It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.

There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.

People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.

Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You’re just sending something to an address, not CC’ing literally everyone all the time.

Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.

The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.

Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.

We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it’s simple, but it’s really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.

When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you’re seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.

That’s not the case with the fediverse. There’s no simple default. You have to build it yourself.

I feel like I’ve been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.

We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site’s growth.

And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don’t have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications, for their own individual reasons.

Which would be fine in a vacuum. But in a federated space, what is done on one instance can have a wide ranging effect on the visibility of content outside of that instance. And as op rightfully points out, because communities are locked to an individual instance, the nature of federation doesn’t help users escape overbearing moderation when the only true sizable communities for a thing happen to be on a specific instance.

Moreover, they’re going to want an emulator that can be managed alongside the rest of the museum software.

That’s like saying what’s the point of the air and space museum if they’re not actually flying the planes.

They’re not going to use the original hardware and put wear on them. That’s a standard part of archiving.

Just for the record, this is exactly what any museum would do, because they’re not going to actually run anything on the original hardware. Those systems are part of the collection, and it behooves a museum to not put any wear on them.

Also because emulators can be managed remotely.

Ever go hiking?

On a trail, where you are not subjected to anybody else’s noise for more than a second as they pass you by?

Skiing?

You’re skiing down a slope and a person is skiing next to you with a Bluetooth speaker?

Sit in a park?

Outdoors, where you can put some distance between yourself and them?

Maybe it’s hard to conceive of for some, but the world shouldn’t be shielded by headphones.

You’re right, it’s already shielded by air. The air that you can put between yourself and the other person.

The point was regardless of whatever they’re doing, you are only as subject to their poor behavior as you choose to be.

If you’re not going to do something about it (and please tell me what you would actually do about this beyond complaining on the internet), then your only other choice is mitigation, which involves just keeping headphones with you to block out other people’s noise or learn to find more peaceful spaces.

It’s normalized because it’s not a serious problem, it’s a minor, and extremely temporary annoyance the vast majority of the time.

Right, but they were suggesting it should be silenced at all times, by default, even for the very first notification.

Well they should silence it at that point because obviously they’re paying enough attention to it and expecting responses, so they should be waiting for the vibrate if not looking at it directly.

But people don’t need to have their phone silenced at all times while in public, they just need to be attentive enough to answer and silence it. I frequently don’t even feel the vibration.

You’re talking about laws. They’re talking about the IRS.

The IRS doesn’t make the laws. They’re an agency like any other, and a very important one.

if you fuck it up, you go to jail

No, no you don’t. This is an actual child’s understanding of how it works.

If you fuck up they often don’t even notice unless it’s substantial, otherwise they just send you a notice. You have to be willfully refusing to pay taxes for a while, repeatedly, before you’re in trouble (tax evasion) or commiting actual tax fraud.

Why would the IRS send you to jail for making mistakes on your taxes? Where taxes are now paying for your incarceration, and you can’t work to make the income to pay taxes.

Strictly speaking, tax filling software, even the free ones, have simplified it all so much that for people who have a single source of income from work and not a lot of tax forms to collect (most Americans), it’s pretty trivial. Maybe 30-60 minutes, once a year.

Less than ideal but far from the grueling, soul sucking work I was told would plague my adult life when I was a kid.

That’s why the IRS is finally doing their own online filling system. No more making Americans shell out for software, so everyone gets a nice, simple tax season.

That’s just for free tax filling software, i.e. a government sponsored TurboTax alternative. And that was definitely needed.

What they’re talking about is not having to actually do the filling at all, or at least only having to file in certain cases. The government pays for employees that look at your stuff, says “that’s the amount”, and asks you to confirm.

Granted, with the way tax filing software has advanced, and how simple the vast majority of people’s filings are going to be, the difference is not very substantial anymore. The majority of people just need to click through the screens and answer the questions, so it takes a little time but it’s hardly a true hassle.

The reason it’s been like this in the US for so long is because of the heavy lobbying to keep software like that proprietary and the system complicated enough that people need to use it.

But it’s also been because of decades of conservative bullshit refusing to fund the IRS to the degree that they could provide the services that other countries get. IRS literally could not and cannot afford the manpower to handle the taxes of every American for us. Software lets them circumvent that.

Vote for people who will increase funding to the IRS so they can manage all this.

The reason it’s been like this for so long is because they don’t have the manpower or (until recently) the technology to handle the sheer numbers. Lobbying from TurboTax and shit also played a big part, but even without that, they straight up can’t afford to do all this when they’ve been strangled of funding from decades of conservative legislation.

Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.

Granted part of that is there hasn’t been any real pressure on it, but still.

Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It’s this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.

They were supposed to destroy these when they closed the locations, to prevent exactly this.

Which is a tall order for minimum wage restaurant workers. The fuck they gonna do? Take it down to the local steel mill and T2 it?

This is a new thing that smaller towns are trying to do to take advantage of an increase in remote work.

The meme is also misleading because it’s implying that this is something they’re giving to everyone that moves there for a limited time, when it is only 10 people. It’s also implying that there’s not enough people there to pay taxes, which doesn’t actually make sense because that’s not how taxes work. There would definitely be enough tax income if they didn’t care about the future of the town. What they’re trying to do is revitalize the area and trigger growth, and they need more income to fund that revitalization.

We’re talking local here, not national.

Even if they started taxing the rich, there wouldn’t be many to tax in the area.

The median household income in Cumberland was $47,235 in 2021, which marked an an increase of 903(1.95%) from $46,332 in 2020. This income is 63.31% of the U.S. median household income of $74,606 (all incomes in 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars).

Top 5%: The mean household income for the wealthiest population (top 5%) is 302,286, which is 173.49% higher compared to the highest quintile, and 3113.14% higher compared to the lowest quintile.

https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/cumberland-md-median-household-income/#income-by-quintile

$300,000 is upper middle class, just barely enough to maybe call “rich”. Even so, it’s likely the only reason they live there is low taxes. We’re not talking national taxes here, this is local, and they can be absolutely sure if they locally tax those wealthier people any more than they are, they’ll move away.

They absolutely should do that, and give a firm middle finger to the back of the wealthy assholes as they move to their new mansion in whatever backwater they’re moving to next, but it doesn’t solve the inherent problem: the tax base is too small and too poor.

This is just a mountain town that has died slowly after the death of industry there post World War II, and frankly there is no good way to save it because there’s no way to convince anybody to take their industries up there. The state can subsidize it but it’s not going to grow.

What they’re doing here is trying to use the new changes in remote work to potentially trigger a revitalization and expand the tax base. Even then, they’re only giving it to 10 individuals, not anybody that moves there as the meme is implying. It may work, but I have my doubts.

It was the lose of jobs as industry moved away, a trend started after WW2.

The culture probably helped but it’s a much larger trend than people simply not wanting to live in a conservative town.

No, it’s to attract people with jobs. Explicitly.

I’m not sure why there’s all this guessing and pontificating going on in here, you can just look the story up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/08/30/cumberland-maryland-revival/