Wait, wait, wait... The average middle-class voter who is struggling to get by is starting to turn away from the Tories and their leader's suggestion is to reduce taxes on the wealthiest people? Not to improve services or perhaps address the issues that drove former conservative party voters to Labour. No. Cutting the taxes of the elite, further reducing funding for services that the majority of voters use or rely on is the obvious answer.

I also noticed that both here on Lemmy and over on Reddit that there's been a push of pro-Russian talking points and a huge push towards Islamaphobia for the past few days, starting just before the attacks this weekend.

I understand there's going to be some natural anger over the attack, but the amount of accounts I've seen, especially noticeable here on Lemmy because we just don't have as many users, who are saying things like, "This is just what Muslims are like," and, "Western countries accept these kinds of people, so expect them to do the same there," and other racist bullshit talking points. They've also been painting the ongoing conflict as unquestionably one-sided in Israel's favor.

It's depressing but kind of to be expected that there's a psyops campaign going on trying to get people outraged at not just Hamas, not just Palestine, but all of Islam right now while simultaneously trying to paint Ukrainian surrender and pro-Russian propaganda. This horrible act of terror was either in part planned by Russia or at the very least is seen as an easy opportunity to try and weaken Western support of repelling their invasion of Ukraine. Just spending a little time in the wrong circles on social media should make that obvious.

One of the things that made me really like Sanders when he was first campaigning for president was when I looked up his record on American war and he had a voting record that tended to follow a quote from him that amounted to something like (paraphrasing), "War should be the last resort, but if a war is started, we need to see it fully see it through."

It's not like siding with Ukraine and getting into that conflict is supporting warfare. It's seeking to prevent warmongers from profiting off a senseless war. The idea that abandoning Ukraine to just be invaded and allowing Russia to get whatever they want by force is an, "Anti-war," stance is fucking absurd.

I don't really know how you can threaten someone when you need them more than they need you.

If you leave town, where are you going to go? The city doesn't need you. If you're not making what you want/need here, go ahead, leave, the city won't be hurt by it. You will, though. Because you'll have to pack up your business, set it up somewhere else, and hope that they do the things you want them to. It'll be expensive for you, won't mean a thing to the city.

So how is it a threat?

Not just young people. I've seen this kind of behavior in surprisingly old people such as Gen X and even Baby Boomers, but I've seen it in a LOT of millennials, the youngest of whom are now in their early thirties and the oldest are in their forties.

While I'm not quite that blunt, I do tend to take a utilitarian approach to institutions. When I went to school, I went there to attend classes, learn, work, the like. When I went to a job, I went there to work. I don't really know how to approach people; the few times I've tried I've only made people uncomfortable, and mostly I just sit on my own and focus on what I'm "supposed" to be doing.

This left me burning out with depression and failing out of university, unable to find a job and being some kind of unhirable that I don't know why or how to fix as I've spent three years looking for anything that will hire me with no takers, and I have absolutely no friends. I'm a man in my thirties with almost no work experience, no marketable skills, no connections, living off the kindness of family, and just ever-growing gaps in an almost empty resume.

Don't be like that triceratops. And for the love of fuck, don't be like me!

I mean, a union is simply a way for workers to organize independently from management. While it's useful for countering bad management and things like that, that's not its only purpose. And anyone saying that it is either doesn't know as much about unions as they think or is anti-union while trying not to say as much directly.

Sadly, with recent events, all I can think about with this is how Linus Sebastion would go on the WAN Show and say things like, "You don't need a union unless you have bad management, and I never want my employees to need a union."

If you think horoscopes don't make any sense, you're really going to be boggled by its sister, numerology.

She didn't just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn't reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it's a non-issue.

She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that's why she liked sex when she wasn't supposed to.

That... That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath...

Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven't; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I'm being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I'm still living with my folks. Don't get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I'm fucking around on the internet because I can't seem to make anything of myself.

Early adopters of almost anything tend to be niche. These Threadiverse sites are looking to pick up where pseudo-message boards like Digg and Reddit left off without being extremist havens like Voat and other bullshit. So let's look at who the early adopters of those sites were. Because... They're not that dissimilar to the demographics that you're describing. Reddit didn't start out as the kind of place that just anyone went to. It tended to be tech heads in their mid-twenties or older, gamers, and chronically online people. They tended heavily to be male. And there tended to be some... Really unfortunate widely-shared opinions.

As Reddit grew, it changed. But it took time. It took there being content on Reddit to appeal to a wider set of people. And that's going to be the case here. It needs to reach a first sustainable mass where enough content is being created to engage and keep the users who first joined it. But that userbase is going to be rather similar. There are always going to be subgroups that are different, but for the most part, the same kinds of people are going to be the early adopters. Creating a breadth of content that will appeal to more and attract a wider variety of users over time will help people feel more comfortable with it.

And, yes. The Fediverse is kind of weird to most people. I was in an argument the other day where someone was insisting that saying you saw something on Limmy or KBin was wrong, you saw it on the Fediverse, and could everyone just stop being wrong please. That kind of pedantic culture is only going to make adoption even slower than it already is. Because most people, they like to go to a site and create a login to look at that content. The Fediverse isn't really that complicated, but it takes a little jump in how you think about websites to go from something like Twitter or Facebook to something like Lemmy or Mastadon. But people were kind of confused about the leap from message boards to social media like MySpace and Facebook as first too. They came around. It took time. It took exposure to the content. It took people using it and sharing it.

So, yes. The Fediverse is mostly a monoculture right now, focused on the people most likely to make the most of out it: Tech heads with some time on their hands for hobbies. The kind of people who either might make their own Fediverse instance or who would know the people that would. Those tech heads aren't exclusively Linux users, they're not exclusively over the age of thirty, and tech heads aren't exclusively the user base, but yes, we're going to start out seeing an imbalance. That's normal. That's to be expected. What's going to be concerning is if five years from now we have the same or a worse imbalance. That will mean that the Fediverse is stagnant or shrinking instead of growing. That will be a time to rethink some strategies for sure. But for right now, all we can do is be active, share the site with other people, and try to get it to spread to more diverse demographics.

I think it's more like saying, "I saw this on my phone," or, "I was on the computer and read," which are both entirely reasonable.

It's just stating what format you were using when you saw it. Like, "I was scrolling through Google News and read..." What you actually read was an article hosted on a different website, but you were using the platform of Google News to read it. It's the same kind of thing as saying, "I read on Lemmy," because you were browsing Lemmy when you read something.

It's not wrong to say that these things are on this site. I often specify Lemmy.World because that's the instance that I use and other Fediverse sites function slightly differently. That's one of the both great and annoying things about the Fediverse is how every instance is slightly different. I'll say, "I was on Lemmy.World and..." I don't know, saw a post, made a post, had trouble because mod controls are minimal over here, whatever. Saying, "On the Fediverse," is more generic. It's usually considered best convention to go with more SPECIFIC terms than generic. I consider using my Mastadon account and using my Lemmy account to be different, but they're both on the Fediverse. I would feel really weird talking about my Mastadon account in the same terms as my Lemmy.World one since I use the two platforms completely differently.