it’s certainly got its flaws so i can understand people not liking it! i do tend to be overly forgiving with genre fare 😅

depends where one draws one’s lines for ‘hard’ i suppose!

i remember enjoying europa report (2013). i’d put threads (1984) into this category too, though it’s not shiny-futuristic/space type of sci-fi at all.

i guess so, i just prefer to use computer more than phone generally (personal quirk tbh), i do understand that’s not a possibility for some situations/people tho!

oh my gravy, that graph is abysmal. it’s like those graphs prager u vomits out.

cool birds

this was my gripe with everyone wanting to use signal. like, no i don’t want to have to maintain a whole other phone number just so i can keep my normal phone number private, i’d rather just use something that doesn’t require phone number in the first place.

idk, i’m probably one of those classified as “hard to work with” occasionally!

example: someone in a group i was involved with wanted us to collab with a non-anarchist group. i wasn’t ok with it because that group was transphobic. they argued that it shouldn’t matter, as our groups agreed on the one issue the collab would be on, just not much else, and people should be capable of understanding that. i argued that it would likely make any trans people who are in our group or who might want to join us in the future feel alienated, unsafe, & unsupported, like we would not have their back and can’t be trusted to stand against transphobia. we were perfectly capable of doing this work without hitching our wagon to a group of bigots, and ultimately we did just fine without them. was i being hard to work with? on this matter, yes! to me, “left unity” does not mean excusing or enabling bigotry or other hurtful behaviours.

i think generally there are different degrees of compromise that we all have to juggle in the current system, but it’s really down to individuals (and groups of individuals) as to what they’re ok compromising on and what wouldn’t be ok for them personally. we can all make up our own minds about who we’re comfortable getting into bed with. i don’t think that’s something specific to anarchists though, pretty sure almost everyone does this in their daily lives.

from the sounds of it, with your buddy, the issue is trying to make anarchists do things how his org does things. these ones don’t want to compromise, which is fine actually, they’re holding to principles they feel are very important. if i were in his shoes i’d be trying to find a way to work alongside them, horizontally, rather than in a “we don’t want your input, just do some labour for us” way. is there a specific project that would complement the work your buddy does, but could operate independently of that org, that they can structure in a way that aligns with their values? something that he could reach out to them and say “hey, people in our community really need [thing], would you want to set up & run a project of your own to tackle this? what kind of support can we offer?” and if they’re still not interested then leave the door open & wish them well.

it’s rough out there! especially when every scrap of income just gets funnelled away from you immediately. treading water is a horrible way to exist. people look to nz as some magical utopia and while it has some nice perks (cool flora & fauna mainly, lol) the reality is there’s a wide swathe of the population struggling with precarity and no relief in sight, just like so many other countries. we’re still at the ‘mercy’ of neoliberalism after all!

woooo! thank you! 🎉

yeah the ‘go make your own org’ thing can often come off like ‘if you hate your job just get a new one’. it gets recommended a lot and while i think it’s important to encourage and empower people, it’s a very tough load to carry if you don’t even have enough people for a tiny local affinity group. like, i’m trying to set up a very small neighbourhood project and it’s taking ridiculously long because it’s literally just me trying to scrape together enough stuff to get it going and missing meals so i can get supplies for it. but once it’s set up i think people will help out so i’m running on optimism in the meantime!

with the guy in question, the main example was his repeated habit of suddenly dropping multiple images/videos of graphic violence (including deaths) into the chat group, then immediately logging off for a few hours. no content warning, no context, no discussion, nothing. a lot of the time he did not seem to know which country or city the images were from, yet when asked why he posted them he would say “people need to be aware of what is happening”.

i often ended up tracking down sources and finding groups we could offer support to, so people weren’t just left in a state of despair. i politely suggested that we can perhaps share links instead of bombarding raw nsfw/nsfl imagery, and add content warnings so people can make an informed decision on whether they were up to seeing those things. i even provided guidelines that journalists who regularly handle those kinds of imagery use, so people could see an evidence-based approach that could easily be applied. and i’d get a shrug in return, and/or private messages from others going “i don’t like it either but that’s just how he is”.

he also told me i was being performative for using indigenous language. i’m indigenous, so that didn’t go over too well. and yet again, nobody backed me up. that was when i finally decided to bid the org farewell.

my suspicion is that this group had become overly fixated on trying to get its numbers back up after a hiatus, and was willing to overlook a degree of crummy behaviour in order to retain someone who was determined, enthusiastic, and clearly enjoyed being active both online and on the ground. sadly i don’t think they understood enabling that degree of crummy behaviour would drive away people who also shared those positive qualities. nobody will be a perfect little angel all the time (self included!), especially when there’s stress and strong personalities and passionate feelings happening, but we don’t have to meekly accept unhealthy levels of asshattery either.

