at least someone's actually standing up for themselves and their people, and not just rolling over for the US
Nintendo's really making it easier and easier to not buy the $500 Metroid Prime mouse control box.
The trump admins have both been a shitshow but realistically they're just taking the problems this country has always had and is blasting them on full display, and now people are finally starting to realize this country has ALWAYS been a capitalist shithole.
Three big issues.
Usability: A lot of these alternative platforms are incredibly confusing for people who aren't tech-savvy. You can't expect most folks to really understand the idea of Lemmy instances for example. Bsky kind of hit the sweetspot of being super easy to use, offers not just familiar features but better features than its competitor (blocklists), while also being an open protocol. Though they're FAR from perfect (their team is extremely questionable to say the least), and it doesn't seem like the protocol itself is gaining traction.
Population: This is a self-defeating prophecy. We saw it with twitter to bluesky, and we're JUST starting to see it with reddit to lemmy. The vast majority of people just won't shift to platforms where the people they want to interact with aren't present. They won't move until they feel like they absolutely have to. People put off moving from the Nazi bar formerly known as twitter for literally a year - the site's been nothing but a cesspool for ages now, but the vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to moved to an alternative site until bsky got lucky. Hell, even now, so many people still stick to it because they're afraid of losing engagement or some bullshit.
Algorithms: I HATE algorithmic feed bullshit, give me chronological 100% of the time, but frankly the vast majority of people have been spoonfed algorithmic feeds for at least a decade now. Going back to bluesky as an example (since it's probably the most successful example of an alternative platform at the moment), it prioritizes the chronological feed, sure, but I'm actually amazed (and appalled) at how many people apparently only use the Discover tab. It's a necessary evil until we can wean the general populace off of their instant gratification and endless scrolls.
Platforms and protocols should be tools first and foremost, sure, but communities should never be tolerant of fascists and nazis. Any viable platform should have, at the absolute bare minimum, enforced rules against hate speech, which is something that's not remotely enforced on any big platform today.
Letting the right run rampant is why social media is in the state its in today, and a shift to open platforms is our chance to take these spaces back and show the right that they're not welcome in society as a whole.
Let's add a 4th person in there, someone who thinks they're helping by doing nothing but yelling that the fire isn't allowed to burn things
This is absolutely one of the reasons they're pushing this garbage so hard. It's VERY easy to manipulate as a propaganda tool.
You can already see that most of these tools lean right because their userbase does - leftists don't touch this garbage because of numerous ethical concerns as-is. Add more astroturfing on top of that, and now it's just a straight up automated fascist mouthpiece.
I'm just using Nextcloud's Memories app. I prefer to keep my photo backups in the same place as everything else in my cloud storage anyway, so it works nicely
Of course it's right-wing, lemmy.world is literally just a liberal hub LOL, its no different than reddit's awful default subs.
I've been using Magic Earth for navigation, it's not FOSS but still has a lot of strong vouches in these sorts of communities, I believe their privacy policy has been thoroughly vetted if I recall. Works great and does what it needs to do.
For Gmail, I highly recommend Tuta, fantastic service. Paid plans are very affordable. The only thing I wish their client had was more in-depth rule customization but I may just be stupid. Admittedly setting up email forwarding from my gmail accounts has made me a bit lazy in fully switching over every single account from gmail to a tuta address, but I'm getting there.
Oh I'm sure, I've heard the same from some friends up north. Rising fascism is a global trend right now and it's fucking horrifying. Need to get out to the range and practice more myself too for sure. Getting out of here is all well and good, but being prepared for the worst is more important right now.
Yeah true. It's generally better from what I've seen but nazi chuds really are everywhere.
LOL
Canada is probably gonna be the plan though honestly. Driving distance, easy on the dogs, minimal culture shock. Just gotta talk with the wife and start seriously planning it out. We slacked on getting our passports renewed last year though, big mistake. Playing it by ear right now - staying and fighting back just seems like a poor option right now while the empire is collapsing on itself.
They're gonna tell us to all vote for Gavin Newsom 💀
Seriously. Like sure it's a half-decent start I guess, barely, but AOC and Sanders are still centrist liberals. Kicking the can down the road by keeping capitalism alive will get us right back here in the future.
It's incredibly depressing that this country is in a state where people genuinely believe these two are anywhere left of center
Yep, and I hate that because I want to support the artists and mostly listen to more obscure shit these days. Plus bandcamp is owned by Amazon I believe so even though the artists get more out of it, there's still a Bezos tax.
Then there's figuring out how to stream it remotely while driving or whatever. It's a whole thing.
I do genuinely really like Tidal so far, but I'm not familiar with their company's political stances or anything, and of course it's not FOSS at all. Spotify is dead to me though.
At this point I'm just waiting for a refugee program abroad to open up so we can get the fuck out asap. I have zero hope in this country ever doing anything about this shit, even if the current regime is toppled. Until capitalism is a thing of the past, it's always going to happen again.
The Christian nationalist fascists love Israel not just because of their warmongering, genocide, and apartheid, but also because they think its existence keeps Jewish people off in their own country away from everyone else.
It sounds contradictory, but the vast majority of support for Israel is literally rooted in antisemitism.
Liberalism is a right-wing ideology, full stop.