All of those things, save for the MRI, are valuable life skills.

I don’t need to know everything about an engine, but I have basic competency in changing my oil or replacing my air filter.

I don’t know everything about the structure of my home, but I know enough to install some shelves or blinds.

If a problem is outside of my knowledge or ability? I call someone who can fix it for me.

A computer should be the same way. People should have a base level of competency in technology, and that technology should lend itself to people fixing problems themselves.

Everything being a proprietary, closed source, magic mystery box, that spies on you, and can only be fixed by the company that made it, is very bad, actually.

What an absolutely brain dead take on what people should and shouldn’t be doing with their time.

Farmers have to waste time hacking their John Deere tractors, just to be able to start fixing them. OP isn’t the one dictating what people should or shouldn’t do with their time.

Yeah, putting a queer person on the front of an article about robots doing sex crimes feels irresponsible at best, and actively malicious at worst, given the current climate around LGBT issues.

Somehow it still exists

I’ve been bouncing around a theory in my head that the big, mainstream, social media sites are kind of too big to fail at this point.

Back in the day, a change in moderation or ownership on a forum site would lead to a user revolt or an exodus to an alternative, and the old one would die out.

Now, these sites are so big and load bearing that alternatives struggle to get off the ground, and people just sorta stay and take it.

I found myself on reddit the other day, and came across someone complaining “now we’re all trapped in this corporate hellscape! I miss forums, BBS, and all that stuff”

Lemmy is right here, and a hobbyist community for old communication platforms like that, could really thrive on a place like Lemmy. Where it’s not just about nostalgia for a bygone era, but actively on a platform that can carve out, an alternative to the corporate hellscape this guy was complaining about.

But no, they’re still on reddit, yearning for the past, and blinded from seeing a future with any alternative

Really use your noggin for this one.

Why would the Russian and Chinese governments want to influence a small collection of web forums with no real influence on the wider world?

No, they’re not here, they’re on Reddit. As are the US and Israeli governments, for that matter. Online influence campaigns are carried out by governments in places where they’ll be most effective, and by more than just your spooky oriental despotisms.

Now, why might .ml users, in general, be generally pro-china? The people who made Lemmy as a platform, and the folks who were first to adopt it (instances like Lemmygrad and Hexbear), were ideologically Marxist. Specifically, Marxist-Leninist. Marxist-Leninists, generally, support the existence of actually existing socialist States, as being socialist.

Contrast that with a Maoist position which rejects these States as not being socialist

You can take that ideological position or leave it, it doesn’t really matter to me. But what’s the more likely explanation here?

That the people who made, and first adopted, Lemmy as a platform tended to have a certain ideology, and so the early instances, like .ml, have people with a broadly shared opinion on a certain topic?

Or that the Chinese government, who probably had no damn clue what Lemmy is, is actively devoting money, and hundreds of people to influence a tiny speck of a Web forum where some nerds circle jerk about Linux, instead of focusing on influencing Facebook or Reddit.

Neocolonialism is an actual term, coined to describe a specific phenomenon

xXEmoXOstrichXx

Holds up spork >:3