and i hope the situation in your workplace improves sooner rather than later!

it might depend on location, i’ve checked guides for a couple different cities and some say to put it into the compost bin, others say to put it into general garbage. similar deal with human hair. so it might be worth checking with your local council just to be sure!

the first thing my mind goes to is children of men, which is maybe a little too close to home.

that elysium thing reminds me a bit of the altered carbon tv show (disclaimer: i haven’t read the books yet), which had their rich people living in like…fancy mansions up in the clouds so they were literally above everyone else, and were basically immortal because they could afford to create backups and keep re-sleeving themselves. i think something it raised was how that capability would affect their behaviour – they were probably already jerks, but being able to live for that long and remove themselves completely from exposure to how most people live on the ground (ie. not great) has put them into turbo jerk mode and they come across as total weirdos who have ditched their own humanity. so this is one of many reasons stuff like neuralink creeps me out, i kind of like the idea of interfaces, but i truly don’t want meths, heh!

so…i got involved with one of the only orgs in my country last year and unfortunately it was not a good fit. started off pretty swell, i felt like i was welcome & contributing in helpful ways, had some really positive times with some cool folks. it was really nice to feel involved in a slightly larger level of solidarity than just my own little disjointed independent actions, and it was a nice bonus to get some social time too, as slimey pointed out!

but then a new person came in a couple months after i joined and, in my opinion, became a ‘missing stair’ type of problem that apparently everyone else was incapable of confronting. my concerns about that person’s behaviour were consistently dismissed, despite being acknowledged to me in private as a legitimate issue. ultimately i got so burnt out with being the only one willing to confront him about his behaviour that i had to reduce my time/energy spent on this org, then ended up leaving when even that was too much exposure to his behaviour for me to stomach. i felt really bad about leaving, and kinda still do, even though it was the right decision for me.

none of this is to try to scare people off about joining orgs or to badmouth this particular group. i think orgs can be fantastic and like i said, i had plenty of wonderful experiences with this group, and i wish them well. but some orgs really need to be better at addressing harmful behaviour, particularly when that behaviour is being pointed out by people from socially-marginalised communities, and particularly in the case of a low-population country with few or no accessible alternatives. i would have been happy to remain involved if they had adequately addressed this person’s behaviour and established some basic strategies for future situations. a lot of the time, people can talk shit out amongst themselves and it’s fine, but sometimes it’s helpful to have some sort of process ready to roll out for when that approach doesn’t work.

i get the solution is ‘form your own org’ but i personally don’t have the mental resources for that, so i’m just sticking to independent bursts of direct action & mutual aid when i can, will hook in with an org if the opportunity arises and they need an extra set of hands, and maybe a time will come in the future when i feel equipped to do more dedicated org stuff again.

true, there’s always going to be some overhead stuff to consider. it’s just frustrating as it feels like every year they ask more from us and give us less. i want to do my research, and i want to help others with theirs, but i also need to be able to afford rent & groceries, lol.

the current systems of funding i think encourage some absolutely terrible behaviour and waste huge amounts of time/energy. everyone seems to hate this circus, yet it keeps on going!

i only have limited knowledge of what happens in my specific uni but over half of all external grant money that researchers/profs bring in goes to university admin. one of the grants my project is part of was for around $2mil and the uni hoovered up about $1.2mil before it got to any of us researchers. and just applying for grants is a nightmare. that $2mil grant took 3 years of preparation and the final application document was essentially thesis-scale (plus we had to rewrite with more focus on ‘economic impact’ because impact on human health wasn’t a good enough reason for us to be conducting geohazards research).

a lot of the unis in my country have been axing academic staff & researchers the past couple years, even the more ‘prestigious’ ones, and they were already treating them terribly so a lot were pushed out by that too. i’m not sure how they’re expecting to get funding if they don’t have any researchers left, and i’m not sure why they think students would pay to attend unis that don’t have good teaching staff. it just seems like they want to be degree mills because it’s cheaper to do that than actually provide decent education or solid research output. they have plenty of $$ for admin & flashy advertising, yet our departments are on shoestring budgets. then they get all up in our grills that we’re not putting out enough papers!

sorry, i clearly have a bee in my bonnet about this, lol.

edit to get more on-topic: my supervisor has absolutely thrown my name onto papers that i was only tangentially involved with and shoehorned citations of my papers into places where they probably could have been left out, in order to help boost my chances of getting more eyeballs and a more serious look from funding bodies. it honestly feels so ridiculous being on one of those huge author teams when your contribution was like…teaching someone how to take samples (but not doing the actual sampling) or throwing together a quick scatterplot. i’ve had someone ask me about something in one of those papers and i’m like ‘lol idk’ because it’s so far out of my wheelhouse and my supervisor just wanted to give me another thing to put on my cv.

