I know. I did not downvote and I really don’t get why people feel the need to. Your comment is completely accurate - it makes no sense to impute any intentions to these people in disguise. My only point was that the people in the photo should not appear like that for the election in any case.

Be that as it may, people wearing masks or costumes have no place in a polling station.

I think you can also see something fundamentally positive in the critical attitude of many Lemmy users: namely the fact that criticism of undesirable developments in politics, society, the economy and so on is practiced here at all. In my opinion, this is important and should not be taken for granted. If only because it is impossible for so many people in numerous countries around the world to express their opinions freely and criticize their governments or powerful people in their society.

In any case, I think that a certain fundamental skepticism towards the existing power structures in politics, media and business is something of a unifying element that motivates many people to participate in Fediverse, after all, this platform is an alternative to the centrally managed social media providers and their functional logics.

Nevertheless, I think your post is important because it shows that all the negativity that goes hand in hand with a critical examination of the numerous problems in the real world is extremely off-putting for many users. This is of course problematic both for the mass appeal of the Fediverse and to a certain degree probably also for the mental health of the user base.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer as to how to deal with this in a meaningful way. However, I try to stay positive and hope for the best.

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Yes, that’s probably true. For me, however, neutrality presupposes diversity - at least to a certain degree. As in the maxim of quality journalism: the assumption here is that a journalist can never be truly objective. This is why an attempt is made to allow opposing perspectives on a topic to have their say, so that the reader or viewer can form their own opinion.

Of course, this principle does not work in an environment in which differing opinions or perspectives are generally unwelcome. This is probably the case with Lemmy and other Fediverse applications for some topics. But I think that this doesn’t just apply to the Fediverse, but to social media in general. It seems to me just as you say: if you only encounter rejection on a platform, in a community or on an instance if you disagree with the majority, you will move elsewhere - which in turn will probably lead to you eventually finding yourself in an environment where the majority of others are of the same opinion.

Of course, it would be highly desirable if people were more open-minded, but I’m afraid that’s a utopia. In any case, I don’t have the impression that the advent of social media has fundamentally brought open exchange forward.

On the contrary, I have the impression that political discourse in many countries, for example, is now characterized by the very strategies that make social media posts successful: the abbreviated presentation of complex contexts, the invocation of enemy stereotypes, sometimes even straight-up trolling. But perhaps this is just a perception error on my part.

I’m not sure whether there can be an ideologically neutral social media platform at all. I think there will always be a significant proportion of users who are not interested in discussion, arguments and open minded exchange, but rather in seeing their world view confirmed by others or simply being part of a perceived in-group.

What’s more, the sheer mass of content makes an attention economy necessary so that one can deal with this flood of information. In my opinion, the content that is easy to consume will always prevail over content that looks at a topic in all its complexity (hardly anyone is willing/has the time to read up on it). So it’s often not about who has the better arguments or actually knows something about a topic, but about who sells their posts better. In this sense, it seems to me that social media in general is not really social, but to a large extent a competition for attention.

I am not aware of any platform that could solve these problems. In my opinion, this is not really the aim, as pretty much all platforms are not really about objective information, but rather about passing the time and entertainment. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can’t find good discussions and serious information. But I think that this kind of content will never be the main focus of any social media plattform. The fediverse approach seems like a good try to me tho, because there can be “special interest instances” that can make their own rules to focus on whatever they are about.

Sometimes I not only have the impression that good content is harder to find, but that there is less good content in general. This may have something to do with the fact that high-quality content is becoming increasingly uneconomical. Plagiarized or low effort content is much cheaper. With the rise of AI, I think this trend will only continue to intensify.

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I try to participate more actively on Lemmy than I did on reddit, where I was really just a lurker. I decided to do so in order to support the platform at least a little. I have the impression that a lot of lemmy users feel similar and really do want to care for this project. And that’s really cool, I think.

In my opinion, however, the biggest issue with Lemmy has unfortunately changed little in the past 6 months: I think there is still pretty little original content. What’s more, the little OC there is easily gets lost in the flood of reposts or screenshots from other platforms. At least that’s the impression I get from most of the larger communities (besides from /pics). I think that’s a shame since this makes it hard to find and appreciate the content someone took quite some time to make.

As far as interactions with others are concerned, it sometimes bothers me that a whole bunch of Lemmy users seem to have really fixed opinions on certain topics. Those guys don’t seem to take arguments into account at all but rather seem to be on some sort of propaganda mission instead. So it seems to me that there are multiple topics that simply can’t be discussed in a meaningful way on Lemmy. I think that’s a shame as well.

But all in all, I quite like Lemmy for what it is.

Unfortunately, the Xperia 5 V no longer has a notification LED. Source.

These are some smartphones with notification LED. There is also an Android app called aodNotify (haven’t tried that myself).

Mozilla Thunderbird?

Yes, pretty much. But unlike Cloudflare DDos Protection and such Google ReCaptcha is mainly used to secure forms of all kinds (e. g. signup, login, contact or frontend posting forms).

Chrome probably still collects some usage data.

Google’s ReCaptcha in version 3 works in the background. Instead of displaying images of crosswalks and such, it uses a kind of risk score. This risk score is based on user behavior: If someone has behaved like a human in the past and thus gets a low risk score, the captcha is passed without you having to do anything or even seeing it.

I assume that Google uses data from it’s own services, web analytics applications and usage data from Andoird devices and Chrome for this. Of course, this is not without its privacy issues but it’s convenient.