You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

You bring up some points I did not say… but to confirm, yes totally agree with. Capitalism isn’t the only evil, and may in fact be the least evil of them all, yet it does have a tendency towards slavery, doesn’t it? :-( Ofc, so too does socialism, in part b/c just as pure capitalism has never once been tried in the world (afaik?), neither has communism. Everything is just a blend - I mean no judgement there, just that it is what it is.

Yet looking back, democracy+capitalism did some wonderful things in the so-called “Western world” (ironically including Australia that is located in the East, but you know what I mean:-), but in the USA at least, it looks like we are ready to end it. Not the capitalism part, but democracy. Or at least that is what the people - like Majorie Taylor Greene, a literal sitting congresswoman - are calling for, and Donald Trump too, who says he wants to be emperor “for a day”. If these people get their way - and the likelihood looks to be something along the lines of just shy of 50%? - then the ability (/burden/responsibility) to vote will be removed. But either way, as I mentioned, the consequences of voting has long since been taken away from us, in certain main aspects - importantly, not all, but many.

Btw you are off on your numbers: try the numeral three. Not 3 million, but literally three as in one person more than two and one shy of four. THREE people have as much wealth as the entire bottom HALF of America - and that was 5 years ago, before billionaires doubled their portfolios just last year alone. More recently, I see titles like “The bottom half of American families hold just 2% of the country’s wealth — while the top 1% of families have a third”. That is beyond “outsized influence”, they have it ALL (almost). Tbf, there is still a very healthy middle class it seems, but the wheels definitely seem to have come off of this ride i.e. the trends are not good, and the “outsized influence” of those at the very top who can literally purchase Supreme Court Justices with their enormous wealth is a problem that seems like it will only solidify the issues.

Also, don’t glaze over the percentage of Americans that have only 2% of its wealth: to state it again, it is HALF. Granted, some are children, but many/most are GenZ to Millenials - those who have started families and are looking to purchase a home, but find out that not only can they not, but it looks likely that they never will. Is that an exaggeration? Only time will tell, but neither Trump nor Biden look to be fixing anything, and Congress only recently passed its budget for the 2024 year (which started on October 1) here a couple of weeks ago - we very nearly started into the 7th month of the year before it got passed. This is routine, now. And don’t even get me started on the corruption of the Supreme Court Justices. Or our for-profit, click-bait media. So if help will not come from the Presidency, Congress, Judiciary, or Media, and it certainly will not come from corporations, then from whence will it come?

Rather, we will see a slide - sometimes steady, sometimes rapidly falling - into anarchy as people find themselves not vested in the system anymore; or alternatively the healthiest people will be those who simply give up and accept their new station in life, at the very bottom, as peasants, making up part of that HALF of all members of society who control <2% of the nation’s wealth, and who cannot afford a home or advanced medical care. In short, America won’t be what it used to be - the dream has died.

So, you are correct that Trump is an example of enshittification of politics but that it does not mean that the entire concept is invalid, however I am relying on that one singular point to make that claim. Also, I am not stating that it is entirely invalid - a glance at the European Union is enough to dispel that. Rather, I am stating that the current state in America is not good, and only looks to be worse. Btw if you have any counter-examples I would love to hear them, but I have heard that no country that has ever devolved to become a 2-party system has ever managed to survive, and that worries me. So even if we managed to fix literally everything else, so long as that foundational flaw remains we may still be doomed, even if the deadline would have been pushed back? In that sense then, therein may lie some glimmer of hope: Donald Trump was so bad, that he may have woken up this sleeping giant to realize its predicament, so we might finally be more open to tinkering with this democratic system that could be done better? e.g. replace first-past-the-post voting with something else, which would force politicians to actually offer something positive merely than claiming that they are not the other side.

Also, note that I am not advocating for a civil war, nor a coup. I am only stating that some people are, and the fact that a coup has already been attempted is proof enough that it could happen again, by the end of this very year even. “Cvil unrest” is present, and I am only trying to open my eyes to acknowledge that. Also, I agree that it is likely to be some kind of boring “constitutional crisis event”, rather than a full-scale shooting one, though the latter is not beyond the realm of possibility either? The people who Putin has working for him are quite good at what they do… and they may yet find another way, like the January 6 attack, to turn a handful of people into a force for a much larger change. “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Exactly - bad implementations of communism, bad implementations of capitalism, bad implementations of whatever utopian form of government we can dream up in theory, all suffer b/c they are bad implementations, even if in theory they are perfect. Beyond that, some theories may themselves just be “bad” overall, if the theory is too far removed from reality.

