Okay Lemmy Champions… I want to spread the news and increase participation. What do you think about requiring an assignment in which college level comp students need to practice critical thinking skills in the subs of their choice at Lenny? What suggestions would you make relating to each an assignment? What negative unforeseen consequences am I not seeing? Thank you.Very
First — allow me to say how impressed I am by your keen thinking in all of your responses. I feel like my own engagement with the Fediverse, and Lemmy, is really casual compared with yours. I’ll be honest: I’m a tourist.
And like a tourist, I have always tried to focus on what’s good and ignore what’s bad, keeping myself safe from what’s dangerous. I don’t know anything about hexbear despite that I may have seen the word before.
The assignment has been a real eye opener.
I simply presumed my students would be curious. Then interested. Then engaged.
I predicted wrong. They felt irritated in the main and never inspired. More will be revealed still but I fear that this round might end in a wash.
They do not find the primitive charming as I do. And they do not relish the brief freedom from being surveilled by corporations. And they do not thrill to the idea of participating in genuine acts of resistance against the totalitarian dictatorship of corporate hegemony.
I’m left but nowhere near “red.”
I like the capitalism of the renaissance for example — yes… things were awful, but there was motivation to be innovative and to work hard.
So… my disdain for universal surveillance is so thorough that I have an air gapped old Mac that I use to manage about a terabyte of data on my terabyte iPod classic. A Chinese refurb that was literally out of the box like new! In fact I think it is new — just a great copy— and I know for a fact that click wheel is not original. So I have worried there is some stealth blue tooth there or something but I doubt it.
Just saying that by way of articulating why I really want the Fediverse to become a thorn in the foot of the lion. Then I want it to be a land mine.
That’s probably the toxic stuff at hexbear? But seriously, I’d like to see the world taken back to tech level 1998. Keep Wikipedia and pretty much toss the rest. I’d like to see the Lemmyverse as is though — but with millions of users mindful of resources — like that video streaming article you sent — they were moving to spread the burden.
But honestly what I see corporate social media doing is using humans like the battery people in the Matrix — exploiting them in vats while giving them unreal hallucinations and zero truth.