anecdotal but i recently went to the doctor to get some skin lesions checked out and she took photos on a tablet to send to a dermatologist. obviously that’s a niche use but stuff like that, also optical character recognition scanning, situations where it’s going to be handy to have a larger view of the photo so you can be sure it will be usable.

arguably this would be a good reason to make things more modular, so people who do want/need the rear-camera on a tablet can slot one in, and people who don’t can get something else or just nothing.

thank you! i try to think of things that will cheer people up a little if they see them

some of it might come down to rather simple stuff, like how many clicks it takes for someone to actually get started. like with lemmy & masto there’s 3 just to get to a signup form (more if someone pokes about looking at instances), while reddit, fb & twitter just have 1. obviously there’s a reason for those extra clicks, but is there a way to reduce?

also making things like about/faq/guides easy to find and understand. masto’s guide is quite well-written and straightforward, but it’s located in the resources dropdown under ‘documentation’. that’s not going to be intuitive to find for a lot of folks. maybe that doesn’t matter too much, as they have a very cute video explainer, but it’s a thing to think about. the join.lemmy frontpage has straightforward language but quickly veers into mentioning more technical aspects (there’s a code screenshot immediately visible, for example), and that may be intimidating right off the bat – it conveys “this platform is for programmers” before a user gets an opportunity to see for themselves that there’s plenty of other stuff happening here. i don’t know if that truly matters, maybe people are only coming into a specific server link where they can see the variety of community posts for themselves? also the lemmy guide is mostly technical jargon, except the code of conduct. it’s important to have those details readily available, but i suspect the users who would want them would be seeking them out regardless of what is on a front page or newbie guide.

this is all ux psychology stuff, i suppose…a sticky business!

aside from that i guess continuing to foster (FOSSter?) a welcoming environment with pro-social behaviours, active caring. it can be a lonely feeling to look around and feel like you don’t have anything to share to the more active topics, or that you’re posting into the void, or that you’re picking up subtle social signals that accumulate to form a heavy burden (esp. heavy on those more diverse voices). maybe current users could take it upon themselves to post into more casual topics a little more frequently, and engage in earnest with those too? looking at the first page of the main lemmy community list it’s like…a whole lotta programming & politics, and very few casual topics. but that’s asking a lot of the existing communities, so idk. overall, balancing the labour of the existing community with the labour of those attempting to join in, and whether the existing community can take on some of that labour to alleviate the burden on newcomers, in order to encourage that diversity.

as far as i can tell it is not, but i may be wrong on that, i’m just going by what they provide on the websites. my understanding is that people can contribute content (the post i saw described it as an art mmo bbs) but i don’t think they have intended for it to be forkable (yet? idk)

yeah, barriers to entry, probs? i don’t consider myself super confident with computer things (despite my FOSS love) but i know there are people even less confident than myself, so if things aren’t on a par with the usual suspects in terms of ease/familiarity with UX/UI, you get that filtering effect where a lot of those folks are going to throw their hands up and say “i can’t be arsed with this” and stick to what they know, and where most/all their friends are. for example, my mother nearly went crawling back to whatsapp because she found element/matrix difficult to install & navigate (we got through that, thankfully, and she really likes it now!).

also different platforms and the spheres within them have different cultures, so those who aren’t willing to explore and feel things out for a while can feel quite out of place and lost.

like…i’m on mastodon now, but the first time i checked it out, i was so confused – mostly just because i didn’t know anyone there, or which instance to join, and i got stressed about “what if i pick the wrong one, everyone will hate me”. it doesn’t really matter (as i now know), but it was enough to throw me off for quite a while. i’m still getting a feel for it tbh, i still don’t know if the instance i’m in is the right fit, but i am a patient person so i can chill out and see how it goes.

ssb is another one, with i think even higher barrier to entry. it’s not very intuitive for people coming from those big social media places, and i have noticed occasional new folk trying to use it like twitter when it’s not well-suited for that kind of posting style, and it’s not really meant to be as fast-moving as that either. i suspect a few people get bored with ssb because it is slower-moving, and some may even feel intimidated because the content is often very niche/detailed/thoughtful/technical. i feel that way sometimes too, like i am not smart enough for it, but it’s still enjoyable for me as it is generally a very earnest vibe (within my hops, anyway!).

i guess you can try asking questions to your irl friends, like “what do you enjoy about [social media platform]?” or “what don’t you like about it?” and see if you can get them interested in suitable alternatives that way, provide some extra guidance setting up if needed.

i really liked @ufra’s post though, ssb got pounded with a bunch of new folk after parl got kicked from its hosting and the community had a very different feel during that time, i think people got a bit more cautious because of that. in a community where people want to feel like they can open up emotionally, and be vulnerable in that way, it’s nice to have a bit of self-selecting out happening so that level of quiet intimacy can continue.

(sorry this got unexpectedly long)