One problem that the USA has found for itself is having allowed itself to devolve to become a 2-party system, where no other parties matter. This is a fundamental phase shift b/c at that point the parties no longer try to accomplish positive aims, and instead merely try to “not” be the other side. Biden won b/c he wasn’t Trump, Trump won b/c he wasn’t Hilary Clinton, Obama won b/c he wasn’t Romney, or McCain, Bush won b/c… well it goes back many, many decades. Afaik, no democracy has ever survived that.

Nor does it seem to matter even, b/c regardless of who wins, the wealthy are in charge. School shootings are a perfect example of that - our CHILDREN are being MURDERED… and nobody gives a damn. I recall one poll result where 80% of the American people were for some form of gun control, and that rose to >90% of responsible, registered gun owners! Also that was a decade ago, so surely after all that we’ve seen since, it could be even higher? There is nothing that engenders bipartisan efforts in Congress these days - but 80-90% agreement among the American populace is astounding!!?!! However, it does not matter one bit what we want - b/c the lobbies want something else there, and they are willing to pay 10-fold more than the counter-lobby, hence children continue to be murdered all across the nation (typically in poorer schools though).

In addition to being horrific, that example also reveals that our democracy is beyond broken, it is no longer “democracy” at all, but a plutocracy where regardless of whoever votes for whatever goal to be done, the rich control what actually gets done, regardless.

So to fix something like that… assuming that it even could be fixed, would take… I have no idea. But going to a political rally will not begin to cover it. We may literally have a civil war coming up, or at least it is highly expected (among experts, it is said) to have some kind of “constitutional crisis event”, much like the January 6 protests where Donald Trump attempted the most ineffective coup that I have ever heard of, yet still was solidly an attempt.

And one potential reason for all that is that whereas the wealthy previous wanted to use middle-class workers to be the underpinnings of society - doctors, researchers, lawyers, engineers, etc. - now they gloves are coming off, and they would have divide the world into the haves vs. have-nots. That CPG Grey Rules for Rulers really helped me see this clearly, though also depresses me:-).

Not for the direct reaction itself but I thought there was something about spraying the container down or some such… I am probably entirely BSing here:-). In any case, whenever someone figures out a method to make it practical, then we’ll see whatever downsides there may be to that:-P.

he was famously trying to build a way to transfer electricity over long distances, and I’m assuming this isn’t possible without incurring huge losses.

Yes, I believe you are correct about that, although I too do not know what precisely those limitations are:-).

For one thing, Tesla was not entirely truthful to his investors:

Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system. Instead, Tesla used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments.

And for another, he chased down the wrong path for awhile:

The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy.

So, it is not quite a full “conspiracy” to claim that he somehow deserved additional funding despite all of his past shortcomings. It sounds to me more like hindsight being 20/20, we now realize how he was correct, how he was wrong, and overall people try to use him as an example of capitalism’s failings. Like the first rule of inventions are that when one fails you should try try again, except that’s obviously not true - yeah try a few times but ultimately spend your time on what looks most likely to work, not repeating to extend forward a string of endless failures. i.e., people try to use his example in spite of the facts, not because of them. Maybe, it looks like.

And it’s likely true - if as much effort had been put into that technology as was put into Edison’s, perhaps we really would have solved that long-distance problem by now - maybe. Therein lies the germ of truth imho: you cannot overcome it if you refuse to even so much as try? So in that case, it is truly the constraints of capitalism that killed the spirit of innovation there, as in we could (maybe) have had something, if only profits were not people’s sole motivation.

Similarly and in a much more damaging manner we see drug companies researching palliatives and “care options” rather than actual cures. The goal of any corporation - even ones working in a medical field - is solely to make profits. Hence Viagra and Cialis, and funding goes towards further development of pain relief and such, even as funding was taken away from research towards cures for common diseases (even ones the researchers themselves believed they were “close” to solving!).

