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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: March 9th, 2025
  • Canadians won’t do shit on this front.

    I’m literally watching a “merger” in the financial industry, where the smaller player, who used a linux-based back-end stack for the banking system, is being forced to adopt the ‘industry standard’ of the larger financial institution – the industry standard being a US company system, running on Microsoft products, and using an Indian company, running the online banking in Microsoft’s cloud. Having a ‘sovereign’ local community credit union isn’t enough to get members/loans apparently.

    Even had an opportunity to ask the new CEO about whether they thought it was a prudent move, given the constant news/trade tensions (admittedly, prior to the most recent issue) – and the CEO’s response was basically “I have a piece of paper from a third party that says there’s no risk, so shut up”. Also, the very accurate comment of “I don’t think the back end matters to people in general, no one is going to move their accounts just to be with a sovereign setup, if they can get a slightly better rate elsewhere”. And you can’t really argue that, seeing as the smaller company that’s being ‘merged’ couldn’t leverage it to gain memberships.

    The regulators don’t only not care about this sort of thing, they encourage industry to move things into US tech giant clouds. It’s hilarious, the BC outsourcing regulations say to avoid concentration, but the regulators themselves practically disregard it and demand everyone use Microsoft, and FISERV (a US backend banking host provider that provides core services for like 80% of the credit unions around). The regulators themselves are in US tech giant clouds. There’s practically no chance that our government actually takes any kind of stand against Microsoft or US tech giants.

  • Agreed. I’ve voted center-left in pretty well every election of my adult life. Generally in favour of a socially progressive / fiscally conservative approach irl. Donated to green party campaigns. Was a card carrying member of Greenpeace for years. But on Lemmy, when I express a generally neutral viewpoint on a topic, and/or don’t support hard-left positions, I’ll be accused of being a right-wing republican nutjob who’s destroying America and supporting Trump and crew’s agenda. Even more amusing in that I’m Canadian, make no attempts to hide that fact, and am vocally part of the “don’t buy american stuff” crowd.

  • I do think it feels insular/hostile, though my take is different than yours. Yes, I’ve had some folks nitpick posts and one up, though I imagine you get that in many similar social media sites – there’re reasons for the running joke that in order to get a correct answer online, you gotta post a question as a woman, and confidently answer it wrong on a male account, and then people will pile on with correct answers and judgey-ments.

    Many of the sites that seem to get posted to lemmy are on VERY fringey locations, locations that often seem highly likely to be hosting malicious content. There’s also far fewer people posting topics, with a very small group of users having like 10k+ posts per year. So it feels a lot more ‘concentrated’, especially on particular subjects, due to those posters’ bias’: if you’re an aggressive poster, it’s fairly easy to astroturf lemmy. Which feels insular / bubbly.

    Adding to that, Lemmy has mods who are just as heavy-handed as on Reddit or any other heavily moderated setup – though lemmy’ll moderate things in a far more ‘progressive’ friendly way than most alternatives these days. Pejoratives are allowed for some groups, but not others. Even calling that sort of thing out in more explicit terms, though still in a neutral tone, can get you banned from many communities on Lemmy.

  • Lemmy skews left, and censors moderate views / comments. You’re generally ok in various areas to be openly hostile towards certain demographics – typically white people, cisgendered people or men in general. You can use pejorative language to describe those groups with impunity. You can get banned from lemmy sites for questioning left-leaning narratives. Functionally, it’s not that dissimilar.

    Censorship is used in part to cater a site to its market niche / audience. Whether you agree/disagree with a sites censorship approach, is generally based on whether you’re in that target audience / intended marketing bubble. If you’ve never been censored on a site for moderate views, you’re just squarely in the target group.