Okay Lemmy Champions… I want to spread the news and increase participation. What do you think about requiring an assignment in which college level comp students need to practice critical thinking skills in the subs of their choice at Lenny? What suggestions would you make relating to each an assignment? What negative unforeseen consequences am I not seeing? Thank you.Very
That’s so cool! Do be careful but yeah, it is such a wonderful experiment. On the one hand, if I didn’t have access to Lemmy, I would never have found out that e.g. after Biden forbade the railway workers from striking (two Christmases ago iirc?), he worked with them for MONTHS to get them all the things they needed e.g. time off with paid sick leave. The corporate media (for the most part) refused to cover it, probably bc it was boring and they couldn’t sell ads as effectively with such content as well as something that bleeds and thus leads.
On the other hand, Lemmy also allows disinformation campaigns to spread too, e.g.:
(For one it ignores how both Russia and China are doing genocide - relevant bc on Lemmy.ml where it was posted you are only allowed to criticize such things when the “other side”, meaning Western capitalism, does it, so like you can say how the USA aids Israel’s genocide but you can not say how Russia is doing similarly in the Ukraine, or China to the Uyghurs, etc. - and it ignores that Trump has said that he will write Israel a blank check to do even more, instead seemingly pointing blame at Biden’s administration for doing genocide, all without ever saying so explicitly but that seems the implication, given the timing of it being released just prior to the USA election? Oh well, surely anything that fosters apathy among the voting populace could never influence the outcome now could it…? Edit: And the list of criticisms just goes on and on and on and on like that - still another is how it ignores how most “humanitarians” and even most PEOPLE in the USA are not okay with the genocide that is going on, so how is that not a strawman to say that “none such exist” as that would want to stop it, as distinct from the leadership that might also want to stop it, yet isn’t doing so, thus doesn’t seem to want to stop it bad enough, though it can NOT be inferred from that, imho at least, that human rights don’t exist here at all, or are not cared about at all - that seems quite hyperbolic to me, and again ignores how Trump will now do more than Harris would have.)
Setting politics aside now:-).
You might point people to [email protected], and post to that community yourself anything that you want a new user to know?
Also check out PieFed - it lacks significant polish, e.g. if you tag my username there like @[email protected] I will not receive a notification bc that feature hasn’t been implemented yet, but especially for a student has such great resources so it at least is something to be very aware of and kinda show off what the Fediverse has to offer now plus where it is heading in the future. Especially as so many people want to get away from the “tankies” - e.g. Lemmy.World announced wanting to support a different project, Sublinks, though that one might be stalled at this point:-(.
Do let us all know how your experiment turns out? I mean make a post somewhere (and please tag me to make sure I see it!:-) so we can all be enriched by your efforts and the fruit that they bring:-). If you need a suggestion for a community, maybe… [email protected] or [email protected].
Had I been truly bold, I would have included in the assignment guidelines that they use the platforms themselves to execute their “creative projects” with the Fediverse — this way you’d be able to see what was done “live.” As it is, I used a digital format for their work they are all familiar with… they’ll be presenting live presentations with google slides…
My guidelines are general enough that the hideous things some folks have run into cannot come back to bite me, but as you predicted, some have run into genuinely nauseating material. I’ve just smiled and said, “I hope you clicked away.”
I believe the best response I’ve received after some adventuring in the Fediverse one student came back hooting about how much she has dreamed of “Internet one point oh.” This is what she calls the Fediverse — and she’s not wrong. Zero corporate Shenanigans.
Yeah, advocating for literal murder, e.g. of someone who chooses to own stock, we have not only a toxicity problem but overall a quite shocking divergence from the experiences visible on other more moderated platforms, such as X (which also advocates for murder these days I hear, but only in such matters as are soon to be approved by The State, like giving cops free reign to murder anyone they choose - but only lasting for one hour, bc otherwise that would be just ridiculous, you know!?🤪🫠).
On the one hand, getting out from under the thumb of regulations is fantastic, compared to not being able to do thus at all. While on the other, people can be so unfriendly and waste so much of our time having to sift through such nonsense (as is sponsored by The Other, Opposing State).
So yeah, I guess it is a bit like 4chan? (Not that I’m speaking from personal experience, but from the stories told about it, it shares similarities?:-P) But then again, Internet 1.0 did not offer the ability to federate as we now can, so actually I think it’s a step forward, more than merely back - yes we are rolling back some features that were quite bad (corporate sponsorship), but we get to keep most of the good - e.g. the ability to view images and even videos directly inside the post without having to leave the site to view them elsewhere and then return. We have the best of both of those worlds!?:-)
Update on the class project. I asked students to report for week 7 about their adventures in the Fediverse.