All of this works together as arguments against capitalism being the best economic system - it works well in theory but only up to a point, similar to socialism, and irl the systems that have worked the absolute best was a blending of the two, with each providing a different mixture of benefits and detractions. e.g. if Tesla had been under a socialist system or in more of a blended one, could his excesses have been reigned in and what innovations would we have today in that case? We will never know ofc, but at least I am attempting to frame the argument that I commonly hear from people who don’t quite state their reasoning, so this is my attempt to reconstruct it. :-)

One problem is that most of your solutions have been attempted before and they failed to stick - e.g. a majority of people who are alive today were present when the top marginal tax rate in the USA was 90% (I am focusing on that b/c the OP referred to MIT), and when that was true, government programs were so well & sufficiently funded that we literally went to the moon! (but how often have we been back there since? granted, there isn’t much real reason to go…:-P)

e.g. people started hiding their wealth in offshore tax havens, only bringing in what they need in the short term to get by at any given moment. This relates to globalism as in how much is a wealthy person even a resident of any one country, despite them living in it 100% of the time and getting 100% of their income from it? If you open up a broom closet and maybe assign 0-1 employees to it, but file the paperwork for thus you can make anything into your “global headquarters” even for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation - Amazon does this all the time, and moreoever keeps shifting it around to take advantage of tax incentives offered to them to move it there (for awhile).

Another way that people hide their wealth - Donald Trump is famous for this (among other things:-) - is to keep the actual financials low while still having the full quality of life experience. So he and his family may not “earn” much, yet still live in a fantabulous apartment that they value in the millions if not billions of dollars. Their cars, helicopters, private jets etc. also may not be directly “owned” by them, but rather by their corporate entity, which is subject to all the tax burdens and benefits of such - so even though he gets the exclusive use of all of his “stuff”, does he truly “own” it, at least as far as tax reporting purposes go?

Even UBIs have been tried before - e.g. slaves might be given their rations regardless of output, so that their families could eat even while taking care of the next and present generation of workers rather than produce work product directly.

So it is not that nobody has ever heard of these things before, it is just that they do not “stick”. e.g. Donald Trump, after taking advantage of that whole financial system, when he gets into power decides to defund the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), essentially the police who monitor for such excesses and abuses as he and others like him are exactly likely to try to get away with. (And yes, the IRS - the general taxation services & enforcement division - got its funding reduced as well, but that gets off into a whole HUGE tangent where it is not just its funding level, but direct mandates to specifically not go after the most wealthy offenders, or rather the particular style of crimes that they are able to abuse, which are more complex and can be held up in court for years and thereby take up a disproportionate amount of resources to enforce) And then on top of that, Donald Trump also lowered the wealth taxes - so both by making things legal, and also by reducing the ability to enforce certain particular styles of crimes that are illegal, he steadily moved the notch more towards “unfettered capitalism” and away from “placing restrictions on it in some form”. Nothing ofc is 0% or 100%, but there is a spectrum, and we do move along somewhere on it.

So, extremely unfortunately, it is not hyperbole at all - the most narrow interpretation of it as meaning equal to precisely 0% restrictions would be, but the common interpretation is to look at the spectrum and see the direction we are moving along it towards that particular extreme end, as in “more unfettered now than it was in the past”. You may actually therefore be in agreement with the person you are arguing with, but missing out on that b/c you keep talking about how to “solve” the crisis, as if the solution could be to simply pass a handful of laws and the problem would be over. However, pass those laws how - through Congress? And with the Supreme Court now having been stacked with judges that each day are revealed to be even more corrupt than we suspected in the past, ready to strike down any law that may cause their own personal quality of life to degrade i.e. they might receive fewer free rides on private jets if they displease the billionaires that they have befriended?

Well, anyway if you are speaking on purely theoretical grounds, or perhaps in Aussie land it may even be possible on practical ones, but in America we do tend to feel that we are well and truly and even royally fucked by the system, and any such “solution” seems unlikely to ever be possible to implement, for the simple fact that our overlords do not wish it. We may have come too far down this road, to the point where even the entire federal government cannot fight against them any longer, except in perhaps specific areas, but not overall, not anymore:-(. Ironically this illustrates the dangers of unfettered capitalism: I get that capitalism isn’t so much “good” as it is the lesser of other competing evils (socialism being demotivating etc.), but it really is like harnessing the power of this giant behemoth beast, whereas if you let the beast take over control then you can become well and truly and royally fucked…:-(. When riding a mount, one must always remain in control, or else… well, we are about to find out I suppose.

i.e. capitalism may be good, but only if properly restrained.

Yeah but you said it was a “problem” - like I dunno, likely the excess energy start a fire or something? - whereas turning them off seems like it would reduce that to the system merely being less efficient than would otherwise be possible.

Anyway, definitely some kind of energy storage battery seems naively to me like it would be the best solution, even if used in conjunction with several forms of energy production (solar, wind, geothermal, maybe biomaterials etc.).

