Dae

Cults follow a life-cycle of explosive growth. Then once they reach a certain threshold, they slow. And either they become something like Mormonism or Jehovah’s Witnesses, where they face slow growth/decline, close to equalibrium, or they begin collapsing in grotesquely spectacular fashion like Heaven’s Gate and Jone’s Town.

MAGA is falling into this latter category, in which the cult grows desperate as it loses members and clamps down harder, making ever-higher demands, making more members nope out, locking the cult into a vicious cycle of free-falling desperation. This is good.

What is not good is that the precedent set is Heaven’s Gate and Jone’s Town, both of which did something absolutely tragic and evil, and MAGA has great political power right now. They will absolutely be doing something truly and historically evil on the way out, and we need to be prepared.

I certainly won’t say no to additional privacy! But until I see cryptography experts call it secure, I’m going to continue to treat it as a public forum.

No, it should be treated as what it is: a public forum. The only app I would trust to keep my messages truly private is Signal.

https://signal.org/

And I do see yours as well! I agree self-hosting gas greater resistance to devs going rogue when all the hosts can just stop participating. But the beauty of Open Source is that if it’s ever truly so bad, the project can always just fork.

While that’s true, the nature of it being FOSS also ensures the potential for forking and going our own way. So for right now, maybe it’s better that it’s not self-hosted, long enough to get a large number of Discord users on-board, then fork it if it does enshittify and make the fork self-hosted. At the very least, again, this is an opportunity to get a large number of normies to see the value of FOSS projects and enter the FOSS world. And that has immense value not just for Revolt, but for the FOSS world as a whole.

I don’t believe so, and honestly I don’t think it needs to be. It’s already FOSS. And honestly self-hosting would just complicate the process more for normies who apparently can’t figure out Mastodon as it is. Maybe if we have at lest one thing that’s dummy simple and familiar that’s FOSS, maybe it’ll be the foot in the door to getting them more comfortable with the FOSS world and out of the corporate sphere.

And honestly I just really want my friends off of fucking Discord, and the more Revolt continues to literally, in every way be “Discord but open source,” the better the odds of that happening is.

It’s not an official packaging, but it is on Flathub, so maybe they have somewhere?

https://flathub.org/apps/chat.revolt.RevoltDesktop

The desktop app has a donation button in the settings. There’s also links to their donation pages on their github, but I do think in both instances they should have their donation link more front and center; it’s proven to work out well for multiple other FOSS projects.

Great time to plug that https://revolt.chat/ is coming along nicely! The Android app is being reworked and is in rough shape at the moment, but the biggest feature missing from the desktop app (where I figure it matters most) is screen sharing. Otherwise it’s an entirely serviceable Discord clone that is FOSS and would benefit greatly from additional support. I, for one, will be taking the money that was paying for my Nitro and donating it to Revolt instead.

If you have a newer NVIDIA, you should be good. It’s a little rough around the edges here and there (steam overlay flickered for a friend, but that was months ago and could well be fixed) , but to my understanding, the worst issues have been solved. And having previously used an RTX 2040, it worke perfectly where it truly matters.

Like others have said, try a dualboot. It can’t hurt.

Zen Buddhist. I grew up Christian, realized I was believing out of obligation rather than genuine conviction, but also I’m pan and Christians have made it very clear that’s not okay with them.

I was areligious for awhile. Which I use because I am still an atheist; I don’t see much evidence for gods, but that isn’t important to Buddhism.

I appreciate the Buddha’s teachings and find them incredibly helpful. I’m calmer, more focused, and over all, happier for my practice. It gives me a spiritual outlet that doesn’t make me feel “dirty” the way Christianity did.

There are aspects to Buddhism that I have to take on faith even though I am otherwise a skeptical individual. But ultimately, those things don’t change how I would have had to live my life. And I believe that a true practitioner needs a balance of logic anf faith: too much logic, and you kill your faith. Too much faith and you wind up in a cult. You need enough logic to stay grounded, and enough faith to believe. But you have to acknowledge that you can rarely prove the things you take on faith and because of that, there will always be non-belivers, and that has to be okay.

No spiders in space yet!

I get the sentiment for this one, but the pastor in question is simply acting like they’re above the law. Hemant Mehta (AKA “The Friendly Atheist”) covered this story on his YouTube channel:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JrlUNGFVN4I&pp=ygUgVGhlIGZyaWVuZGx5IGF0aGVpc3Qgb2hpbyBwYXN0b3I%3D

The short of it is that where this pastor’s church is set up is not in the right zone for housing people, the building isn’t designed for it, and he’s actually puttinf them in danger. And on top of having already been in trouble for this once, I found out in the process of finding the first video that he’s still doing it!

That said, I still up-voted the post, because while the pastor is actually in the wrong, so is the state. There’s zero reason why these people should have to resort to sheltering in a building that isn’t safe just to avoid succumbing to the elements.

By default, both Plasma and Cinnamon have a very similar set up to Windows.

However, Plasma is insanely modular and customizable, so if you’re willing to take the time to, you can make it look as much like Cinnamon as you please. Given how simple Cinnamon’s design is, I don’t think it would be hard at all.

I realized the hard truth is you don’t get mad at shit you don’t care about. And suddenly a lot of shit I got mad at felt really fucking stupid.

I also learned to take a deep breath before I act in anger, and it often calms me down enough to find a better solution.

Something something on the internet something something dog

I think Deezer has an electron app or something it uses, but it’s worked great for me so far. It costs the same aa Spotify the last I checked, and has a comprable selection.

No, it’s Trump. They, Robin Bullock, Kat Kurr, all of them make prophecies about Trump. The whole fucking theology centers on Trump. He’s become the lynch pin to their everything. One pastor in particular, Shane Vaugn, claims that “Trump is a messiah.”

They have hitched it all to Trump. Without him, it all falls apart. They will try to pivot because they won’t just give up their influence, but his second defeated will hurt their credibility. It will sow doubt. And when he eventually kicks the bucket, will, I wager most Christians only have it in themselves to wait on just one messiah to come back.

Your comment exposes what it is that’s so deeply disturbing about this wave if Leftist Nihilism. They’re basically saying “if we can’t save everyone, then we might as well all die.”

While you’re definitely correct that Trump isn’t the last bigot who will run for president, none of them will have rhe same level of influence he did.

Trump is a literal cult leader. You have pastors like Shane Vaughn who literally call him “a messiah.” He is literally worshipped. That’s why he could get away with Jan 6th, that’s why he’ll have so many voters no matter what, it’s a cult.

With the above said, the his defeat will dishearten his mkst fervent followers. I believe many of them will never be able to bring themselves to vote for another candidate, ever. Not all, but many. Republican voter enthusiasm will be at an all time low.

Following this, the infighting we already see will only get worse as would-be successors fight for the scraps that their titan left behind while others fight to leave Trumpism in the dust. Even if they manage to get a majority, they’d accomplish nothing meaningful.

Their entire plan hinges on Donald Trump’s cult influence. The depend on his rabid base of supporters. If he loses this election, that goes away. The remnants will be fought over, but none of them will be able to touch the level of influence Trump himself had. His legacy will leave the Republican party fractured for decades.