Starting up wikis is so easy nowadays that there's no excuse. I maintain a few Dokuwiki-based ones, it's my preferred engine for simple wiki stuff, but Mediawiki (the same one that powers Wikipedia) is not bad either and not really too difficult, just a bit more demanding storage-wise. Heck, you can currently fire-and-forget DW-based wikis on SDF's "one payment" access tier, even! Probably on Neocities too, haven't checked.
TLDR; Fandom has a lot of QAnon articles written to make the scams seem legitimate to less computer savvy people.
My mom has fallen in a Qanon conspiracy world. The people from that world write Fandom articles about themselves to make it seem legitimate. I found them when I started investigating these people trying to convince her to steer clear.
no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
we have to use a decentralized open alternative (like lemmy) to take back control, switching to a proprietary solution by yet another company will only delay the problem further.
We can’t just get out of capitalism, but you can work to improve your situation. If you have a yard, grow a garden.
Also, see if there’s a mutual aid group in your area, and if not consider talking with your neighbors about what you can do to help each other out. One person might be good with car Maintanance. Another might be a good gardener. Everyone can contribute something.
Gardening will not solve the climate crisis because it won’t offset the millions of tons of co2 being emitted.
It would help, sure, but we have to radically change production to stop it. Currently the rich own those, so the best we can do short of removing them is plead.
Also yes, you can’t just get rid of capitalism, history shows it takes years/decades of planning and organizing. Start as soon as possible because I don’t think we have all that much time.
Where did I say it would solve the climate crisis? I was just having an alternative to capitalism to provide some of your food. Of course it won’t dismantle capitalism or save the world. People have been gardening forever, yet here we are. It’s just a step you can take to take some control over your situation back.
Never said I would’nt do it either. I’d love to grow my own food over pesticide garbage we have in supermarkets here. I just don’t have any land at all, and there isnt any in a pretty big radius around me.
That’s fair. Most people don’t. You can probably still grow some food if you have access to a balcony even. It won’t be much, but it can offset some of your reliance on purchasing it.
Also, again, look into mutual aid groups around you. There may be someone who does have space for a garden and produces more than they can consume. Maybe you have some skill or ability that could help them and get some food in return.
and better if that capital comes from a network of companies/volunteers instead of one monolithic corporation that can just bully everyone into their will.
no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
There was a time, long ago, where companies actually cared about their customers, and wanted to sell them good products while making a profit, and they strived for the win - win, and the “customer is always right” philosophy. They took their fair share, and they didn’t triy to squeeze every last dime out of their customers with crappy products.
Not that that they were saints by any stretch of the imagination (there were definitely bad players back then too) but there used to be a sense of ethics with Capitalism, in America at least, a sense of products being warrantied to work the way they should be and advertised as how they would actually work.
I have no effing idea how to get back to that state, as it seems like the “lunch for wimps” crowd are running the c-suites these days.
No way of going back to that state unless we start from scratch, power is too consolidated as it is. And capitalism would soon evolve back to something like this eventually anyway.
We are on late stage capitalism now, as predicted by Marx.
e: also those better times werent that good either if you werent white/from somewhere rich, not long ago kids were working in coal mines.
Regulation. Take the money out of governing, both national government and private directors. If someone makes decisions that affect many people, make that person accountable, either through a competitive market or a functioning justice system.
The problem is that the fantastically efficient tool that is capitalism will try to increase it reach as much as possible. Killing competition and undermining laws will always be the end goal, so long as they are in anyway allowed.
The reason companies used to care is because not caring drove customers to the competition. But then there was no competition, and the care evaporated. As long as they are allowed, they will take. Civility can only be guaranteed if profits are on the line.
I used to have the app, but that was ad galore. Now when I browse it, usually for some book series, with firefox and some ad blockers, it’s perfectly fine to read and browse. So I don’t really get the hate, but that might be because I don’t usually browse it for new content, but as a reference for finished series, like the wheel of time.
The biggest insult is that Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia helped create fandom because he was fed up of people using Wikipedia to create detailed articles about fictional characters and video games. Wikipedia now has an artificially strict notability policy where things are falsely declared as not notable so they can be monetized on Fandom, all while Jimbo Wales has the gall to ask for money for his “non profit” Wikipedia while he makes the real money on Fandom.
I mean the conspiracy theory side of it is questionable but the basic facts are true:
Wikipedia has a policy against non-notable things. They were always embarrassed by the fact that every detailed version of every Pokemon had its own page, whereas the pages for important historical events were stubs. The WP:Notability standard has been the bane of every garage band and open-source game and DVD extra that was booted off the site because trivia cannot meaningfully be checked, trivia that otherwise allows hoax articles to live on.
