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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2024

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  • Friedrich Nietzsche had a lot to say about this.

    Suffering is part of what gives life meaning. If you don’t know how hard it can get, you don’t know how good it can get as well. And there’s good suffering out there. Physical exercise, challenging yourself, testing your potential to see what you can actualize are all sufficient things to do in this life. You don’t know what you can do until you try to do it.

    Then you have to consider things like morality and knowledge.

    We humans (and specifically old, white humans) tend to subject others to a certain kind of suffering through the patriarchy. That’s not right. Every human should have a chance to live a good life in contrast to suffering. And the ethical pursuit of morality doesn’t have to stop with our specific species of life. Humans also subject hundreds of other biological species to a life of slavery, torture, and death. It is a noble cause to bring freedom to those species, just as it is to bring freedom to Palestinians or Ukrainians or Hong Kongers. Their potential is limited by human made constructs which can just as easily be deconstructed.

    Also, the universe is infinite (as far as we can tell). There are many machinations ongoing that cause certain events to happen. Why? Why was my local village destroyed by a rock flying in from space? Why is my town in Texas experiencing freezing temperatures when that’s never occurred before? How long do I have to get to higher ground until the tsunami that earthquake caused reaches the coast? It’s in our interest to learn about the natural world due to the hazards it brings to our lives, of which reality could end prematurely. Humans are also curious. Why is our universe the way it is? Why can’t we live in a 4D reality? Can we even grasp reality? How do I know something caused something else? How confident can we be in those judgements?

    The human condition since The Enlightenment has meant we’ve shifted our epistemological focus away from us towards the greater world around us. If we no longer have an Almighty God which has all the answers and tells us what’s good and ill, who does that now? We do!

    God is dead. But morality, knowledge, and the good life of flourishing are not.



  • Having the ability to export your account data (say to a CSV) might be useful for this reason.

    If you want to move to a new instance, you can pack your bags and head out.

    You can probably imagine how this won’t be a 1:1 transition, however, because the new instance might not have the same communities as the old instance. I commented on another thread about how it would be cool if Lemmy took your communities list, looked at how those communities federate for instance (or just do a word search on the new instance with names of the communities of the old instance), and serve you suggested new communities to subscribe to.

    And if you can export your data, then there’s no need to store it in a centralized way to make these types of actions doable, which favors privacy.


  • And it’s not like exporting your subs to a CSV file or something to then upload to your new account on your new instance will work. Different instances will have different communities, so it won’t be a 1:1 transition.

    I can definitely see the friction for new users if this happens.

    We all know people are lazy, so if the friction proposed by Lemmy is more of a burden compared to the inconvenience proposed by Reddit or another social media platform, then people won’t change.

    It would be interesting if there could be some tool that proposes similar communities on the instance you’re joining based on the communities you were subscribed to in your previous instance. Community federation could allow for that linked list that could be reverse searched and served to a user, precluded by uploading a CSV file of your previous communities so you don’t have to keep track of individual users in a server somewhere (which is anti-privacy anyways, and Lemmy imho is pro-privacy).