OpenStars

I mean… true but…

There’s only so much Russian outright propaganda I can stomach at one time, so even if it’s “less” it’s still “too much” at the same time?

https://lemmy.ml/post/21927716 - edit: to be clear I’m not talking about the post, but rather the comments within it.

Sigh… I used to be that way. But it does get exhausting, and I now prefer to spend my time in other ways.

Great! I don’t really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do… and like that interface, then that’s wonderful. It’s definitely quite polished. I don’t think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I’m not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it’s a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other “control the conversation” tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler… or a Trump supporter.

Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it’s not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?

It might though - don’t underestimate how much some sheeple prefer to simply be taken care of, rather than e.g. make a simple change to a config file. They will allow companies to sell all of their data, and not blink an eye. X is enshittifying for entirely different reasons (political ones), and Reddit for sheer stupidity, and Google as well, and… well but anyway, look at how many people are still on them, as opposed to here.

But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned… we must become intolerant.

To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.

So long as conversations can be kept “fun”, there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.

I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.

Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just “no thank you, if you don’t mind” but “FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?”. I mean, I’m no lover of capitalism but… if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of “Truthiness” to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very “discovery” of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn’t going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you’ve never so much as heard of existing (yes that’s a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there’s Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there’s lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won’t, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the “joke”? It’s really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we’re declining. I mean, I’m writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

Months ago was the time to make changes. Yeah, that’s what they said then too, except it was wrong then, as proven by the fact that the changes did happen.

Even if the words sound similar, now really is different than then. Voting has already begun - the fight to pick candidacies is long over and done. It is now long past time to pick a side.

If you want to vote 3rd party then go ahead - nobody is stopping you. Aside from all the news about some 3rd-party candidates receiving money from and having demonstrated ties to Russia (look it up if you haven’t heard), the Democrats do not seem to be taking such rhetoric as a credible “threat” though, for whatever reason. Probably bc they really are the best hope for the Palestinian people, as the latter recently confirmed by putting out a statement saying why they finally chose to endorse Kamala Harris’s campaign. You can ofc accuse the Dems of being very naive and disconnected from their voting base - that would be extremely difficult to argue against - and yet facts are facts.

See e.g. this article: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17919598.

How though? And more importantly, why? Like, what “leeway” does Kamala have to say anything different than she already has, which she could shift to?

Maybe after she wins yes, but at this point the choices are Trump vs. not-Trump, so I don’t see how a vote for a third-party would help in this case. At one point, with Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton there were different thoughts about how a vote for Bernie would cause Hillary to shift more towards the left - but most of that again gets back to the nomination process, not the final show-down between the two parties, and after that was a disastrous example of how voting for the 3rd-party candidate didn’t help the democratic party shift, except in the sense that it handed literally hundreds and hundreds of judicial nominees to the Republican party that, among other things, ended the protections of Roe v. Wade.

Two months ago the situation with Biden was VERY DIFFERENT than the situation now faced, with Kamala. Back then we could - and yay, did! - shift and pivot to adjust to the harsh realities that he was not capable of running again. We very likely would have lost if he had. But that was then, and this is now.

Anyway I think that I’m preaching to the converted here, so maybe I just misunderstood something that you said. Tbh, I don’t agree with your take on the OP - I think it really does show voting not for a 3rd party but voting for the other side b/c “bOtH sIdEs ArE tHe SaMe” (the title of the post), specifically wrt genocide. I think that b/c there are only 2 tracks shown… Also, the genocide being mentioned implicitly in the graphic (“but worse…”) shows how its focus is on short-term effects immediately after the election, not long-term ones about telling the Democratic party how the American populace would very much enjoy it if it would become more liberal if they would please and thank you very much.

I’m guessing that what they are calling political homicides are direct politicians being killed, as distinct from murders of civilians that involve political motivations.

But stuff like this is why I am unsubscribing from this community. It seems more like it’s trying to foster “engagement” and that’s not why most of us came here.

I mean… yeah, ofc, but that ship has sailed, and I for one hope that this message gets spread far and wide, to help counteract the message being preached from the literal and actual pulpit in America that a vote for Trump = a vote for God.

