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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Austria, Ireland, Denmark, and Finland are all DAC members and aren’t included in the graph. The graph is unequivocally misleading, which is my original point.

    The article itself does have a more comprehensive table, but it uses outdated figures from several years ago. The title of the article is “List of development aid sovereign state donors” and yet it excludes major ODA donors such as Saudi Arabia, not only from the DAC list but also from the second list.

    I don’t understand why people keep defending this when I outlined like 10 separate errors already. Are you even reading my comments or am I responding to bots?


  • It isn’t titled “foreign aid per capita among western countries” though. The fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also in the top 20 paints a very different picture of what placing highly on the list actually means.

    Furthermore, it doesn’t say “among western countries with greater than 8.5m population except for Norway which is much smaller”. The caption says “among countries with large populations”, where a large population is defined as greater than 8.5 million. That’s extremely misleading and arbitrary. And then Austria and Saudi Arabia are omitted anyway, despite fitting all the above criteria.

    So yeah, I would definitely go so far, and in fact I considered going further and calling it outright misinformation.




  • I think you did a really good job with this video. I kinda agree that it might be too long to hook complete newcomers. But it seems like a very useful resource for people who are just starting off on the fediverse or have heard about it a few times and want to understand more about how it actually works before really getting into it.

    I think there will be a good number of people who bounce off the fediverse a few times before starting to actively use it, because it is relatively complex compared to mainstream social media. But then they will keep getting annoyed at corporate social media sucking and will eventually fully commit to the fediverse. This video could definitely help people take that step, and it really captures a lot of what makes the fediverse so great. Nicely done!



  • This graph is extremely misleading.

    First of all it states in the caption that it only includes

    highest donation rates among countries with large populations

    Even of this disclaimer were true, it’s completely arbitrary and makes no sense. Norway (5.5 million) has about 8 times the population of Luxembourg (670,000). Whereas the US (340 million) has about 60 times the population of Norway. If such a size discrepancy is so meaningful that Luxembourg should be excluded, then how can it be relevant to compare Norway with the US despite the vastly larger population discrepancy? Luxembourg should be #3 btw along with Liechtenstein (2) and Monaco (4).

    More damningly, they don’t even live up to their disclaimer. Taking the numbers straight from the quoted source. They randomly excluded Denmark (7) and Ireland (8), which are just as populous as Norway and almost equivalent to Sweden in per capita ODA. They also excluded Iceland (11) and Finland (12), which come in above UK/Canada/Belgium/France. And then as the cherry on top they conveniently excluded Qatar (17) and Saudi Arabia (18). The US is #19. And then it’s also missing Austria (20), UAE (21), and New Zealand (23), before you get to Australia, which is actually 24th, not 12th.

    Furthermore, ODA is just a small part of the economic picture. As it states in the wikipedia article

    by definition, ODA does not include private donations

    The US is giving approximately $64.5 billion annually in ODA. In comparison, private charitable donations from American individuals, foundations, and corporations totalled $557 billion in 2023, with 67% of that money coming from individual donations.

    Granted, many of those donations are directed towards domestic causes, but even if a relatively small percentage is directed towards foreign causes, it alters the narrative that is told by this graph. For instance, this organization is largely funded by the Gates foundation, which is a private charitable organization, and thus not included as ODA.

    The foundation has donated more than $6.6 billion for global health programs, including over $1.3 billion donated as of 2012 on malaria alone, greatly increasing the dollars spent per year on malaria research. Before the Gates efforts on malaria, malaria drugmakers had largely given up on producing drugs to fight the disease, and the foundation is the world’s largest donor to research on diseases of the poor. With the help of Gates-funded vaccination drives, deaths from measles in Africa have dropped by 90 percent since 2000.

    In conclusion, I feel like that graph helps paint a certain political narrative that isn’t even remotely accurate, partially because it randomly omits about half of the countries in the top 25, and partially because it’s measuring a very limited subset of philanthropic activity.




  • I agree with you, but I feel that you’re glossing over the bigger point. In my view, you’re right about the way most social media users behave, but that behavior is also bound to slowly change as people get a better grip on how it is effecting them in a negative way. We as a society are learning the hard way about how toxic social media can be.

    Most people are dumb and they don’t have time to consider whether something is better or worse, especially something as new as social media. But when they start to notice other people (like us!) doing something differently and having a better experience, they eventually catch on and change their behavior.

    It’s like how it took a long time for people to stop smoking cigarettes, but once the tide turned it happened within a couple generations. Or wearing seat belts, or any other new, cool technology/product that people eventually started to understand better and adapt to after a few generations. Social media is like that, and we are simply the early adopters of a more humane and healthy form of social media. It takes a long time, but people will eventually start to understand how corporate social media is an unhealthy and exploitative habit, and this decentralized, community driven model is a much better experience.


  • We’ve kinda been hibernating since July 2023, with the userbase rapidly declining from that peak and then remaining nearly constant for the entirety of 2024. Honestly it’s quite impressive that we held such a steady monthly user count for the past year.

    But now with all the publicity around the fediverse, we are beginning to pick up some organic momentum again. We’ve grown by about 2k active users in January (~5% growth). Keep that up for a few more months and it will start to become noticeable with more activity, which should hopefully start a positive feedback loop.

    Regarding finding and subscribing to communities on other instances, I’m pretty sure this tool addresses that problem fairly effectively.

    https://lemmy-federate.com/

    You may want to add your instance to that.