A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.

It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study

Some key paragraphs:

Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.

After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.

The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.

But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.

Ah, I am sad to hear that. And sorry that has been your experience.

As only an amateur coder, I can’t weigh in how serious the issue is, but I’m gonna take your word for it, without any other person involved adding input. I hope it’ll end up in a state, where the project can still sustain its growth in both features and users.

Congratulations Ruud & Rest - everyone at the foundation really, it’s just fun to say Ruud & Rest! I’m excited to see how this will develop. PieFed does have a lot of features already, that I do miss for Lemmy, and the communication from the main dev has been great so far. (An opportunity to post links to his PeerTube channel, as well as his Liberapay profile).

A great addition to the “Threadiverse” in particular, and the larger Fediverse!

You actually make a great point. Really, for me it was mostly a quick idea because I had been musing about PeerTube’s streaming capabilities in a different comment thread, and about how it leverages the P2P mechanism, so it was fresh on my mind that I wanted to stress-test my own server somehow (and I wanted to learn how to set-up OBS with chat and stuff for PeerTube). Then, while “working” on the canvas, I had the sudden: “Hey, I’d love to set my pixels while zoomed in, while also watching the whole field zoomed out”-thought … but of course that would just as easily be possible by just having two browser windows open 🤷

If nothing else, I got some promising data showing my server can handle several people tuning in to live streams at the same time - and I am also using this to test how my server handles someone wanting to encode a 24h+ VOD from a stream, so that will be there, too - probably for another time-lapse in addition to the official ones.

Hi, the OP this was crossposted from here. The answer is simple: I am using PeerTube Companion, a Firefox add-on that automatically redirects me to my home instance when loading any PeerTube video - so I can easily comment and like and subscribe. So when using the “share” button or copy-pasting the link from the address bar, I will default to posting a link to my instance - in essence, it is the same video, loaded from the same source, federation being what it is.

Could that be the common ground for the India-Pakistan conflict to come to an end?

As just a personal thing, the original mute watching was so surreal and unique, I enjoyed it more - solving the mystery of what is happening from what’s shown visually alone (and some subdued music) - but that is a deeply subjective thing.

you should also get back together with that girlfriend and be on the phone with her while you watch it.

Oh no, I couldn’t do that to her, she definitely deserved better.

That is a possible explanation, although I think it was weirder than that, because I remember checking some “obvious” settings like that afterwards. I also re-encoded the file with VLC media player out of curiosity, where it should have just re-encoded whatever audio track it had, without adjusting it to a specific output device, and the resulting file then also had the same issue when played in SMPLayer (whereas the original worked in SMPlayer).

I might still have both files laying around on my NAS, but I myself at least don’t really have the energy right now to go into a rabbit hole again years after the fact, and sharing them would be non-trivial.

So, I once watched The Lighthouse together with my then girlfriend remotely, being in a long distance relationship at the time. We used the same file, started at the same time and were in chat together.

The audio codec of this (of course 100% legal) file for some reason did not work with my VLC player properly. There were no voices. But it also wasn’t just complete silence, some music and subtle, surreal sound effects came through. None of this was happening for my ex, btw, even though we had the same file.

Talking about the movie in chat and afterwards was fascinating, I only then realised it was, in fact, not a masterful, purposeful, stylistic choice: A major production not just in black and white, but as a silent movie. I also was able to get the essential things that happened and the important plot points, so that is also another point very much in favour of the film.

That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it’s noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of “the same users” than before. There’s still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.

That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than “mass exodus users” may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.

Also, one can lead to the other. If you catch the right fish with a scam, they may just unwittingly give you a way in to an institution. Only the latter would make the news, though.

I had been wondering when the first big campaign-style mod for the game would hit, stoked to hear more! As a side note: I get why, but I’m still kind of sad that projects like this seem to use Discord as their main space.

Oh, just a casual stroll of the “show only adult” section on Nexus Mods for BG3 can show you what people will come up with, if “normal nudity” is already in the game.

Looks good, and should remain visible that way on other instances after lemm.ee goes down!

That’s actually addressed in this video - he interviews the main maintainer in the last segment. The issue was Fedora announcing they want to retract support for 32 bit libraries eventually, and that sparking fear in the community, because some apps like the Steam client would be affected. As it looks as per the interview, to quote the maintainer: “Bazzite is not going anywhere”. The Fedora maintainers took comments to heart (in fact, their announcement was to get feedback from the community), and critical libraries for certain applications will remain maintained, until apps like Steam and OBS and such can switch to 64-bit architectures.

But don’t feel bad for thinking otherwise - in the interview, the Bazzite maintainer laments how many outlets used the announcement to fearmonger, so that was a widespread sentiment. Sensationalism, anxiety and outrage tactics to get clicks, basically.

SteamOS, at this point, is not officially supported outside of select hardware (Basically, Steam Deck and other handelds), so while it is prominent and talked about - it may not be the best choice for home PC usage.

As @chortle_tortle@mander.xyz said already: Bazzite is probably the closest equivalent, it also has gaming optimisation, but a more fully-fledged Desktop experience along with it. There are other gaming focused distros (e.g. Garuda, PikaOS) as well, but if you are prone to choice anxiety, just go with Bazzite - and check the others out if you get sucked down the “I want to tinker more with my system and try out more, different Linux flavours” pipeline later.

I deleted my Reddit account over a year ago and don’t want to make another one again, but there’s a community for cross-promoting: !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Try fetching them again - speaking only from experience with my own (Lemmy) server, when fetching a community not yet “visible” to it, reloading the link twice does the trick.

That being said, I just checked - I’m getting a server outage notice when trying to go on piefed.social.

!eurographicnovels@piefed.social for people from other instances as an easy link.

Piefed has a lot of cool mod and admin tools (and other features), hope you will be happy with the new home! I moved my subscription.