Also, as we could have guessed, this is an enormously clickbaity “news” title, as this excerpt explains:

“In a moment like this, I am compelled to be clear that every voter must make a choice, and my choice is to oppose the dangerous politics that (Donald) Trump and the MAGA movement have unleashed by supporting the ticket that can defeat this potential for American fascism,” Barber said in a statement to CNN, while stressing that he was backing Harris in his personal capacity.

In their personal capacity they are endorsing Harris, but in their professional (or whatever that word should be to mean non-personal) capacity they are only endorsing “not-Trump”. As it should be.

Edit: which reminds me that I wanted to block this community - that issue of EXTREMELY misleading headlines (especially those that mean the precise polar opposite of what a natural interpretation of the sentence would seem to indicate) comes up FAR too often here for my tastes. !globalnews@lemmy.zip significantly cleans up such trash by limiting what is allowed to be shared.

Tbf, the Democratic party nomination process is not a 2-party system. They did say that back then, and they were wrong to do so - hoping that people wouldn’t notice that difference.

But now we are talking about the real deal, the thing that they were trying to falsely tie an equivalence to, the actual vote for the actual presidency. Democracy in the USA may not last the decade regardless, but voting one way is for ditching it in favor of Project 2025 and among other things, ironically enough even moar-er support for genocide, while the other is a vote for hopefully a little better than the current status quo.

Both offer short term pain and long term destruction… but not equally so.

Omg that sounds hilarious 😂

Bc pwn libs.

And it’ll happen again if given a quarter of a chance. Get voting!

Thank you for confirming my bias that both sides are indeed the same - I will now proceed accordingly. 😜

/s btw, and damn I wish this was funny. As it is, it feels all too real…😔

Edit: I have no idea what this is from, but somehow a ginormous flag-painted truck pooping out another, still giant flag-painted SUV that then proceeds to make a mess and what looks like endangering a child in a desert town, possibly of middle eastern origin, seems VERY American to me. Though I apologize for the appalling lack of bacon and guns, which I will henceforth rectify with this actually real picture:

Ah, thank you. I’m not 100% certain that’s entirely a positive, but indeed it makes sense why e.g. Tesseract on dubvee.org would want to eye using that, when it comes out.

Whereas Mbin provides more cross-platform compatibility with Mastodon, and PieFed with other similar integrations, e.g. PixelFed and upcoming Loops underneath that.

So what will make Sublinks better than e.g. PieFed? Or Mbin for that matter? All 3 of these I thought used Python rather than Rust, as Lemmy does.

It does not though. I made a post the other day from the StarTrek.website instance and couldn’t figure out if nobody had upvoted or commented on it, then tried to look it up on my regular discuss.online instance where it didn’t exist, then went further to look it up on Lemmy.world (where the community is located) and saw that tens of people had. I wasn’t able to respond to any of those at first though, until it caught up on an instance where I already had an account (edit: except I could not do that from the StarTrek.website instance where I had made the post from, bc it hadn’t seen the comment yet even the next day - so I had to do it from a third instance involved in all this.)

And that wasn’t even the only time that very same day that I saw a post existing/not existing and/or having a different number of comments and differences in voting counts. Perhaps 0.19.6 will help with some of these issues, at least on Lemmy but then PieFed, Mbin, and eventually Sublinks are still going to have to figure things out on their own as well.

So I am glad that things are going well for you who I note is on Lemmy.world, but the rest of the Fediverse is definitely struggling, in part because rather than in spite of that centralization. Also I note that Lemmy.world federating smoothly within itself doesn’t even count in my book as “federation” at all! That’s just Reddit 2.0 with everything on a single server, with all the benefits and pitfalls which that entails.

More generally when the subject is man vs. bear, and someone chooses bear, it doesn’t help to simply laugh at those making that choice. Maybe we should listen, and maybe even expend efforts to make changes to become more welcoming for more people that would absolutely love to get off of the likes of Reddit, X, Threads, or Facebook?

That’s my 2¢ anyway.

Broaden your mind.

There is more than one Lemmy.ml admin:-).