Out of 23 students, not one genuinely grocks, as it were, the why.
Oh, they can give lip-service to the tropes we’ve been exploring in the SF class— privacy, autonomy, freedom, ethical uses of technology etc but none of them have become inspired, or even curious by these alternative platforms.
I believe it was you who wanted me about this attempt. Perhaps you were right. Not because they’d encounter vile things, which they do but do not blame me for, but because … I have dragged them out of the cave too fast? It’s too jarring for them? Too cumbersome. Requires too much.
The simplest features you and I take for granted in dealing with the mechanics of a Federated platform are simply too challenging and disheartening for these college students.
It’s like the corporations won in a single generation — as they anticipated.
I mean on the one hand kinda yeah, and it was always going to be thus. On the other hand, allow me to encourage you by reminding you that your job was not to teach them about freedom & open-source goodness so much as critical thinking skills. So even if they don’t get it NOW, so long as they have the tools to get it LATER that will be enough.
If you are in America, then realize that No Child Left Behind did a grave disservice - sorry if you said that earlier and I forgot, though also, I am hearing of similar occurrences all around the world as the wealthy do not see a need for the middle class to exist any longer, hence are pushing to cut back funding for edumacashun.
Add to that how the current generation is all about achievements involving “scores”, not really intellectually curiosity - plus, how could they truly know much of anything anyway when the body of knowledge is now so much vaster than what a human brain could hope to comprehend? Which was always true in our lifetimes anyway, but now it’s true even for one field or even sub-field underneath a field, plus Googling existed - or at least did, whereas its demise lately might feel like a blip while we merely await its return, being rebirthed from the ashes of a purifying fire, a Phoenix of internet searching if you will? :-P Anyway, in the absolute height of irony, they literally cannot afford to be too curious, or they will be kicked out of college for refusing to “learn”.
But give them a few years after leaving it and… maybe they’ll turn around, some of them anyway? Perhaps your REAL job is to inspire in them a lifetime love of learning? :-P
It does bug me that spez was correct though - he really did see clearly into the hearts of the lazy bums who endlessly mindlessly scroll through content regurgitated from decades past, plus those actual niche subs that are too frightened to move away. Then again, we can be pretty toxic here as well, just like there, so is it really all that different here, vs. there, except that here we lack the content that they have there? I strongly, vehemently maintain that the MAXIMUM experience here is better, and probably the average is too but e.g. I was reading a post this morning where someone said that they thought that lemmygrad.ml was named that way as a joke and almost joined it, before realizing that it was serious - if they had though, then its being defederated by almost other instance would have enhanced its echo chamber effect enormously, by bringing in next to no outside material, only what is local on that instance itself. And could you imagine joining hexbear, or even making a post there unawares? I still shudder from my own experience of merely making a singular reply to a comment there, all of ONCE (something middle-of-the-road such as “at least Biden brought gas prices down just prior to the midterm elections, which helped Dems win those crucial Congressional seats, which isn’t nothing” - and I got my ASS handed to me for several WEEKS and WEEKS where they would just all pile on, long past when I was so done with it, and ngl after I made the same mistake in lemmygrad.ml I very nearly left Lemmy myself rather than put up with such a barrage - all from different accounts, mind you, so that blocking is horribly inefficient).
We are still fairly new, and dynamic, and all of us still learning how to make things work - e.g. https://slrpnk.net/post/15217190. But that’s also what makes it “exciting” for some of us. And yet, the interface and interactions are legit less polished overall, so it really does seem to endear itself more to those of us with an “early adopter” mindset. And maybe that’s okay, especially for now, and all the more so if that is what keeps us kind and worth coming here to:-).
Don’t lose heart. In the assignment sure, but deeper than that, you’re doing a good work - which I can say with certainty b/c you care, and that right there is basically everything? The details you’ll work out later:-P.
First — allow me to say how impressed I am by your keen thinking in all of your responses. I feel like my own engagement with the Fediverse, and Lemmy, is really casual compared with yours. I’ll be honest: I’m a tourist.
And like a tourist, I have always tried to focus on what’s good and ignore what’s bad, keeping myself safe from what’s dangerous. I don’t know anything about hexbear despite that I may have seen the word before.
The assignment has been a real eye opener.
I simply presumed my students would be curious. Then interested. Then engaged.
I predicted wrong. They felt irritated in the main and never inspired. More will be revealed still but I fear that this round might end in a wash.
They do not find the primitive charming as I do. And they do not relish the brief freedom from being surveilled by corporations. And they do not thrill to the idea of participating in genuine acts of resistance against the totalitarian dictatorship of corporate hegemony.
