An “instance” is a server that talks to all the other Lemmy servers, where your account info and login are stored. There’s a lot of benefits to decentralization - even if one instance goes down, like lemm.ee, it doesn’t really impact the whole of Lemmy too severely. The cost of running an instance isn’t super high, which means that if an instance is being annoying about advertising or something, you can ditch it with little cost to yourself and even run your own instance if you want. A single cabal of admins can’t ruin it like Reddit (cough cough Spez) and it can be easier to curate your own experience by choosing what instances you want to ignore completely.

Any given instance is not necessarily a safe harbor, but as long as Lemmy is around, there will probably be multiple instances to choose from. The only thing you really lose is your post history - and you can link to your old account info in your new account for continuity’s sake.

Rationalists are (supposedly) smart enough to figure out that Roko’s Basilisk wouldn’t waste cycles torturing someone in effigy if they decided they’re going to ignore the threat of Roko’s Basilisk. It’s the opposite of a catch-22.

Oh, I’m sure there are bots on Lemmy too. The general userbase, however - of people who are sick of Reddit’s BS - are also going to have very little tolerance for bot BS, so the instances are incentivized to try to keep bot activity down lest they be de-federated.

Ostensibly it’s to protect things like credit card information. In reality it’s to make sure Microsoft has more control over your computer than you do.

This is why I use Open-Shell. Ever since MS decided that the entire program list should be in a tiny little scroll window I’ve been giving it the middle finger.

The main difference is that it requires TPM 2.0, which allows applications to run in a fully encrypted mode and prevent user tampering.

I’m honestly not sure that Trump’s death would have been the best thing for the world.

Hear me out.

If Trump were assassinated, he would have become a martyr - and it would have been easy to paint the Left as the culprits, thus obliterating any chance of winning the upcoming election, and more. But it wouldn’t have been Trump who won the presidency - it would have been someone more capable and more subtle.

Trump is laying such waste to the government that he’s quickly turning people against him - and his vanity and incompetence are undermining his own party’s efforts to secure their power. As long as we survive the current attacks on democracy - which is, admittedly, a big if - then he may have utterly destroyed the power base for the GOP for a long time to come. A destruction that wouldn’t have happened if someone with their sanity intact had landed the office.

We’re going to suffer in the meantime, but at least we have a chance to turn it around - a chance that may not have happened if Trump had eaten that bullet.

Nostalgia.