Jimbo Wales decided to profit off of the desire to create fan-encyclopedias or even complete nonsense (like, for example, Penny Arcade’s Elemenstor Saga wiki, which details the history of a novel series and anime and cardgame that never existed) by creating Wikia, the for-profit Wikipedia that had no standards about what you could put on it besides legality. Just create your own Wikia and run it with an iron fist.
Now, the question is whether he did (1) in order to drive profitable users to (2). That’s where the conspiracy question lives. And I tend to assume good faith. People’s morals erode over time, not all at once. Since both (1) and (2) are totally legitimate, but profit motive encourages the millimetre-by-millimetre enshittification of Wikia into the horrible thing it is today.
It doesn’t seem so devious to me. He wanted Wikipedia to be considered a serious source of information which admittedly, detailed pages for video games, fictional characters and such would work against that goal. Being a non profit also works towards being taken seriously in the eyes of some.
So he created a secondary company to host that content and profit from it. Why not, I would argue. Don’t use the product If you don’t like it. I personally hate wikia. It’s slow and covered in ads. The question I ask is why is there no competition in the space? Jimbo’s not on the hook for that.
The video posted is actually all about what the competition is like :) its hard to compete with a huge company like wikia/fandom, but folks are making it work anyway, and that’s pretty cool. I really enjoyed the video
I’d be very curious to hear more details on this, do you happen to have a source handy, or any recommended reading?
In fairness, the money he gets from being a scumbag with fandom probably can’t be used to fund Wikipedia unless he wants to donate the money he’s making from his business to run his nonprofit. It’s not surprising he wouldn’t do that (even if thats the way the world ought to work) and I don’t presently have reason to believe he personally gets anything out of the donations that are given to keep Wikipedia running
Why would we need a fediverse alternative 😂 unless you want to go around editing wikis with your mastodon account, wikis are basically just static webpages. It’s called HTML 😂
Believe it or not, Wikipedia actually does use a single global account for all of its wikis. That includes Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, and almost every other site listed on their website. The only one you have to create a separate account for is their test wiki where they test new versions of MediaWiki (the software they develop for their wikis).
Jimmy Wales actually isn’t as directly involved in Wikipedia as he once was. These days, he only holds the chair emeritus and the founder’s seat on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
His chair position changed to a chair emeritus in 2006, and the site implemented the unified login feature in May 2008, though they’d been discussing implementing the feature since 2005.
Wikis like Fandom typically make it easy/easier to create and edit pages. Wiki editors are rare and you want to make it as easy for them to latch onto helping and volunteering as is possible.
Maybe a fediverse option isn’t needed (though the below comment’s point about having a central account would make it easier for a lot of users), but having a convenient and easy way to create a wiki for your favorite fandom, without using Fandom would go a long way toward breaking Fandom’s hold over the entertainment sections of the internet.
I learned about this plug in the other day. Indie Wiki Buddy. It’s not a fediverse alternative, but it’s the next best thing. It can redirect your Fandom results to their independent alternatives.
I only use it for WoWpedia, because it has a lot of information from years ago. I still remember when they added so many unnecessary interface elements and the website became slower. Luckily, I found userstyles.world/style/5722/clean-fandom-wiki, which made it usable again.
Mfw you want to check some quick Minecraft details and you get a pop up then half your screen covered with one video. Thank heavens that they created minecraft.wiki as a wiki is basically essential for playing that game.
I agree with the premise; fandom sucks. But does it really require a 20 minute exposé though?
I’ve seen a few links to the Indie Wiki Buddy extension page. I’m not too interested in installing a browser extension to find new wikis, but I bookmarked their listing page: getindie.wiki/listings/
Another comment without watching so I might be repeating something in the video, but did they mention how poor bloated the site is? I was trying to use the Forgotten Realms wiki and after a few tabs it would grind my browser to a halt. For something that really just needs to be serving text and a few images it’s wild how badly the site performs.
You could always use Invidious or Piped (instance list here) to avoid using YT directly if you want. You won’t get any ads or anti-adblocker bullshit with Invidious, so I usually use that. I’m not sure about Piped, but it seems good too. Unless your point is to simply stop using YT for anything, in which case just ignore what I said.
EDIT: To the now 8 of you who downvoted me, just, why? No, seriously, why. If you downvote me, please at least tell me why you are instead of downvoting and leaving. It makes me anxious to think that I was a dick or spreading misinformation or just being rude and not even noticing it, and would much rather have someone say something to me so I can at least know what people don’t like. That’s not to say I would agree with it, I might not, but I’d rather know what the problem is so I can agree or disagree.
I think it’s the fact that not everything needs a 20 minute video. There’s a lot of topics that I’m interested in but skip because I don’t have 20, 30, 40, 60 minutes for it.
That makes sense. I just thought he had something against Youtube (and for good reason), since he only said “Not watching a YT video” instead of “Not watching a 20min video”.