I’m left but nowhere near “red.”
I like the capitalism of the renaissance for example — yes… things were awful, but there was motivation to be innovative and to work hard.
So… my disdain for universal surveillance is so thorough that I have an air gapped old Mac that I use to manage about a terabyte of data on my terabyte iPod classic. A Chinese refurb that was literally out of the box like new! In fact I think it is new — just a great copy— and I know for a fact that click wheel is not original. So I have worried there is some stealth blue tooth there or something but I doubt it.
Just saying that by way of articulating why I really want the Fediverse to become a thorn in the foot of the lion. Then I want it to be a land mine.
That’s probably the toxic stuff at hexbear? But seriously, I’d like to see the world taken back to tech level 1998. Keep Wikipedia and pretty much toss the rest. I’d like to see the Lemmyverse as is though — but with millions of users mindful of resources — like that video streaming article you sent — they were moving to spread the burden.
But honestly what I see corporate social media doing is using humans like the battery people in the Matrix — exploiting them in vats while giving them unreal hallucinations and zero truth.
Translation: you have a fulfilling career and an actual life, rather than e.g. health issues that required some downtime as I did over the past year:-).
But I went through similar shock multiple times in my life, finding out that people are not what I thought they were. This recent USA election was yet another one, and the one that originally elected DT as well. It helps me understand people, which might be good I dunno, but it also makes me lose faith in the entire democratic system, especially in this post-information, disinformation age. It is like the system is under the assault of a foreign agent, which causes cancerous growths, yet we seem to have had zero immune system response to it. At which point this “body” is not “ours” anymore, it has been taken over. And yet, this is also the way that it has always been - e.g. predating the Civil War - but we were just fooling ourselves to think otherwise, again and again.
Anyway, back to the kids: they think differently than we did growing up, and also we ourselves did not pay attention at the time, but we too thought differently than others around us. That’s the reality to have to deal with, or else change careers.
A look at video games is instructive: before I was born even there were more “frustrating” games (that still persist today) like D&D where you go to all the trouble to make a character, then they die in some campaign, which gives people a “sad” feeling. Hence, most games don’t do that, preferring instead to build characters up and keep reintroducing them even if they leave, to really tell a STORY where they are the main character(s). Anyway, back to people irl: they prefer not to feel any sort of frustration at all - and btw if they do, it is the school’s fault (No Child Left Behind said so) - and instead just want short, simple, straightforward hops right into the magical “job-land”, where jobs are passed out like candy, yet do not involve doing the 4-letter word “work”.
Also, we could totally be surveilled by corporations here - everything is free and open to the public, including these very words I say right here & now. It is just that their surveillence does not dictate our user experience, as it did on e.g. Reddit, before we left it. And ofc they don’t want to resist - they hope to get jobs IN that very corporate hegemony!
Speaking of capitalism, the phrase “Make America Great Again” keeps reminding me of how the top marginal tax rate was like 90%, so the literal thing that made America GREAT was basically socialism, and government regulation reigning in the worst excesses of capitalism, i.e. I mean the slavery part. Unions were strong, protections were put into place, but then we (collectively) forgot, so now we’re losing them. It’s our own faults:-(. However, rather than return to the greater level of socialism that we had then, to make America truly GREAT again - an example could be to limit the purchasing of housing by corporations that have zero plans to actually live inside of them - we instead will turn to fascism, b/c that always ends well in history I suppose (by those who refuse to learn either “from it” or even “it” to begin with).
Get those thoughts out of your head: it will never happen. I am not saying that resistance is futile (hehehe), just that it needs to not be naive. The Democratic campaign we now see was not savvy enough to function, and if we were smart enough and could be open enough to have seen that, then we could have tried other things - e.g. perhaps Kamala Harris could have risked angering the extremely wealthy in a more desperate bid to keep DT from the throne, rather than act assured that she would win regardless. What the Fediverse is good for though - imho you understand ofc - is not to be subversive, and rather to enjoy, as you say, out from under the bootheels of corporate advertising. NO ADS is a fantastic selling point, even to those of us who use ad blockers to begin with.
BTW the mealtime videos moving has nothing to do with hexbear - it’s really a complicated situation that has little to do with anything toxic, and much more to do with how it would be preferrable to not have every single community on the entire Fediverse located at Lemmy.World. But if it is hexbear drama that you want, here is a perfect post to read: https://discuss.online/post/13387124. TLDR: they aren’t “leftist”, they are trolls who only pretend to be thus, exactly like the MAGATs that claim that they are “defending” (rather than overthrowing) democracy. And what’s more, they know it - they just don’t want you to say it, exactly like a toddler seeing what they can get away with.
