just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

As I said, Lemmy is federalized. Jumping from Twitter to BlueSky/Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy is difficult due to the network effect. The people you want to follow aren’t posting on BlueSky/Mastodon/Lemmy because there isn’t an audience there. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, Lemmy is federalised, that means you can change instances without loosing access to the people/content you follow. Sure, the fediverse isn’t immune to corporate takeover, but it is more resilient.

Migrating from Reddit means you loose access to all Reddit content. Migrating from .world to, I don’t know…, .ml means nothing sense you can still access .world’s content.

You need the plurality of site content

I wouldn’t say plurality. If the biggest instance only had 10% of total content, that 10% being taken over by a corp wouldn’t kill Lemmy. That 10% would be too little to perform the drawbridge strategy and so people could migrate to a different instance and access the same content.

Wait, Trump is doing what? Can you link some sources?

BlueSky isn’t decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can’t set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn’t happened yet.

a .world or .sh.itjust.works - is too much for a handful of amateur admins to handle. Hand off the instance to a venture capital firm and you could see rapid enshitification.

Lemmy is federalized. It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance. And I don’t see how the venture capital firm could stop them… For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we should be unshitifiable. It is possible for enshitification to happen… but it is of a greater difficulty, because the other non-shit instances still exist and they are federated, thus able to access the same content.

They could try and pull up the drawbridge and de-federate from every other instance that isn’t under the control of the firm so that the content of the venture capital instances are exclusive, but for as long as they don’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances we are good.

It is not to hard to imagine that, if .world where to be sold like that, half or more would jump ship. At least that’s what I hope.

What do I think? I think it’s normal to have wallpapers that aren’t related to the kernel of you OS and I’m struggling to make sense of how people setting their wallpaper to something they like could possibly be a problem.

Capitalism is the economic model where the wealth created by the workers is owned by the people o whom the tools and resources required to created said wealth and not the workers who put in the work to create it.

Here is a comic that might help you understand:

Republics aren’t necessarily democratic.

A country is considered a republic when it’s government in comprised of representatives of the citizen body. But how should those representatives be selected? The concept of “republic” does not specify how. You could choose them through democratic means; You could elect a president who in turn selects the representatives; or you could have them be chosen based on who is the richest. That would still be a republic.

Democracy comes from the Greek demos, which means people or district, and kratos, which means power. Democracy is when the power is on the people.

Republic simply says the government should be ruled by representatives of the citizen body, Democracy states how those representatives should be selected.

(Please correct me if I’m wrong)

Democracy bad? OK, then I guess you won’t mind if Great Britain comes back to their former colonies and enslave everyone.

Have we all developed selective amnesia to the dictatorships that happen in Europe around the time of the second world war? Do you really want to live in those places? Or go back to monarchy?

I’m assuming you are an American… America as pretty much always been a democracy since it’s independence. You don’t know how life is like outside a democracy. You’ve never heard of horror stories of those who lived under fascist dictatorships during WWII. My country was one of those… for 41 long, long years… The International and State Defence Police (Policia Internacional de Defesa do Estado, or PIDE for short) had eyes everywhere… Even the most banal things, like owning a lighter, was outlawed - unless you had a license (if you read the article about that lighter license, you will notice that it doesn’t just say “lighter”, it is worded in such a matter that outlaws anything that could possibly be used to start a fire… You can start a fire with two sticks…). No one was safe. Gatherings where outlawed. Saying anything even remotely against the state would lead to to be captured and tortured for months on end, making death look like an unreachable dream. Worst of all… the PIPE’s torture methods were notorious for not leaving any markings on the victims bodies.

This GOP stuff reminds me a LOT of The New State, as it was called. Salazar, the Dictator, was also a conservative determined to bring Portugal back into it’s former glory. He hated democracy and felt like the new more progressive ideas were destroying our country, and, of course, he demonized the immigrants…

“Portugal is not a small country”

He had strong (and fake) Christian values, which where present in State propaganda.

“Salazar’s Lesson”

“God, Homeland, Family: The Trilogy of National Education”

In the picture above, you can see Salazar’s ideal family: The husband comes home from work, the wife an kids all stop what they are doing to greet him back home. The wife was to be an overzealous mother, a devoted wife, a true fairy of the home. A life of endless submission. They were trained to be like that from birth. First submit to their father and brothers, then their husband. The only future she could hope to have was a stable marriage.

I could go on and on on the horrors the the New State. I don’t know what kind of world you what to live in but I can assure you that, if you advocate for an end to democracy, you will not be the one in power.