@AliothFox One of the reasons I took a break from most of telegram was because almost all the furry channels I am in have turned into , basically, reading off the news of Trump and talking about how awful it is. It's like people are enjoying talking about how shit everything is, and are enjoying being the ones to bring that information to everyone else, and anyone that suggests calling congress critters or getting involved gets shouted down as being "naive" or whatnot.

I got tired of it. I got tired of politics from people who aren't really involved in it and don't want to do the least effort to be involved (writing your congresscritter)

I got tired of people wanting to be the ones that delivered all the shit stories.

@AliothFox

I think that one of the weird things that people have trouble grasping is that the whole point of the fediverse is so that you have control. That things turn from a "this or that" into a "this and that" situation. The fact that your data is yours, and that you can take it with you and migrate as necessary is CRITICAL. Switching costs being low helps you.

So it's weird when I see people acting like they can only be on bluesky or mastodon/fediverse. There isn't an or here. I know we all feel these things are zero sum games because we've been taught by for profit data hoarders that we have to have some kind of tribal allegiance to companies, but we really don't. They're yes AND solutions. Post to bluesky, AND to fedi and to your website and to medium and substack and twitter and anywhere else you can.

@AliothFox Oh, absolutely. I agree. The problem is now , like you said, people are treating the mere PRESENCE of people who have different opinions (or those different opinions) as abuse itself. It's not good.

So now we're at a point where people don't even talk to other people if they don't agree with those people on everything. Even though "the other side" on most anything is not the straw man they're made out to be, people don't even get to be exposed to alternate viewpoints. And yeah, like you said, the convictions will never be challenged.

It's going to be why ageism is probably going to die in the tech industry, because the new crowd is largely incapable of doing work with people who challenge their opinions and viewpoints. And even if the code review is helpful and a learning experience, if an employee considers criticism abuse, they won't make it long. And they haven't. And so, yeah. I'm actually pretty concerned about it going forward.

@AliothFox I agree with you. I was having a talk with someone who is politically not aligned with me to say the least regarding some technical work we do in the programming / software engineering space, and it occurred to both of us that while the safety features are nice and helpful, they may be doing more harm than good.

People don't talk to each other anymore. People don't talk to people who have different opinions from them anymore. They don't have to. They can defacto block and ignore ANYONE who even remotely disagrees with them for anything. This is a problem because it's trained people OUT of talking with others who don't share their opinions.

You see it all the time, too, in the workplace. People coming into the workplace in my field are incapable of having hard discussions or hard pressures. My manager has had to talk to some people's parents. Because they were given a hard task and were upset by it and didn't know how to talk to anyone about difficult things.