I’ve been thinking about how a lot of science fiction portrays futures that feel far more optimistic than the world we actually seem to be heading toward.

In real life we’re dealing with many simultaneous, compounding crises: AI being deployed in ways that cannibalize society under capitalism, an ever increasing cost of living with fixed wages, declining birth rates (people replacing children with pets/mascots), pollution, mass extinction of biodiversity, climate change, etc. It feels less like “one big problem” and more like death by a thousand cuts.

By contrast, in most SF stories there are usually one or two central issues to grapple with—an evil AI, an empire, climate collapse—but rarely the overwhelming stack of interlocking failures we see in reality. Even dystopias often feel strangely cleaner and more legible than real life.

Is there a known psychological explanation for this? Something like optimism bias, positivity bias, planning fallacy, or cognitive overconfidence, where we systematically underestimate complexity and overestimate humanity’s ability to coordinate and improve? Or is it more about narrative constraints and what the human mind can comfortably model?

Curious if there’s research, theory, or even just good takes on why imagined futures so often look “better” than the present.

Now there's NodeBB. Although it doesn't yet have an Android app, I'm excited about the potential return of old-school forum software that it represents.

I’m trying to find a way to archive all my saved Lemmy posts from multiple instances in one place, and be able to search through them by tags, title, body text, date, etc.

Does anyone know of a free online service or a local Linux tool that can?

• fetch and store saved posts from all instances I’m active on,
• let me query/search effectively (tags, title, content, date, etc.).

Thanks in advance!

I just got banned from SpaceBattles for an introduction post. Not for doxxing, not for threats, not for spam—just for expressing opinions and interests that didn’t fit the approved worldview. Apparently that’s enough now.

What’s wild is that this isn’t an isolated case. I looked back at an older thread out of curiosity, and roughly 80% of the people who were active when it started are now banned. Read that again. That’s not “keeping the peace.” That’s systematic purging. When most of the original voices disappear, you’re not moderating a community—you’re curating an echo chamber, enforcing ideological cleansing. Strip away the forum UI and polite language, and what you’re left with is authoritarian repression: a system where dissenting voices are removed until only the sanctioned narrative remains.

In the real world, this kind of logic doesn’t just stop at bans and deletions—it ends with people being permanently silenced. History is full of examples. Look at Jeju Island, where American-backed South Korean forces massacred huge portions of the population for protesting, all under the excuse of “restoring order.” That’s where this mindset leads when it’s given real power.

SpaceBattles used to market itself as a place for creative freedom. Now it feels like a NATO-flavored circlejerk where deviation from consensus is treated as a personal offense. There’s an orthodoxy, and if you don’t kneel to it, you’re out. No warning, no real engagement—just deletion and exile.

The irony is hard to miss. People can openly believe in a supernatural entity watching everyone’s thoughts and actions, and that’s treated as normal, untouchable, beyond critique. But have an opinion that challenges mainstream political narratives, media framing, or power structures? Suddenly it’s an inquisition. Labels come out, motives are assigned, and the ban hammer drops.

We’re constantly lectured about “authoritarianism” abroad, yet this kind of censorship is defended as virtuous because it’s done by the “right” people. At least some countries are honest about controlling speech. Here, it’s wrapped in the language of safety and community standards while dissenting voices quietly vanish. Call me cynical, but when a forum erases most of its long-term users for wrongthink, that’s not a healthy community—it’s ideological hygiene.

What really gets me is the smugness. The absolute certainty that silencing is the same as being right. That deleting posts is the same as winning arguments. These are the modern book burners: not torching paper, but scrubbing perspectives, rewriting history, and pretending the absence of disagreement proves consensus.

If your ideas are so fragile they can’t survive contact with uncomfortable opinions, maybe they’re not as solid as you think. And if a forum can’t tolerate a blunt introduction post, it’s probably not about “rules”—it’s about control.

I’ve noticed that on pkgstats.archlinux.de most packages’ popularity graphs seem to show a big drop recently — even popular ones. Is the site broken, has data collection changed, or is something else going on? Anyone know why this is happening?

I believe that because Reddit is generally left-leaning and the majority of those users are opposed to AI, we may see a disproportionate rise in AI-generated right-wing content, which could influence public opinion. And the pentagon also showed interest in using LLMs to gaslight people.

I’m using Linux and I’m trying to avoid accidentally downloading the same files multiple times.

For example, I use Soulseek to download music. After a song finishes downloading, I usually move it to another folder (my main music library). Later on, when I’m searching again, I don’t always remember whether I already have a particular song, and I end up re-downloading it.

Is there a good way on Linux to keep track of what I’ve already downloaded, even after files are moved to different folders, so I can avoid downloading duplicates? Ideally, I’d like something that doesn’t require manually searching my entire music library every time.

One idea I had was leaving a placeholder file behind in the original download directory and configuring Soulseek not to overwrite it, but I’m not sure if Soulseek even has that option.

What tools or workflows would you recommend for this?

Lemmy claims decentralization, but once you join a community on one instance you’re still subject to that instance’s rules and moderators. Being banned from c/community@instance still means you can’t post there unless you make a new account elsewhere. That isn’t real decentralization, it’s just fragmentation where every instance ends up replicating the same centralized moderation power in a different place. Federated instances don’t stop this, they just scatter the same problem across multiple servers. If the goal is escaping centralized control, the reality is you still get banned, silenced, or cut off the same way, the only “freedom” is signing up somewhere else. That’s not decentralization in practice, it’s decentralization in name only.

I hear then connect through the earphones as always but then every other sound is played by the phone's speaker. I've tried reconnecting and rebooting them a few times without luck. Any suggestions?

Edit: rebooting the phone solved it.

I haven’t voted in years after reading the argument that voting mainly serves to slot you into a cohort, making it easier for governments and corporations to profile you. Recently I heard someone argue the opposite angle: don’t vote because none of the politicians deserve you. A comedian mocked that stance as basically holding your breath when you are angry.

Now I’m conflicted because both arguments feel compelling in different ways. What are your strongest arguments for voting, or against voting?

I believe I heard something about Maria Teresa not treating his patients and telling them pain were caresses from the lord or something like that and moving donations to private accounts.