There is definitely a spectrum of performativeness in public reading, with “Grimes sitting on the sidewalk in designer distressed clothing, reading the Communist Manifesto” at one end, and sitting in a chair at a coffee shop at the other.

We’re performative every day; it’s not like the clothes we wear and how we style ourselves and the choices of people we hang out with in public aren’t also performances that we use to signal information to others. Whether that performance rises to the level of performativeness (derogatory) is mostly just in the eye of the beholder: A non-reader might see any public reading as performative. A non-activist might see any activism as performative. Etc.

Every news outlet has bias.

Just because it’s not your bias, doesn’t make it not news.

Just because it’s your news, doesn’t make it not biased.

The idea is to create fear. Make Palestinians scared to go to aid centers, so you can look ‘good’ on the world stage by allowing in a minute amount of aid, but minimize how many people it actually gets to.

Going with a Bond that young gives too much of a Kingsman, action Mary Sue vibe, for me. Bond is supposed to be an ex-British Navy Commander, iirc, which would be late 30s to 40s. Not under 30.

It will make it extremely risky from a liability standpoint to operate any platform that allows user content.

The EFF has a bunch of writeups on these types of laws. This is the last of a 4-part series on them: Link

Fediverse operators would for example be extremely vulnerable to lawsuits, because almost none of them can afford teams of lawyers to deal with claims, true or not, that they failed to enforce content policies.

Depending on how the laws are written, anyone who could find a piece of objectionable content (which will vary by jurisdiction) could sue the platforms. This makes it very appealing as a route to shut down platforms you dislike, especially if they’re niche.

It consolidates power under large corporations like Meta and Xitter, who can afford to handle legal threats.

If I had the self control to not just unblock the sites or uninstall the extension, I’d have the self control to not go to them in the first place. :P

I definitely think this sounds like someone who is just lonely and missing connection and attention… and is looking for it in the wrong place (objectification).

I’ve never been to Chicago or Mama Delia’s, but men aren’t crawling into holes and disappearing from public life, and it feels like she’s using one restaurant that happened to have an imbalance of men vs women to craft a narrative of male withdrawal that imo just doesn’t exist.

Are there MGTOWs and hikikomoris? Sure. Are they any significant percentage of men? Not remotely.

I think this piece is more revealing of the author’s own mental state, than society’s.

Yeah, this is just setting up a future Fetterman/ Sinema. Nothing is stopping her from going independent, or even just voting against GOP bills as a Republican. We don’t need her muddying our primaries, turning the Democratic Party into the “redemption arc” career path for conservatives.

I understand it’s a slippery slope argument, which is why I didn’t find it particularly convincing.

And if you’ve done bugfixing of software, you know that the data that users give you in reports is 90% of the time less useful than what you get out of crash reports or telemetry (yes, there are rockstar testers out there, but they’re the vast minority of users). Not all beta programs are there solely for the developers’ sake (some are there for e.g. third party devs to update integrations, etc), but this one seems to be, and that isn’t evidence of malice.

Forking Firefox means it isn’t Firefox - yes, this means that the original was OSS, but you really need to be an expert to get at all the OSS code running on your machine. I mean that it is literally not Firefox, since your fork doesn’t have permission to use the trademarked name.

This is only relevant if you are planning to redistribute it after you make changes. You can make any and all changes you want to FF on your machine to remove telemetry, and you do not have to remove the branding.

If we think of the enabling functionality in Firefox as a virtual lock, breaking that lock is illegal under the DMCA. That seems very weird for code that is ostensibly open source.

Extending this argument would mean that it’s potentially illegal under DMCA to remove any protection mechanism that it would be ‘hacking’ to bypass during usage (e.g. SSL, authentication, etc) from any OSS project. Thats not the case, because an OSS license gives you explicit permission to modify the application.

I am 100% on board with the author until they question it being open source, immediately after noting that users can take the source code and remove the telemetry function from it. They try to reconcile that contradiction by seemingly saying that since Firefox has the telemetry, a non-telemetry Firefox wouldn’t be Firefox, and that somehow makes FF not open-source?

Is Firefox really open source if we have to submit to data collection to access features distributed under an open source license?

Yes, ordinary end users can create a patch set to enable these features without needing to submit data to Mozilla - but that would clearly no longer be Firefox.

Plenty of OSS licenses have rules baked into them about how you can use the code, or lay out obligations for redistribution. That does not negate their OSS-ness.

“Is it really open source if I have to edit the source code I was given to remove a feature I don’t like?”

I mean, yeah? What a program does is completely orthogonal to the rights granted by its source code license, which determines whether something is open-source.

I am also not sure why they seem to think that this move either is meant to or is likely to push away technical users in favor of some supposed group of non-technical users who will go into the settings to manually enable a beta testing feature (Labs).

Yes, (as the author notes) the purpose of a system is what it does, but the author isn’t presenting any evidence of what it’s doing vis a vis their claim of making technical users quit FF.

Mozilla has plenty of issues, but I just don’t see “forces you to agree to telemetry if you want to participate in beta testing” as some canary in the coalmine of enshitiffication.

But regardless of that, talking about the problem in general is surely okay.

This is you directly asserting that people in this post are part of OP’s supposed group. This is and clearly never was just talking about the problem in the abstract.

These are contradictory statements.

I was not calling for OP to call people out, I was pointing out that their choosing not to do so meant that there was no way to repudiate the assertions. If someone who fits your supposed ‘pattern’ proves they’re not in fact a bot/ troll/ AI/ etc, you can just claim they clearly weren’t who you were talking about. It’s a set up for a No True Scotsman argument.

You use the standard straw man of “anyone who disagrees with you” being put in this category, but that is not at all what’s happening here. I disagree with people on Lemmy constantly and I very rarely think that this is what’s going on. However when I run into a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving, I start to think that the person might be a paid propaganda account.

Which is all well and good to claim, except that both OP and you clearly think some of those people are in this thread, based on your own comments, and many of the people disagreeing with OP here, I haven’t seen around much on BH, and none of their comments in here are doing the behaviors OP describes. That doesn’t look to me like “a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving”, it looks like you’re absolutely just using this as a broad net to attack people who disagree with you.

There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated claims being made in this thread, especially wrt what these supposed maga-bot/trolls all claim or do.

If the post contained any actual examples of comments that OP believes are either bots or trolls, it might be possible to actually analyze whether their assumptions and claims have validity.

As it stands, however, making broad insinuations about the ill intentions of anyone who disagrees with you is not very Nice, and is certainly not Assuming Good Faith.

The mods here are very active, and very capable. We don’t need people starting witch hunts here to “root out the fake Leftists”, and based on OP and some others’ reactions in this thread, that’s clearly what’s happening here.