Be very careful @dominicHillson, you are close to realising that the dumbest 95% of people defaulted to their views and rationalise their surrounding beliefs. The important part is that at no point have they or will they verify their beliefs. They are literally copying others and aren’t aware of it. If you press them most of the time they will get progressively more “uncivil”. There is a reason fascists genocide their enemies and don’t care about honesty or correct language. Power is how you go against nature, and if you are wrong, the only way to “win”.

If you guys want to rebuild your beliefs so they are actually true, you have to start with figuring out what truth is. I know philosophy is a scary and worthless sounding thing, but its literally the attempts to understand things through reason(literally having reasons for believing) and refining those views.

Epistemology is the philosophy of truth and knowledge. Some examples of epistemological thinking are

• Are the people around me a reliable way to determine truth? ex. In a Hindu region, the average person will vouch for Hinduism, in an Arabic region, Islam etc etc. Can mutually exclusive things in different regions become simultaneously true just because people around them believe it?
• Are experts a reliable way to determine truth? ex. Blood letting was a common profession, as was astrology.
• Are family members a reliable way to determine truth? ex. one family believes one thing, another believes the opposite.
• Are the most popular people a reliable way to determine truth? ex. Hitler could be argued as a popular person in his area and time, so also could any random influencer.
• Are the most powerful people reliable sources of truth?

You can clearly see a path this takes, so let me give a silly story.

The most popular politician during a debate says “You all trust me and my skill! That’s why I’m popular. The answer to the great question is three!”. Then, the expert mathemagician takes the spotlight to answer the question of one plus one. “Clearly an expert knows the answer and not some silly politician! After great calculations, the answer, is four!”. The crowd thinks, clearly the answer must be either three or four, maybe the uncertain could compromise to three and a half. If only there was some way to reliably come to a true conclusion.

To me personally, truth is the most internally consistent configuration of information that I have, cleaned up using cognitive dissonance as my guide!

Why what? I wont answer unless you ask properly!

I think that style is the counter for kids asking “why?” just to piss you off or push boundaries. It’ll take too much effort to spam and will force real questions.

MORE COMMENTS THAN UPVOTES??!!?! 13 upvotes and 17+1 comments

edit: guess i should actually answer. I never used it, but i was curious when i got to see it in a default chat program that was bundled with ubuntu or something. I used to love the idea of proper peer to peer encrypted chat but everyone else was just so hard to get onto the same platforms and before i knew it everyone defaulted to weird things like sms, steam chat and facebook.

I found a screenshot of them refusing a secret meeting with meta, so i made an account with fosstodon thinking they wanted nothing to do with meta… first thing i did with my account was check their stance and then deleted my account… UGH

The corporate power structure is the problem. Non-profit status is like a negative head start to corruption. Ubuntu is taking step after step of microsoft like action for example. Also, wikimedia is dead. They have a massive Mormon style of excess funding that they put on the casino stockmarket while still begging and harassing for donations.

Have to deeply self censor my comment…

guys… you are scaring me. No faith for humanity if you guys cant put down your collar for even 10 minutes in the shower…

Zombies

I never said i agreed with OPs specific claims. I agree with more of what you just said than what OP said.

My only claim is that its totally unacceptable to add nothing to a convo other than trying to peer-pressure shame a person from talking about privacy concerns on a privacy community. Sometimes that type of abuse would stop nonsense, and sometimes itd stop legit convo.

Telling someone they are “crazy” is one of the most common ways to shut down legit observations and i see it too much.

I don’t remember a whole lot about lavabit other than how rough it was to lose access.

I’d consider my own email service, but most places that have problems with user accounts will consider a self hosted domain as invalid. :(

It’s healthy to discuss this type of thing even if we are wrong or paranoid. You are being abusive in an anti-privacy way.

Oh! another lavabit victim in the wild. I signed up with em because i just wanted basic security and privacy for a new email account and then poof gone. To top it off, my next email provider had some issues and i lost that account too :(

Now I’m about ready to rant a post about how we don’t actually control our own email accounts and therefor don’t control our lemmy accounts. I’m a big boy and can handle passwords and account control myself without a guarantor!

I am aware about bots and fake account stuff and see the need for better verification, but email is not a valid way to do it.

When i was just lurking here at the start of rexit, i kept getting the feeling of finally being around real humans again. It was amazing! unfortunately it seemed to go back to reddit style copy paste link spam to generate content. One step forwards and one step backwards.

I feel a similar way. The quality just kept going down and down to the point where I couldn’t tell what was real or not. Most just wasn’t worth reading either way. Lemmy seems the same way now too. People are focusing on making “content” instead of trying to make higher quality posts.