I don't spend any time on Mastodon.

Why? Are there anarchists on Mastodon? Or is this some kind of sarcasm I'm not getting?

I do have a Mastodon account, but I never use it. I much prefer forums over microblogs.

This is pretty accurate, but it should be noted that ALL ideologies can be and often are treated essentially as religions.

They all serve as dogmas and myths around which a set of true believers congregate, who then alternate between telling each other their myths of inherent superiority, proselytizing non-believers and lashing out at the followers of competing sects. They all lay out moral guidelines by which they can both affirm the faithful and condemn the heretics and unbelievers. They all demand absolute submission and attack any sign of deviation, and since they've defined themselves as inherently morally superior, they consider any of those attacks to be self-evidently morally justified. They all have a hierarchy (whether formal or informal) by which dogma is disseminated to the faithful, with the view (again, whether formal or informal) that ideas that have not been sanctioned by the designated people somehow don't qualify.

And, pointedly, they all have their own "Satans" - the ideas and/or people that they can generally be counted on to blame for whatever evil might arise.

I browse on All almost exclusively, and if a community or poster is notably toxic or spammy I block them, but if they just don't interest me, then I just scroll past them.

Honestly, I don't even understand what the supposed problem is. The world is full of things that don't interest me. That's just the way it goes, and really it's just background noise that I barely even notice.

Generally, for me, it means something less than entirely "good."

The times I'm most likely to use it are when I'm finding minor fault with something - "Well... it was pretty good, but..." or when something is better than I expected, but not quite fully good - "Hey! That was actually pretty good!"

Well... yes. I don't see it as much more than simple materialism simply because I don't think that humanity in general is anything close to equipped to make much more of it.

With the internet, cheap mobile phones, and wireless tech, humanity has given itself a global consciousness

Yes, and that global consciousness has revealed itself to be to some significant degree petty, ignorant, self-absorbed and mean-spirited.

I think that at this point in time, humanity is far more in need of philosophical and sociological advancement than technological.

I don't care what other people choose to do with/to their own bodies. It's none of my business, at all, ever.

For myself, I'm not sure. I don't have the means, so it's irrelevant, but if I did... I don't know. I don't have any issue with it really, but it doesn't particularly appeal to me either. I can of course see advantages to overcoming the limitations of a natural body, but for whatever reason, I've never been much for pursuing fulfillment by acquiring things (which is pretty much what augmentation boils down to). It just seems to be too much hassle for too little gain, and particularly since the acquisition of things never leads to real fulfillment anyway - it just fuels the desire to acquire even more things.

Most likely, given the choice, I'd choose to just continue to inhabit my natural, unaugmented shell. But I really don't know.

I can't even quite visualize how that could happen.

I can sort of understand people who can't bring themselves to avoid Amazon - again, for me it's really just a gut-level aversion that happens to coincide with an ethical stance. If I didn't have that gut-level aversion, there's a good chance I wouldn't be able to resist either.

But yeah - the chain restaurant/coffee shop thing just makes no sense to me at all, no matter how I look at it. There are regional and local versions of pretty much anything one might want, and they're pretty much universally both better and cheaper.

I couldn't even watch the whole thing - my cringe meter topped off with Canti in a suit, sounding like a TV weatherman.

I use both, but overall I prefer kbin.

I like the UI much better (on mobile - I couldn't even tell you what either one looks like on desktop). The lemmy mobile UI is too disjointed for my tastes - it's essentially just a seemingly random assortment of buttons for a seemingly random assortment of functions. I've tried a few lemmy apps, but haven't been impressed, and I can't be arsed to wade through dozens of betas in the hope that one of them might actually appeal to me. Kbin's UI is fine the way it is, so that's that to me.

And I like kbin.social's "All" better than any of the lemmys I use (.world, .ninja and .one). Kbin.social has a pretty broad range of content, but generally without the botfarm instances, which is just what I want. Lemmy world (when it's working) has too much botspam for my tastes, and while I love lemmy.ninja just on principle, it has a relatively sparse and limited "All." Lemmy.one's "All" is pretty good, but the overall feel of the instance is a bit too weedy for my tastes.

And Ernest is awesome.

Sounds like adolescent edginess to me.

Damn. This is the first solid whiff of September I've gotten on Lemmy.