US is a flawed-democracy, EU, Canada and Australia are currently the leading democrocies. That all could change but US is not the best in that area.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

In battleground states the win/lose margin will quite possibly come down to a few thousand votes, particularly in PA. The endorsement might not change anyone’s mind, but to her millions of fans it raises the elections’ importance for anyone who doesn’t “care about politics”. It turns a civic issue into a social group issue, and people care more about the latter. It’ll pull people reluctant to go to the polls to show up and vote.

I did do a test install (on a virtual machine), and everything seemed to install/configure fine using the python source code and instructions in your repo, but I wasn’t able to see any connections being made in the listener log. Brain is too tired, but I tried all of the addresses/ports listed (Debian/bash/ip addr) and created port exceptions with ufw per the instructions file. Can this work with a virtual box?

Very cool. 100% over my technical knowledge level but I’ll take a look at the code and give it a whirl when I get a chance.

I think it would be awesome if it worked. Power to the people! ;)

sounds interesting, is the source code on somewhere like codeberg or GitHub?

How does it work?

actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.

The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)

Profit = enshittification. It’s guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.

An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone’s home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.

Do any software devs (ok that’s like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn’t have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?

The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can’t buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.

!politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world is the link for anyone who is interested.

I guess my idea was a somewhat unregulated version of /politics , with far less “approved sources”, and more discussion and non media news outlet narratives. Basically I liked what that former site’s /r/politics community was before 2015 when people could post anything, editorize within reason. It could be a self post, a link, discussion, etc.

I don’t really want to ‘limit’ what people submit, but that might change if people think it’s not working out well.

I mean look at Lemmy circa June of last year. All of the people who fled ‘that former site’ to come here said this place felt like an old version of the internet, like 1990s forums/usenet. I was just going for that sort of community, and hopefully people willingly follow the rules.

I like the opinion piece idea though, I’ll add that to the sidebar.

I’m not sure if this is allowed but I just wanted to put the updated address here: !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world . I changed the name from what it was originally as this seemed like a better description.

The sidebar states that only links to articles are allowed, and as there does not appear to ever be self posts, I take it that they are being removed?

Not trying to be incendiary, just generally curious what the purpose of the policy is.

I’d argue we don’t necessarily need more homes. I think what most cities need is really to end zoning.

There is more than enough commercial and industrial vacant properties over the US that could very feasibly be turned into residential housing to house every person ten times over.

Zoning really is the problem because developers are essentially being forced to build unwalkable communities. You’re just not allowed in many cities to buy old warehouse space and develop it into housing or to build small businesses (groceries, shops, etc) in areas zoned residential.

Ending/reforming zoning would solve so many issues… (I say /reforming because there are limits, most people don’t want to live 10ft from a factory). But I hardly hear anyone talking about it whether on Lemmy or in the media… but it seems like it would fix so many issues.

I’m 100% for a simple IRS tax return but what the heck is with this?

To use Direct File, you need an IRS account with ID.me.

To get an ID.me account, you need to:

Take a video of your face

If you can’t or don’t want to take a video of your face, you can have a video call with an ID.me agent who will confirm that your face matches your identification.

Is that really necessary???