Don’t forget the guy in The Matrix who CHOSE, nay BEGGED to be put back in.
ApesHumans just want to “be comfortable”, it would seem. The thing that seems to get people out of that is pain, as the mother of innovation and all of that. 1984/Animal Farm. People are Sheeple. Like a drowning victim, you cannot help someone who refuses to be helped: you can only encourage / try to motivate them to try to change their own direction.Which is why I think you will be a good teacher: b/c you care! Either that or a bad one, if you allow everyone to take advantage of you along the way and then break from the strain - b/c man is that whole system becoming predatory these days! Please, PLEASE take care of yourself - whatever you have to do in order to make that happen.:-)
What a kind and thoughtful reply this was. I have nurtured the notion of replying to you in the back of my mind and today we have a snow day. I will update you on the Fediverse project I offered in my Science Fiction course.
Drumroll…
It was a bust on one level.
I genuinely thought I would ignite passion for this work in one tenth of the class… or at the very least: INTEREST! And under that: curiosity.
None.
I did get folks to create accounts and explore and the oral presentations were filled with…
Drumroll…
It doesn’t work!
Or
It’s too hard to get to work.
Corporations have succeeded in creating the laziest generation. The most incurious batch of victims ever brewed up.
So… I did not start a revolution.
And neither did Luigi… but we tried to shine light into darkness.
Luckily my way involved zero murder.
And your and my conversation began with me just asking in how bad trouble might I get into for this attempt. The answer was zero. My students executed what they could with the bandwidth they had at the level to which they were accustomed to work.
Plus sides…
They did think critically. Many of them owned up to their own lack of patience and attention.
Some mentioned they they need more dopamine in their social media.
Which tells me they “got” the point but that they do not mind being scolded by the telescreen when they do not bend over far enough trying to touch their toes.
OpenStars, your discourse is not easily abandoned. Thank you so much for the intelligent responses and the concern you shared.
I do not have an active Fediverse project rolling this term. But I will likely come up with something for Spring. I’m thinking of ditching every book in my fiction class and having us read THE BOOK THEIF closely for spring.
I’d settle for the novelization of Inglurious Basterds… maybe we will write that as a creative project.
How could this country run so far afoul?
Here’s hoping your adventures in the Fediverse are numerous and satisfying.
Hah… that’s the way I sign off postal correspondence and it occurred to me I could stalk your avatar here and find these things out. I shall resist that impulse and hope you have time for a reply.
I don’t know what is going on with kids these days. Whatever it is, is not good. And also, large portions of it seem intentional, while other parts (No Child Left Behind) due to incompetence.
I know that we grew up in the era of information. But that was then, and this is now, the new era of not just mis-information but outright, active dis-information. Your Chinese device may legit be spying on you - see e.g. TP Link routers - it’s only a matter of probability based on how cheap that would have been to accomplish (undetected) at the time it was made. And if not, then perhaps they should have done it - it’s just strategic!? :-P
I think part of a revolution must start with opening our own eyes. e.g. some people wanted Bernie Sanders - but lol “no, not like that”. I’m not saying “bOtH sIdEs SaMe” - I’m not - however… qualitatively if not quantitatively, they kinda are, yeah. Speaking of, Bernie has a recent video about oligarchy where he points out what that means. The thing in: as he described how the government exists to serve the interests of a single person and their family, my thoughts turned to how Biden pardoned everyone that he wanted to be exempt from whatever. He’s not “tHe SamE” as his opponent - he’s not! But… isn’t he though?
Regardless of Truth vs. Falsehood, I at least understand that this is how people perceive things. No nuance, no subtlety, no room for quantitative differences. So, now we will get what we wanted: not having to think deeply anymore in order to vote. Before, our votes barely mattered as certain oligarchs got what they wanted either way, whereas now, other, different oligarchs get what they want this way.
Brace yourself: I don’t think there will be another Presidential election, or least that the probability of such is maybe 50%. He said that he’d be a dictator, and he was. He also said that we’d never have to vote again. We’ll see. Long before that, Project 2025 says that it will start gunning for the liberal academic institutions present in this country. Be careful, and maybe start thinking of a backup plan? Teaching kids who don’t want to learn in the first place may no longer be a viable career option in the extremely near future - even for you who has the job already. Sorry, this has got to be stressful to think about… but it’s a real worry. Even if there is another election, the ratchet has been dialed up, and that tends to never go back down, especially lately, and only ever forwards:-|. Btw this is not “despair”, this is my attempt at least at being a realist.
Bc more to the point, it’s what the people want. As long as that remains true, and at some point long beyond that, such will continue. This is our new normal - and it’s not about “sad” or “happy”, it simply is.