seek to kill all agency and authenticity in the users of their products which is contemptible enough.

We should all be more like Donald Boat.

If we can’t change the material conditions that let these losers play with money and toys then we can at least hold them in cultural contempt.

A bit long, but well written. It read like a novel, quite enjoyable.

What a fucking world

A world of non-thinkers

At least Donald Boat found some wisdom.

Thanks for your comments. I agree with everything you said especially that these traits are desirable for broader life IRL. In a way the web culture is a reflection of our own cultures just more mixed, extreme, amplified and with a good dose of parasociallity. I desperately want people to break free of their cycles. Think, talk, discuss, empathize and form communities, use your free will for good damit. These are the real antidotes that will enable the cultural shift that will allow us to reject the smothering of the human spirit in the current way of life.

Anyways, it is a terrible thing that there is an armsrace to be authentic. This really ought to be solved on the user registration side. And also yes, saying something profound with hidden meaning through creative intuition is great, I write poems sometimes. But its not the solution to authenticity online.

Haha you did not answer my questions, but you are clearly passiinate about this vision and I like that. As I understand it you describe a sort of moral credit that has value within the community that hands it out. So I imagine that a board would mint these tokens? What would these tokens buy you?

We will grant that most in the community will be commited to the cause so they will want to participate, but other than respect, why and what should I grant/sell you (you having some credit) for helping the cause. Couldn’t I just grant my effort to the cause directly? I get the renown aspect, but we also have commemorative mission patches pins and stickers for that.

So in short, I am not questioning the renown/trust mechanism of a moral credit system, but I am questioning the monetary function.

Don’t take this a rejection of the idea, the rebirth of the internet has to start somewhere and that might be here by visionaries.

Yes! After winter comes spring, and who knows what that may bring. It is the belief in a better world that brightens my days. Even if hope can’t heal everything it might heal some and that is enough for me.

We are not powerless agents! Use your free will to shape a better world. Unironically: live laugh love.

Thanks for the elaborate write-up, it’s good to engage in discussion about these things. An electoral system seems quite elaborate, but I would love to see it work. It would require quite active participation by the users, and I am not convinced that smaller instances would have the active user base for this. Even so, the idea is quite appealing.

Vetting good faith users is indeed one of the difficult problems. We could make better captchas maybe. For example taking some pictures of household objects in certain orientations. You could also check the exif flags to check if they line up with known cameras or something. Just an idea.

I like your idea of social credit/karma, but I have some questions. So imagine that an instance can hand out these social points and so can another instance. How would we equate the value of one system to another? What is stopping my instance from minting a bunch of social points and giving them to me to elevate my “trustworthiness” in your instance?

I also had an idea for a trust system based on belief systems. So as per Decartes I know that I am (real), and I have met some people IRL that are also real, so whenever they message me, I have a high degree of trust that they are not bots. I would also feel relatively inclined to trust the friends of my friends, with that trust decaying as we move down the friend chain. You could sort of make a “trust tree” where you would be able to see how many trust steps you are removed from IRL validation. You could even weigh the scores and downgrade someones trust score in the tree if it turned out that one of their contacts turned out to be a bot or something like that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Genuine discussion and meaningful interactions make this a better place.

How would we defend ourselves from such a bot flood though?

Let’s say that we start to become competitive with one of these big tech companies user wise. What is stopping them from destroying the fediverse with bots by sewing dissent, hate and slop?

Perhaps the answer to such a scenario would just be to splinter, defederate and sort out the bot issue with better user registration.

Happy to hear your thoughts.