We do have wireless charging for phones, and induction stoves that transfer heat. And yes there was a bit of a conspiracy regarding Tesla, it is quite famous, but I will leave you to direct your own studies there however you see fit. One part is that Edison was not so much the “inventor” as his reputation may naively lead people to believe as an “exploiter” as in he ran an invention sweatshop company. But anyway you are right to be suspicious of Tesla ofc - he wasn’t very practical and maybe it was after being burned by his experiences with Edison but he did not set out to prove his ideas in the most practical manner and instead went off the deep end trying to solve the more scientific and engineering aspects further rather than take forward what he had already shown irt short distance transfers. So the conspiracy wasn’t “huge”, just a consequence of him having been blacklisted by Edison combined with his own business ineptitude to not find financial backers. I am only saying though that the limitations were not entirely physical (the long distance ones are, but not the short distance ones), so much as practicality especially in the business sense of taking a product from conception all the way to market.

Sadly it does kinda look that way, but even more devastatingly sad than that is the near certainty that we are giving them far too much credit for forethought there. To think that the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has that level of strategic capabilities, rather than simply “gimme monay, now puh-lease”, is rather generous. More likely they will be shocked that the leopards (themselves in this case!!?!!?!!) have eaten their faces off too, and as the move Don’t Look Up perfectly illustrates, they too will be more surprised than anyone else as the world ends. But hey, at least they got theirs while the getting was good, right? :-(

i.e. Business Intelligence (acumen) is not the same thing as actual intelligence (IQ), and definitely not the same as emotional ability to empathize, with others and even one’s future self (EQ?). If these people could understand something, but it is to their financial detriment to do so hence they won’t, then it is no longer a matter of helping them understand (IQ), but rather of motivating them to care (EQ) and thereby actually do something about it (business).

Why couldn’t the solar panels simply be turned off - is that not an easy solution to having too much intake?

Every previous adoption of technology has taken - what, 50 years? - between having the technology and being set up to make use of it. Gasoline did not immediately have car engines to put into, nor kerosine a whole city’s worth of lamps set up to receive them, etc.

Though at first, if fusion could power up the existing electrical grid then it could e.g. make electrical cars more efficient in the net/overall sense, even if vehicles operating directly on fusion power themselves would take many more years. So fusion really might be different than those that came before, if we are anticipating and more ready for it than previous technical advances?

Though yeah, it will have its own challenges e.g. the radioactive wastes, so fusion would not begin to replace greener energy approaches such as solar, wind, and geothermal, only perhaps supplement them.

it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources

In the OP the use of the word “problem” rather than something like “challenge”, and referring to the problem being the pricing structure (negative) makes it seem like we’ve switched topics slightly, but if you are just referring to the foundational inefficiency of energy distribution then yeah I agree it is definitely a challenge. However, that challenge need not be so overwhelming (even perhaps solely wrt pricing) that it negates the benefits of having that form of technology available altogether. e.g. if the power company itself, or each recipient building individually, had its own battery (if let’s say those were cheap & sustainable) then that could work, without the users needing to care much. I forget which city but one example in Germany iirc pumps water up a mountain during the day, then at night or on a cloudy day that potential energy falling back down generates electricity again. So yes a “challenge” for sure but not necessarily an insurmountable one!:-)

Also, there are “problems”/“challenges” wrt use of fossil fuels as well, which have implications for climate change, and therefore even purely from a profit perspective there’s government laws & subsidies and public perception that can affect it, which could push the overall net towards being beneficial to store that energy for later.

You just mentioned a number of ways that capitalism could be “fettered” to work more for the benefit of all. But the person you responded to said “unfettered capitalism” (unless they changed it later). :-)

You gotta recharge your phone battery sometime though - and if electricity had a different cost for nighttime vs. daytime, you can bet that people would choose the day option whenever possible.

(I chose a mobile device here bc it doesn’t need any “extra” battery or technology beyond what would already normally be at hand.)

Nikola Tesla was a radical anarchist then, I guess? :-P

Don’t forget the rest of your phrase there: justify… “to who”?

If to you, he would have to do a LOT more than he has, for you to still buy in despite seeing that.

To them, merely having the title of “CEO” seems to be enough, to those who refuse to dig deeper. pOsItIoN oF aUtHoRiTaH.

They will be shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED when their money goes poof.

Put another way, your question presupposes several things, e.g. “In a fair world, how could that be allowed to happen!?”.

BTW, Donald Trump lowered the funding for the SEC, the agency responsible for investigation of financial fraud matters. Also he + the Republican Congress lowered the funding for the IRS too. After ACTUALLY “defunding the police” with his right hand - while simultaneously claiming that the leftists wanted to “defund the police” with his left - we will see a lot more of this than we did in the past.

