Max-P

To talk to the people much more than just navigating the app, they want to meaningfully engage and be accessible to the chinese people because it’s their app meant for actual chinese people.

It’s not even to go for a TikTok clone, it’s more to do with the avoidance of Meta products because they’re following Twitter and allowing toxicity and constantly pushing ads and influencers and MAGA. Someone decided hey it would be funny if we just installed an actual Chinese app just out of spite since we’re effectively getting censored anyway so getting censored on a chinese app to blow it all up would be funny. It was supposed to be a meme.

Turns out the chinese people on there were mostly excited to get so much attention and an opportunity to talk with americans. Loads of kids there practicing their english, and people felt so welcomed they’re trying to learn the language and everything’s subtitled in chinese+english because they want to communicate back and make their content accessible to them out of respect. There’s plenty of content there to teach chinese to the newcomers too. Bunch decided to stay because it’s just pretty nice since the lack of politics and “sensitive” topics it’s a very positive and welcoming platform for once.

The whole thing is a completely accidental cultural exchange on a massive scale, and a very rare case where americans and chinese people kind of can talk directly like that. Both sides gets to peek at the other’s lifestyle and bond over common things instead of hating on eachother. They aren’t learning chinese to use the app, they’re learning it to communicate and exchange with the people. The chinese government seems unconcerned and welcoming as an extra fuck you to the US.

The algorithm is surprisingly not really biased nor pushing propaganda. It’s happily suggesting me openly queer content (with a lack of hate comments and americans being called out for their hateful comments), they have gun content, they have a car scene, they have their thirst traps (with respectful comments), it’s really not all that different than us and not the propaganda machine the US is so concerned about. It kind of leans more left than TikTok if anything, which makes the ban even more questionable.

7 days currently, 30 days on the previous boot. I had to open it up to install extra drives.

I’m witnessing it firsthand, conservatives with a long history of being conservative on TikTok, spending a couple hours talking to chinese citizens and coming back completely shocked they have eggs for the equivalent of less than a dollar here, and massive family sized grocery hauls for like 50 bucks. People that thought their entire life chinese people work 80 hours week in dirty factories and basically slave labour, and they get on there and see average office workers ordering and showing their DoorDash equivalent like it’s the price of a coffee.

You don’t have to be a tankie to see why the government is worried. At minimum hundreds of thousands of americans are seeing chinese people living in (or appear to be living in) much better conditions than they do, and it’s making a lot of them rethink their life especially gen-z. That’s a huge threat to the US stability whether it’s clever chinese propaganda or not, or even whether you think it’s a good thing or not.

The national security threat in question is americans accessing Chinese content and figuring out the commies have everything they thought voting Trump would give them.

They didn’t even believe the CCP propaganda there and we’re just coming in being like “yeah it’s actually worse than that”. At this point it’s worth it for them to just… let it be because we’re giving them better than their own propaganda.

The “threat” is americans daring going a bit more left than even the democrats. It’s not about China, it’s about controlling and owning social media to control the narrative.

The same as already happens on lemmy.ml 😂

Also shockingly getting more gun content than I ever did on TikTok and YouTube, turns out they kinda like guns too minus the shooting schools part.

Yep, the sentiment is overwhelmingly what’s so bad about China having our data when Meta does exactly the same if not worse. There’s literal memes about skipping the middleman and sending it directly to China.

Quite a bunch are also learning mandarin to integrate better with them and a lot of chatter about how the divide is entitely made up by the government. The governments are fighting but the people on both sides are nice.

Some culture shock for americans is families in China can actually afford to stock up on food without going broke. Like, a lot of americans are seeing through the US propaganda for the first time.

They might not have free speech there and the guidelines are pretty strict, but one glaring thing is it’s just a good experience there. No arguing, no shitty political takes. The lack of constant negativity and fighting is a breath of fresh air compared to what the american social medias are pushing non-stop because it’s clicks and views and ad money.

I think it’s all a good thing: diversification of social media platforms so you get different perspectives and cultures. We get to see first hand what life really is over there and the reverse as well. And the likelyhood that both the US and China pressure social medias to silence the same discourse is pretty small. You can make fun of Trump and Musk all day there and you won’t mysteriously get burried by the algorithn because Elon pulled some strings to quiet it down. The good stuff has a tendency of being on the other side of borders.

You know the government fucked up big time when thousands of americans are fleeing to Chinese apps and learning the language and all.

Ultimately we need to prepare for a future where the majority of jobs have been automated and need a way to keep the economy going. Everyone being employed full time is just something that is not sustainable on the long term as technology progresses. We’ll eventually need UBI because otherwise all the money will be transferred to nearly fully automated companies controlling basically everything. We just won’t be able to keep everyone employed without creating a massive amount of bullshit jobs nobody really wants to do. The better way is UBI and people going into research or creative works, and aim higher like space travel.

We’re not quite ready yet and people are way too invested in capitalism for this to work just yet. But it will become a necessity eventually. It’s not just affecting IT, it’s affecting all sectors: we can basically 3D print houses now, we’re not far off automating farming either. We will reach a point where most of society has been automated, we can feed everyone effortlessly.

Damn that’s a lot of bandwidth

Because the government wants the data collection. They just want it to be an american company so they get a copy of it all.

As for alternatives, I’ve heard lots of good things about Tailscale (or headscale if you want to self host).

If them connecting to you is an option, WireGuard is also stupidly easy to set up and very reliable. If you need to also forward layer 2 traffic (old LAN games and weird local protocols), you can use OpenVPN for that. A bit hard to set up but also quite capable.

Unfortunately that trace isn’t very useful due to the lack of debug symbols. One would have to decompile and analyze the binary to really gather some information as to how that happened, and it’s probably against their TOS.

hamachi will occasionally disconnect *and then ask for my password to restart the service. *

The GUI is probably trying to restart the daemon for you which causes this, because that’s not standard behaviour. You can probably fix that but just allowing your user to do that passwordless, although it’s dumb:

# /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/50-hamachi.rules
polkit.addRule(function (action, subject) {
    if (
        subject.user === "YOURUSERNAMEHERE"
        && action.id === "org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units"
        && action.lookup("unit") === "logmein-hamachi.service"
    ) {
        return polkit.Result.YES;
    }
})

You’ll want to change your username in there and also adjust the service name if it’s different.

He says that like other countries aren’t also a democracy. If the people wantes liberated they literally would just vote that kind of government in!