Andreas

The first distro I used was Ubuntu as part of a computer class at school, but it was preinstalled on a school computer. The first distro I installed on a personal computer was Arch because le reddit said it was le epic hackerman’s IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE TO INSTALL distro. It installed, and after that I didn’t use it because my favorite Windows apps couldn’t work.

That’s relieving to hear. I know the backstory of Kbin is that Ernest was originally a Lemmy contributor but he and Lemmy’s devs got into a disagreement about politics, so he went to start his own project instead. There was no communication about the block from Lemmy’s devs for a while so a lot of people, including me, theorized that it was related to the conflict.

Exactly, if an instance loves to censor others so much they should deal with the consequences of less interaction and visibility. lemmy.ml is also dropping off my feed because their devs have beef with Kbin’s dev and they blocked interactions from all Kbin instances.

Why don’t you start an account there and help them out, or start an account on an instance that is federated with both if you prefer the community there? I personally disagree with their moderation and don’t like the kind of users they approve of, so I’m happy seeing less of them around.

I was a kid when all of the big social media websites except TikTok took off so I never got to have it anywhere else. I wanted the sense of pride and accomplishment of being the first person on my instance to get my name as their username.

I brought up the social system because you can see that everyone in this thread arguing against you is saying that your “excellent welfare system” is the reason why your income is lower than the corresponding American programmer’s. The massive taxation is obviously a big factor to your reduced income, but let’s look away from that for a bit and just focus on the American companies.

American companies in America pay more because the costs of doing business in America are much lower and there is a greater availability of loans and funding.

American companies in Europe pay more because they have the advantages listed above that local European companies don’t have and they have the resources to invest in a global expansion.

That’s it. That’s the answer.

I don’t think that you, me and OP have different values on this issue, actually? We all agree that the state is supposed to provide us with a structure to live in that we couldn’t have on our own, and as payment for this safety net, we contribute taxes. My and OP’s argument is that with the current projection of the economy and population growth, the state cannot provide the current generation of tax payers with the structures and support that we will eventually need, and therefore many of us would rather pay lower taxes and lose the benefits, because we won’t be getting them anyway. We know what’s coming and we don’t want to be the ones “holding the bag” when the system collapses.

I’m trying to explain OP’s point to the Americans in this thread who don’t understand that European social security systems are currently under severe strain and are on the road to collapse, and how OP feels to have to sacrifice so much of his potential income to support a failing system. The 80s stereotypes of reliable, high-quality social security no longer hold true in Europe in 2023.

Is renaming the instance domain without reinstalling Lemmy related to changing the WebFinger query? It’s the trick some instances use to have a different instance domain from their username domain, like @[email protected] while the instance is mastodon.domain.com.

There should be a patch for it that hides the “recommended” feed in the homepage. I’m not certain because I never use Youtube with an account or the official website/app, so I don’t get targeted recommendations.

That’s why I suggested Revanced with “disable recommendations” patches. It’s still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.

I watch a ton of videos there, literally hours every single day and basically all my recommendations are about stuff I’m interested in.

The algorithm’s goal is to get you addicted to Youtube. It has already succeeded. For the rest of us who watch one video a day, if at all, it employs more heavy-handed strategies.

I think it’s sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.

The algorithm doesn’t actually care that it’s promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people’s eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using “not interested” and “block this channel” buttons doesn’t make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you’re teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!

The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP’s mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). “Youtube with no ads!” is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.

Using Piped/Invidious/NewPipe/insert your preferred alternative frontend or patched client here (Youtube legal threats are empty, these are still operational) helps even more to show you only the content you have opted in to.

Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit

Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don’t like “magazine” for a community)

Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin

Hardware companies have much deeper pockets because the initial investment for hardware design and manufacturing is much higher than software. This also helps them keep their profits because new companies can’t enter the industry and compete as easily.

I also realized that I didn’t mention the elephant in the room, selection bias. US companies in Europe are those who have already “made it” in their domestic market and are looking to expand globally, of course they’ll bring money that Arnes Webbyrå AB doesn’t have. I follow CS industry discussions that naturally end up talking about the US a lot, and there are stories about how retrenched developers with experience had to accept terrible wages like $30k a year with all of the lack of safety nets that living in the US comes with. Those positions exist, but they don’t hire foreigners, so we never hear about them.

But I agree with you that a high minimum wage also reduces how much a company can pay its top employees, because their expenses on lower-paid employees like customer support and janitors will have to be balanced out somehow.

I think it has to do with the higher rate of investor funding in the US that allows companies to spend above their actual assets by a huge margin, because of the significantly lower capital gains taxes there. The risk is much higher that US companies go bankrupt or investors stop funding the company during times of high interest rates (such as now), which is why US tech companies are disproportionately affected by the post-Coronavirus layoffs. Even Reddit itself (according to Spez) has not been profitable through all 18 years of its operation, but someone was clearly pouring money into it to keep it running. European companies on the other hand have a lot more administrative overhead when it comes to loans and investment than US companies, so they can’t use money they don’t have to offer attractive compensation on the level of US companies.

I’m not Danish (I’m the resident foreign invader on the instance), but if you are, you should come over to feddit.dk to complain with us. Privatization and the social system destroying itself is a hot topic right now.

I must admit though, the way you described your country made me think you were from Greece or somewhere that is bleeding citizens because its social systems are beyond salvaging at this point. Is the public pension in Denmark really unliveable? I would assume that it’s much worse here in Sweden but old people are generally still able to get by.

Oof, it sounds like your country is further along than mine on the “broken down social system” scale. My country is already dealing with reports about retirees who can’t survive off their pension despite working for an average income their entire lives, old people who are not able to find caretakers and people who have to wait in line for an unreasonably long time to get public healthcare and subsidized housing. All while politicians slash budgets and make privatized systems the only way to get timely and high-quality services. I can only see it getting worse from here and it makes no sense to pay so much for something whose quality only gets worse with every passing year.

You’re right that healthy, young working adults without children have very little to gain from socialized systems. I’m going to assume that OP, like me, is an early Gen Z who fits this description, and is about to enter the job market or has just entered it. For our generation, this statement

The state is not here to rob you, but to provide you with a structure to live in that you couldn’t have in the same way on your own.

does not check out mathematically. The taxes we pay today don’t get locked away in a box to be spent when we are sick or elderly and need them. They are spent on the sick and elderly we have right now. This means that at the age that we start needing benefits more than we contribute to them, it’s not going to be us, but our children’s and grandchildren’s generation who are footing the bill. But the birth rates across Europe are below replacement level and none of our countries have come up with a system that either raises birth rates above replacement level or successfully introduces foreigners who will be net tax contributors for all their lives. That means that despite paying high taxes and receiving miserable salaries (compared to American salaries) today, we won’t even be able to enjoy benefits from the state in the future because there won’t be enough tax contributors by the time we need these benefits.

It absolutely feels like getting robbed.

“Suddenly”? This has been happening for a long time. If you click on outbound links from built-in Windows apps, they used to always open in Edge unless you used a tool named EdgeDeflector to redirect them to your preferred browser. In 2021, they killed EdgeDeflector by making it impossible to redirect links with the microsoft-edge:// protocol baked in, even if you go deep into the registry settings to change this. They will eventually do this to Outlook and Teams too and get away with it, just like they got away with restricting EdgeDeflector.