They can’t. Hungary was protected by Poland and now will be by Slovakia. The EU Commission can theoretically act independently but in practice, this is political. And the EU Council can only take official action if Hungary has no friends at all.

All beautifully preached to the choir. Now: how to communicate all this to the unwashed masses who think the web and the internet and Chrome are all the same thing? Serious question.

Or, worse, they consider the changed world normal because they never personally knew anything better. This is the “shifting baseline” theory and it is an absolutely terrifying thought.

Here’s one theory: it’s because they live in Italy.

So, Usenet. Coming full circle.

You’re both right!

But I see a terrible paradox in the case of ads. The creator pays their bills with ads, but I have no intention of acting on those ads. Possibly the contrary, since I did not want to see the ad and I dislike being manipulated. So in my case the ad is making precisely zero money for the company who is paying the creator’s bill, as well as annoying me. Presumably I am not the only one. There is a paradox here that is hard to resolve.

Good analysis, thanks.

regulation like that is only proposed to hide up other clauses and proposals that are equally bad or even worse - get the public distracted and thinking they made a difference

But IMO this bit was superfluous POV. An alternative theory is that nobody is secretly scheming to do anything, least of all the chaotic EU apparatus, and that most politicians are not experts and they are simply responding to various competing stimuli, as humans do. Notably elections and media hype and lobbyists. Personally I don’t get why so many people attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence, but whatever, I’m in the minority and that’s fine.

Interesting detail about the eID certificates. You’re right that Americans will find this crazy in the way that we Europeans might not. Perhaps Americans are right.

That requires putting one’s faith in the vapor-currency that is crypto. Not saying that it won’t happen one day, but neither is it necessary to solve this problem.

A simple Paypal button, for example, does not require DRM spyware if done from a website on a FOSS stack. The Paypal tax is is mere pennies compared to Amazon. A bank transfer has no tax at all, tho it’s not great in privacy terms.

But where do I get the author’s Paypal ID or bank number from? I want you pay you directly, dammit, but you insist on allowing to Amazon tax the transaction and to force me to install spyware to read your damn book.

This is a cultural problem as well as a technical one, of course.

IMO we need to get to world where enough authors are happy to allow ordinary folks to “pirate” their work, and enough readers are happy to pay them even though they could get away with not doing so. In that world the technical solutions could so easy, so frictionless, in theory. But it takes a leap of imagination for everyone involved.

In theory, if a good number of public libraries and and the Internet Archive each has a paid-for digital copy of a book, and decent infrastructure to ensure redundancy, plus a paper copy as the ultimate backup, then it seems unlikely the book’s content will actually be lost before centuries have passed.

The problem I want solved is this: how do I get my money to the author of a book without needing to use DRM software and without paying tax to gatekeeping corporate monopolists?

I wish I could turn off seeing the voting system because I think the voting system is meaningless.

Completely agree. This is how Hacker News does it.

IMO a first step is to get rid of the downvote counter. On a healthy forum a comment will generally have far more upvotes than downvotes. So it seems to me that showing the exact number of downvotes is putting disproportionate weight on the negativity. 400 upvotes but 9 people downvoted it, what bast***s! You often see this kind of indignant comment, which suggests that people love to focus on the negative if given the chance. We should not be pushing people to focus on this number. It’s completely counterproductive if the objective is quality and not just mindless engagement.

where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with

This is the scourge of any forum. Downvoting apologists need to think about what they are doing. Downvoting makes comments less visible. So downvoting is the equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you don’t agree with them. Is that really what you are trying to do?

Personally I never downvote any comment that is made in good faith, no matter how much I disagree with it. Occasionally I even force myself to upvote them if they’re thoughtful. It’s not that hard.

E: Sad but unsurprised to see that a bunch of people think my personal opinion needs to be hidden. I guess it’s less risky than coming up with a counter-argument and seeing if you get more upvotes.

Impressive. Framasoft seems to be holding up much of this space all by itself.

IMO believing that someone’s work can become tainted by their beliefs is a form of magical thinking.

Stopped reading at “drives engagement”

Finally, confirmation that I’m not dumb and that this is really missing! Seems very odd that something so basic as sort order has been left out of the settings.

I for one am changing the sort order to Top, manually, on Every. Single. Page.

As I recall, there was a split in that Reddit community about whether to migrate here. Most of them decided to stay there on the (reasonable) grounds that they wanted to reach as many people as possible with their (IMO justified) message. So presumably the ones who came here are the dogmatic ideologues who prefer hating to persuading.

You’ve been lazily downvoted because your joke didn’t land right, but I agree with the gist of it.

Nobody likes advertising, nobody. Different people hate different things about it: the visual distraction, the manipulation, the hint of spying and stalking. But literally everyone hates advertising.

So I’d say this is the point that should be emphasized. It’s like Wikipedia. No profit and therefore no frigging ads.

Exactly. And well done for being a busybody in a good cause! The world needs more people like you.

This looks like a glimpse of how Mastodon (specifically: ActivityPub protocol) can really detrone Twitter. The world is full of governments and agencies and other Very Serious Organizations. They must hate having to depend on a single private company to get their message out. They must be itching for an alternative that gives them the kind of control that they have with phone numbers and email addresses and websites. Surely this is Mastodon’s golden opportunity.

Slightly tangential, but why is “one of the two major Lemmy instances” using a TLD under the authority of the government of frigging MALI, a semi-failed state that has nothing whatsoever to do with Lemmy or its mission?!

Come on internet, grow up and show some respect for internet architecture. TLDs are not just for jokes or decoration, they actually mean something.