This post title reads like a rhyme

Paul Bunyan

The people the government derives it’s power from the consent of

Do a headcount of which citizens are on which side. Rationality and empathy exist in bubbles, not a sea. Most of the population is really just that plain dumb and/or sadistic and apparently has grown in numbers and magnitude since last time. The side you’re rooting for also will almost always pull their punches whereas the other side simply doesn’t. Give me a deus ex machina fairy tale dream to cling onto because those in power with the big guns and tanks and bombs lust for hurting people and they’ve got the majority of the masses tricked into happily getting themselves and others trampled upon.

Oh, yeah? Me and what army?

Please, I have only so little hope left

So a perfect time for a military coup? 🤞

Do you have the problematic instances, communities, and users blocked? Most of the maligned content that I’ve seen has come from two instances that I’ve since blocked from my feed, although blocking their bananas users requires each user to make themselves known first. Lemmy requires a bit of custom pruning of federation to fit each user’s tastes, interests, and values.

Secondly, there is a lot of despair going on due to the current state of society. For-profit media will show things through one lens, and non-profit forums will show things through another. There are a lot of people passionate about making a better world and stopping malicious powers.

Thirdly, amassing fandom communities takes time. Everyone is affected by global superpowers and politics, but they’re not going to be happy about it; in contrast, not everyone is into the same specific pastimes. Attracting people to communities for XYZ fandoms/hobbies/passions requires these communities to stand out among the sea of posts and catch the users’ eye, or for the user to actively seek them out and find them.

Last and least likely, you don’t happen to be sorting by Controversial?

“Accidentally”. The cruelty is the point.

Instead just one comedian, you get house full of clowns

Re: bots

If feasible, I think the best option would be an instance that functions similarly to how Reddit’s now defunct r/BotDefense operated and instances which want to filter out bots would federate with that. Essentially, if there is an account that is suspect of being a bot, users could submit that account to this bot defense server and an automated system would flag obvious bots whereas less obvious bots would have to be inspected manually by informed admins/mods of the server. This flagging would signal to the federated servers to ban these suspect/confirmed bot accounts. Edit 1: This instance would also be able to flag when a particular server is being overrun by bots and advise other servers to temporarily defederate.

If you are hosting a Lemmy instance, I suggest requiring new accounts to provide an email address and pass a captcha. I’m not informed enough with the security side of things to suggest more, but https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted or the admins of large instances may be able to provide more insight for security.

Edit 2: If possible, an improved search function for Lemmy, or cross-media content in general, would be helpful. Since this medium still has a relatively small userbase, most bot and spam content is lifted from other sites. Being able to track where bots’ content is coming from is extremely helpful to conclude that there is no human curating their posts. This is why I’m wary of seemingly real users on Lemmy who do binge spam memes or other non-OC. Being able to search for a string of text, search for image sources/matching images, being able to search for strings of text within an image, and being able to find original texts that a bot has rephrased are on my wishlist.

Re: AI content

AFAIK, the best option is just to have instance/community rules against it if you’re concerned about it.

The best defense against both is education and critical examination of what you see online.

Gives a new meaning to Knuckles the Echidna

Not an American tourist this time

You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve been waiting for a refund on this crappy copper I bought from Ea-nāṣir

It means that humans developed empathy and the scientific means to help each other avoid natural selection. Intraspecies and interspecies empathy is the cheat code against natural selection. Certain ram species, for example, also were not designed intelligently, so as they age they may grow their horns until they penetrate their skull and kill them. Natural selection is most effective when it culls prior to the life form procreating. However, thanks to the power of empathy, we can abate natural selection by performing oral surgery on humans (ideally in our adolescence for wisdom teeth removal) and by shaving rams’ horns as they age. Ideally, as science develops and empathy spreads, we can come up with more effective and painless means to ensure everybody has a chance to live and be happy.

Huh, I’ve got all advertisers hidden forever on Lemmy

Interesting. Looking into this.

https://lemmy.world/post/26507780

The top eighth of a billionaire and the bottom seven-eighths of a billionaire

When you’re too old to rock ‘n’ roll and you’re too young to die