In the past, criminals feared the police and did not want to get caught. Now that there are fewer investigations into financial frauds… we have FA, and we are about to FO.

(1) ngl that is amazing, a heart-warming story

(2) still fuck Elon Musk

All good points, except the existing software does not have that developers name attached to it.

Watch as he burns through it in one:-).

Also, bold of us to assume that he has not already spent it:-P.

I feel the need to be pedantic here: that quote continues on to the very next (and final) sentence being:

Not something that can be done with a simple plugin.

However, anything that is logically possible, is doable, with enough effort & investment - e.g. that infamous quote:

All that quote means is that it would be most simple to do as a back-end task, not a simple front-end one (though even a front-end could, in theory, e.g. slurp up 1000 posts and then use some metric to figure out how to display the most proper subset of 20 from that superset).

But for instance, someone could spin up their own instance, and then add whatever sorting method they wanted to it. However, recall again what happened to DMV.social - anyone who opens up a Lemmy server will be spammed with CSAM, it would seem - so there are other more urgent matters to be attended to first, unless that someone used it purely as a testbed, and made all connections to it to be read-only, or else had a team of moderators willing to put in large amounts of time to fend off those attacks with both manual efforts and also developing automated tools at the same time - e.g. they would need to have technical skill even just to moderate, much less administer the machine (unless, like existing Lemmys, there is a whole team of admins doing the technical parts already). Anyway, I don’t suggest this lightly like it is trivially easy, just to say that it is possible.

It would be beneficial to talk more about these desirable features to ensure that when developers do invest time in them, we’ve already come up with a good and robust solution.

Sure, I am not trying to tell you what to do. Just stating that until and unless someone is willing to tinker with actual implementations - and again, right now their attentions seem to be directed elsewhere, plus while Scaled-sorting Hot may not be perfect it is something (I don’t personally have experience to say if it is better than before b/c I was on Kbin.Social at the time which was totally different - but I thought I heard many people say that it is better now?) - then it is going to be a purely theoretical discussion. Which is probably how Scaled sort got implemented too? Though now that it is built, it could be tinkered with, if there is the will to do so.

But unless you are offering to do any of the actual implementation work yourself, I think you would need to discuss this with the actual admins who you would expect to do that work for you - hence you might try Matrix where they hang out, rather than solely discussing it here.

And then, as you said in your OP, when they say “no” and close all GitHub issues, that, as they say, is that. You can’t “force” someone to do work for you for free - and even if you were offering money, or perhaps offering to do all the “design” work yourself for free, they still would need to agree to actually do the implementation.

Moreover, even if you DID offer to do ALL of the implementation work entirely on your own, unless you do want to spin up your own instance to actually run it on, you still would need the buy-in of the instance admins, for which having the buy-in of the developers would go a LONG way.

So you asked:

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?

And my suggestion is that you cannot walk into someone else’s house and tell them how they should do things. Especially when they have ALREADY said no. They know better what their prioritization is, and what they hope to accomplish over the next month, year, and so on. The absolute beauty of the Fediverse is that you can take all of the existing Lemmy code, which is entirely functional, make a fork of it, and spin up your own instance - and not just run it, but even modify the code to do… whatever you want! And then you can share that code, and benefit all the instances that are running Lemmy too! Discuss.Online, Lemmy.World - all of them, well, those that choose to keep your suggestions, though it is up to each one individually to either accept or reject them, and it is ultimately their call. Reddit does not work this way, nor FaceBook/Meta/Threads, Instagram, Xhitter, etc., but we do, b/c it is “open-source”. The caveat to that being… that someone, somewhere, must put in the actual effort to get it done.

And the people who would normally do that, seem to have said no. I gather that you feel frustrated but… it is what it is. Therefore, of what use is it to talk about any of this, when there is no path forward for it? THAT is how to move forward your ideas: either find or become someone yourself who can implement them, and THEN in talking to them you will actually be in an even better position to understand how it all works, and how it might be changed to work even better than it does now.

I dunno, perhaps I should not have replied at all? Sometimes I do overshare my thoughts and if you disliked that here then I apologize:-). It was my hope to help spur your thoughts along these lines that I was thinking, since it seems to me to be the only way forward. But I guess please ignore me if you think I am wrong, and I wish you luck either way!:-)

Fwiw, I do agree that eventually, when the developers are ready to move forward with this again, they indeed might appreciate a ready-made solution if one happened to be already available by then, but again that assumes that one could be made purely on theoretical grounds alone?