Perhaps. In theory, you’re definitely right. I just feel that this is something where building the momentum during a single election cycle isn’t feasible. The most likely result of voting for a third party without laying this groundwork would be splitting the vote and giving a landslide victory to the greater of the two evils.

Formally organising online would make it possible to demonstrate how much support each candidate actually has without giving an official vote to a candidate that the general public isn’t confident enough to vote for. Watching participation grow and third parties receive substantial semi-official support could build excitement and lead to a third party being trusted to have the sway to win.

I’d love to be proven wrong though. If we can organize enough support for a third party within a single election cycle that it’s reasonable to risk voting for that candidate, I’m open to it. I already have too much on my plate, but if no one has built this service by the time I have energy for it, I’ll definitely be thinking about it

I suppose it’ll continue until enough people believe that it’s possible for a third party to win.

I think ranked choice voting would make it much simpler to foment that change. People need to be able to trust that breaking from the party line has a real chance of success, but that can’t happen without demonstrating support.

If we can’t have real ranked choice voting, a third party could build a website to let people coordinate votes according to ranked choice, and hopefully carry the result as a unified bloc to the polls. Have an agreement that if a certain threshold of participation is met, vote for the ranked choice result. Otherwise, lesser of 2 evils.

We honestly should just replace every single fixed dollar amount in every law with an algebraic formula. It’s ridiculous that we design laws to become dated and require replacement.

Minimum wage should be tied to worker productivity, and wealth tax should be tied to the median personal income, including that of non-working adults. Welfare programs should be tied to regional cost of living. Limits on rent should be tied to changes in regional median income.

We’re already tracking most or all of that data anyway, might as well put it to maximum use.

I’d also like to hear what your idea is. I don’t know of a platform to solicit someone building your device at a price you’ll be wanting to pay, but there are forums to help you learn how to do it yourself if you’re motivated enough.

If it’s cool enough to pique interest, you could try posting the concept in an electronics community and seeing if anyone’s interested in the challenge, or an ideas community and just floating it for people to choose to run with.

It’s also possible the device already exists and someone can suggest an easy option for you

Yeah, I haven’t been around here too long either, but it feels like something interesting is happening for sure. There’s tons of memes, but there’s definitely also some interesting non-meme content. It’s shaping up to be a replacement for the core of what made Reddit work, hopefully while learning what not to do along the way. I know of at least 1-2 new apps on the way from seasoned 3rd party Reddit devs. Sync (!syncforlemmy@lemmy.world) will likely become my app of choice when it’s available.

The biggest issue I’m seeing right now is the amount of data we’re asking server admins to store as far as long-term sustainability. In a Lemmy Support community, I saw one admin saying their 1k-user instance was gobbling up an extra GB of disk space daily. I wonder if the devs could overhaul the content distribution system to reduce the number of copies of data stored? Maybe clusters where each cluster is a “core federation” inner circle that shares/mirrors content with each other (basically a pact to distribute seeding the network), then more loosely federated servers that are allowed to view/share data without fully mirroring all relevant content.

So many subs got shut down, and some definitely were questionable at best, but in it, Reddit organic feel and freedom

While I agree that deplatforming should be very cautiously and judiciously approached, I will say that there is some content that should be blocked for the sake of preservation of tolerance. I don’t care whether the topic of discussion is legal, I care if it’s ethical. Hate speech has, and does, encourage real violence against innocent parties. When the goal post keeps moving for the sake of attracting investors or silence activism, rather than focusing solely on user experience, we start to see unreasonable restrictions on free communication. With federation and open source software, there’s no way to stop neonazis from setting up their own network, provided DNS is willing to point to them, but that doesn’t mean we should assist in growing their ideology/platform.

Not to mention moderation was being done by a shrinking number of people and it seemed the echo chamber in each individual sub got worse.

I wonder if this might be a reflection on increasingly difficult times for many people as cost of living exceeds income? Moderation takes real work. It’s unpaid and generally quite thankless. If would-be mods are bogged down with real-world problems, they’ll have less energy to devote to volunteering.