One thing I disagree with there is that the OG Star Wars did seem to try to warn against the decadence of bureaucratic systems - their wastefulness, their slowness, their corruption, and especially vulnerability to takeover and being converted into authoritarian regimes, etc. I think the real, deeper message of Star Wars was that despite how it may appear to a naive view from a first glance, there really is not just one right way to do things. Again, as you said, in the older ones.

This ofc came across way better in the books, and you can strongly and probably successfully argue that George Lucas simply wanted money and fame and saw none of this himself. Except that it's the tale of history, like Rome, so it's not even his telling just his borrowing existing elements so that space wizards could have laser sword fights:-).

It is a fascinating thought to consider though: the Jedi were "good", but turned a blind eye to evil and then were slaughtered, so ultimately what good were they? Conversely the Sith were "evil" and yet they brought order and stability to the galaxy... except they didn't bc the Rebellion was disruptive (but was it though, or was it a counter force used to provide a reason to sell the masses on the need for order?) and then ultimately Vader turned to love and overthrew the emperor. So... ah... TLDR: Yin Yang saved the day?

I see an extreme amount of parallels with e.g. Trump, rising as an emperor out of the fallen systems of democracy, not in spite of but seemingly directly at the behest of The People. And not to fight a real enemy so much as a manufactured one. Star Wars was fortunately not all that relevant to the 1970s era, while the 1960s Star Trek and later renditions in like the 90s really inspired people, relegating Star Wars to mere fantasy. But looking back in hindsight... there was a lot that we could have learned from, if only we had been open to it.

I like that phrasing: Star Wars is more "dramatic". Although it got fairly deep into politics too, which I think most people simply glazed over. The perils and vulnerability of democracies to authoritarian takeovers from within definitely sounds a tiny bit familiar these days, though would have fallen more on deaf ears ~50 years ago.

Yup. Fortunately most of what I've said is already in PieFed. Notably, PieFed is lacking in some of the foundationals - like when a post is deleted the notification for it remains, and these kinds of things can be quite frustrating, plus the search feature is not good. However, while I would not recommend it to a brand new member of the Fediverse, I am using it as a daily driver myself, who knows how to fall back to Lemmy to compensate for its shortcomings. So there is hope for the Threadiverse, regardless of Lemmy on its own.:-)

Thank you. I don't always give good advice but if this one helps all parties involved then I'll be glad.:-)

I don't know much what the performance bottlenecks would look like for a social media platform. Pages themselves can only be so large though I assume that as the total amount of content grows then it would scale more with activity, yet even that would have bounds placed upon it like no ability to comment on posts older than six months. Naively to me that sounds like it could take great advantage of parallelization, and therefore not be as well suited for Python, though perhaps an actual database system is being used? Which is obviously true so to clarify I meant using Python to connect to some more optimized SQL engine, and yet that sounds naive even to my own ears so definitely not trying to pass myself off as an expert.

There may be value in seeing features arrive more quickly though, especially as people are leaving Lemmy to go back to Reddit, so if something could help them want to stay or even help bring in new ones, then even short term benefits may contribute towards a longer term future.

Not even that - I saw this on the internet and decided to share bc I thought it was funny:-).

There isn't a system built into Lemmy where qualified users can demote moderators.

As much as I agree that there is a very large degree of similarity between Lemmy and Reddit, there is though: community members can appeal to an admin, and there is also the "owner" level even above that, if not the same. You really wouldn't even want to go above that, bc if someone pays for a machine then to some degree it really truly is "theirs", unless you go down a few levels and do what the 196 members did: just flat walk out and go elsewhere:-).

Also, PieFed has some really interesting ideas for democratization of moderation where instead of the purely binary "remove" vs. "allow", power is placed into the hands of individual community members to tweak the settings to get the kind of experience that they want. e.g. posts below a voting threshold can be automatically collapsed, or even hidden altogether, thus allowing the entirety of a community to make that decision for someone, if they want, or the user can not use that feature and preserve the ability to read the content - again, unlike a mod decision that must either preserve the content in its entirety or else remove it altogether, without capability to provide such nuances. Additionally, there are other factors such as labels that can be placed onto user accounts ("new user <2 weeks old", "has >10x more downvotes than upvotes", "posts but never comments or votes so looks like an unregistered bot account", etc.), plus you can define your own emoji labels to help remind you not to engage or something.

I don't know if or when we'll ever see such on Lemmy, which was written by authoritarians for their own purposes, and we are merely allowed to use their software. If we want differently though, we'll need to create it. As K/Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks are doing!:-)

I highly enjoyed the Crash Course US History series.

Today is a good day to die!

Ah... I mean for the kids, yeah.

Bc blah blah "dramatic tension" blah blah.:-D