hadn’t heard of that one, sounds like a fun comedy series

sent a message

Yes, it can be a way of exploring various social situations without pressure whilst also having fun.

There aren’t any particularly good forums for it on Lemmy unfortunately but if you like I can send a discord invite to a community for finding people to rp with on DM.

Short answer: No

Long answer: Nooooo

If irl feels difficult one thing you might try is actually online roleplaying with real people (via text or voice). All the time in the world to overthink and process anxiety and allows building a bit of confidence before trying the real deal.

The 5 yrs I was on apps I’ve had maybe 3 or 4 dates (no second dates) from maybe 3x as many matches. Meeting people irl during the same time maybe 9 dates with some resulting in follow ups, and maybe 2 dates from people I met online from other spaces.

Yes on all accounts - I think freedom of thought and expression are linked to a great extent. We form and develop thoughts and ideas by expressing and discussing them, especially when it comes to more advanced concepts that benefit from group insights.

They are tied, because the other two freedoms are intrinsically linked to the first. If a thought is not permitted to be expressed, then it is, for all intents and purposes, prohibited.

Consider how often you forget something. I write things down to remember them. If that thought, expressed, were considered criminal, then it becomes a limitation also on thought itself.

calls to violence, hate speech, and medical misinformation in the name of protecting its citizenry. I don’t think it can ethically suppress other kinds of expression, especially political express, most especially criticism of the government.

…and yet political expression and both “calls to violence” and “hate speech” are overlapping. Is a call to revolution not the ultimate criticism of the government? (but also inherently violent?)

Who gets to decide what is hateful, violent or misinformation? How do we prevent the tools used to regulate dissemination of these types of expression from being applied against other things, or the definitions of the terms from being changed/drifting over time? (Consider for instance statements regarding transgender individuals somehow getting covered by medical disinformation laws…)

I think a voluntary community, however, can ethically set much narrower limits on expression within community space.

I agree, I think this could be applied even regarding non-voluntary spaces.

However, if a forum has a sufficiently large number of members amongst the population, I believe it should be considered a public space (and have these freedoms apply), hence taking away the power of controllers of large platforms to dictate/limit/direct the public discourse.

should have the ability to restrict hate speech and threats of violence

Who decides what is considered hate speech and threats of violence?

The rest of your comment indicates you’re aware of the vagueness of these terms (and existing instances of regulatory abuse).

IMO any sufficiently large online platform should constitute a public space for purposes of these freedoms, essentially removing the ability of individual organizations to direct public discourse through platform ownership.

This is what inevitably happens when freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason. Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with.

Sometimes

There are plenty of things that Americans, in general, actually agree on. As much as the expression is disliked, there is a broad center that endorses at least moderate reform.

The problem is the fptp system that bundles people who are okay “just a little reform but not too much” with actual regressives, and people who actively support moderate reform with those too progressive for the “just a little” folks.

The end result is stagnation in popular issues due to the inflexibility of the electorate and enabling less democratic influences to dictate policy.

Doing something that gets your org banned by a government that isn’t even the one you’re protesting seems not only ineffective but counterproductive to me.

Censorship laws in the UK are quite dystopian, but even in less authoritarian countries, this kind of action would result in serious consequences.

that equipment was being used to further a genocide against the Palestinian people.

[Citation needed]

Finding out part of fucking around.

Countries don’t usually take kindly to people or organizations that break into military bases and vandalize equipment.

They already are. Marginal tax rate on income is ~66% and tax pressure as a whole is close to 50% of GDP. Hence increasing taxes isn’t really feasible.

No. Citizenship for a child in my country is tied to a huge amount of rights and access to welfare that essentially extends across a lifetime. Birthright citizenship would inevitably lead to an increase in (already significant) abuse of our strained welfare system.

Right now what’s needed is rapid reform in order to salvage as much of it as possible. We can’t afford to rapidly expand the system to include more people.

It’s possible to reduce the privacy issues by using APIs with a local frontend. Given that APIs usually cater to companies instead of end consumers they actually have simple opt-outs for information logging.

Requires a bit of know-how, and you’ll be paying for your llm per use (not that bad actually, I’ve personally averaged <10$/yr in api costs) but at least you get to have all your personal issues on your local device instead.

For a chatGPT-like experience you probably want the ooga booga web generation ui but there’s others too.

Tehran Times is completely untrustworthy in this context, they’re - essentially a propaganda outlet for the islamist theocratic regime in Tehran. Given that they make such an absurd claim and that it hasn’t been independently verified - this is likely false.

See link below regarding Tehran Times:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Times#cite_note-regime-1

Same here. Back before that I was basically only on reddit. Now I’m only on fediverse. One (anti-)social media is more than enough.