retributive violence against individual actors is not the same as dismantling oppressive systems

My problem is that I only understand one of those things. The other is meaningless hot air, spewed exclusively by intellectual elites who may or may not have any idea of what that is even supposed to mean.

work of creating resilient communities and networks of mutual aid to replace those heirarchies.

And that explanation doesn’t tell me anything either. Put up a guillotine. Put the man in. Let the blade fall. I understand that. Create a network of mutual aid to replace hierarchies? Never saw that happen. Never learned about that, or how that is supposed to work. Don’t know what that is supposed to mean, or how that is supposed to play out.

If you assume anyone knows about any of that, and if you assume that anyone can imagine anything concrete about that, you are out of touch. You are communicating ineffectively. At least to me. And probably to most other people as well.

until the market adapts on how to recuperate that money since it can expect every citizen to get that every month, I don’t trust a free market not to ruin that.

Simple: Make UBI is inflation adjusted. Problem solved.

Of course! How could I miss it. The argument: “User numbers are an indicator of quality”, is not valid, unless in context of the fediverse. Because…

Wait, I don’t think me, being the dumb asshat I am, understand that: Why? Why do you think user numbers indicate that something “can’t be as bad as you make it out to be” in the fediverse, but not anywhere else?

Reddit has more users than lemmy. Can’t be that bad then!

I see! Thank you for clarifying!

So let me see if I understand you correctly. I asked what Mastodon is for. You answered that Mastodon is for having meaningful conversations with people one on one about subjects important to you.

That would mean Mastodon is not in any way comparable to twitter, or any other social media platform of the like. To me it seems that, by this description you provide, it is best compared to a chat room, where you are together with a hand full of friends you already know, and can have a conversation. Just in a timeline that is a bit slower, and a bit more permanent than a chat room, but not quite as bloated as a classical internet forum.

That means Mastodon is not “social media”. The purpose of you being there is not to easily discover new stuff which might interest you. And likewise you also can’t easily reach out to new people with stuff that interests you, and which you think might interest other people. Mastodon doesn’t want you to be able to do that easily. Because Mastodon is an internet forum with people you already know, just with an added word limit.

So it seems I have misunderstood Mastodon. It doesn’t intend to be social media. It intends to be an early 2010s internet forum with a word limit. Now that I know what it is, and that this is what it is supposed to be, it makes a lot more sense to me.

And there are small independent artists who want to display their latest artwork to an audience of followers on a social media platform, with the potential of broader reach and impact. And there are activists, who aim to raise awareness by doing the same thing.

What you seem to be saying, is that social networks like Mastodon are not for that. No artists. No activism.

So, what’s Mastodon for?

Do you notice a pattern?

Every single one of those is either SF or Fantasy.

There are a lot of artsy lovers of literature out there who hate exactly those genres, and who have a burning passion to fix all the (perceived) flaws which (in their view) come baked into them.

As I see it, that’s a big part of the problem: For the last century “a writer” was always “the literary type”. There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers. You wouldn’t hire one of those, if you wanted to have a real, well crafted story. At least that has been a rather common prejudice for the last 100 years or so.

And now, all of a sudden (over the last 20 years), the most popular franchises, generating the most income, all turned into SF and Fantasy, while eating everything else in their path.

In that context, I don’t think the current situation is all that surprising. If you want to hire “a real writer”, there is a good chance that you will hit one who despises what writers were taught to despise for the last hundred years. In an unlucky twist for everyone involved, that also happens to be what they now have to write.