I didn’t even know you could do bots on lemmy

That’s enchanterelling.

I tried to visit but their security certificate is expired. Are they still a legit site?

Do you think the fediverse has a civility problem?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: social media (and humans) have a civility problem. And I wonder how much of it is astroturfed. When Trump was first running for the 2016 election, social media was flooded with racism. You disagreed with one twitter egg, and five more were like “debate me bro” and they had all these stats about race-science, and rhetoric to misconstrue the nature of equality and the value of liberalism. I don’t think it was grassroots. I think it was Steve Bannon’s troll army or some other coordinated institution. Here on Lemmy I keep seeing violent leftist rhetoric, and I also wonder if it’s feds, or reddit’s goons undermining the competition. They’ll post “murder all pigs” or “shoot fascists” and get like a thousand upvotes, and their arguments are belligerent and idiotic, and they pile on you for disagreeing. Feels coordinated. Feels like 2016 honestly.

is there anything we can do about it?

Downvote, report, block. Don’t engage (trying to remember that myself). But I bet they’re still driving people away.

violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs,

The people I’m talking about (the worst ones) don’t even have an “end.” No plan at all. The violence is the end. It’s pure stupidity. I see it as the lust for violence, coming up with some politics to justify itself.

I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It’s why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting “kill a cop” or “kill fascists” memes, like this is literally an “advocate violence” platform. I don’t expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.

Social media is kinda washed up. A lot of people are on substack, too. The internet as a place is just less popular, I think. We’re all getting sick of it.

In theory the fediverse is not a monolith. We actually want for this to not work.

This is the answer.

Hire Steve Bannon as a marketer?

They already disappeared around 2017 when Steve Bannon’s racist troll armies flooded every single social media site or app. The auto-immune reaction killed the host, which I suspect was the point.

I never considered CSV but that would be the simplest way to store basic definitions.

There will be complicated behavior. And a bit of hierarchical data (each item will belong to a specific map). Plus I want inheritance so they can perform different functions on different screens. But the basic data is fairly simple.

Is there a good CSV library you use to read the data into C++?