comfy @ comfy @lemmy.ml

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29

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957

Joined

3 yr. ago

"You only attack liberals, what about the other side?!?!"

I haven't heard this (strawman quote?) myself, but my answer is I rarely think people further "right" than liberals are worth discussing politics with. Outside of special circumstances, I skip arguing with anti-liberal "conservatives" and neo-nazis and go straight to denying speech (both peacefully, and where appropriate, forcefully). They generally have no interest in good faith or truthfulness, those concepts are silly, idealist and weak self-restrictions to them.

"Never argue with an idiot, they will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience," - Mark Twain.

Captain Smith, Triangle of Sadness ;)

Liberals, on the other hand, sometimes value other people, the search for truth and a better society as much as us. So it makes sense to discuss our disagreements so long as each side reciprocates that respect. We can actually learn from each other.

Relevant quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on antisemites (1946):

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

And a point of notice: it's worth acknowledging that some people share worker-class values but have adopted the language or even talking points of mass-media bigotry. I've even seen this in some unions, for example. I don't automatically consider them a lost cause like I do with nazi scum, even if their ignorance or careless word choice suggests they're "the other side" - the sides are drawn by the class war, not a culture war.

I do agree that Lemmy.ml should never be recommended as the “official” Lemmy instance, but (correct me if I’m wrong) the Lemmy devs don’t do that.

Yeah you're correct, they explicitly don't want it considered the main instance.

I’m not sure I’ve seen how to contribute the old way, by donating time and performing tasks. Not my case, but how would someone get started on that?

Good point, it's a bit hidden away: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/01-overview.html

• (Formally) Reporting issues
• Translating
• Programming and Design
• Donating

As far as I know their politics and views have had zero impact on the code.

Adding to what Cowbee said, general anticapitalist politics were the motivation for their effort and the reason it is not a for-profit exploitative service. They don't want or need to put in addictive features or ads to profit or appease venture capital, and that's no coincidence, it's a decision resulting from their political beliefs.

But yes, their more specific personal political views don't really impact the code and haven't prevented others from using it freely.

Relevant context: https://lemmy.ml/comment/18395421

I'll take a grassroots donation campaign over ads any day.

edit: relevant context: https://lemmy.ml/comment/18395421

Technically? No. (ActivityPub)

Culturally? No. (Venture capitalist for-profit and already beginning the resulting enshittification)

I don't see any reason to consider them part of the Fediverse.

You're welcome :)

I just had another look at the settings options, and it looks like we can import/export account settings, including subscribed communities, blocks and saved posts. (I haven't tested this, but I can see them in the exported data file)

subreddits

We ain't in Kansas anymore! They're officially called communities or comms for short over here.

It usually helps to subscribe to more than one, especially if it's something simple like Apple comms, but you don't need to sign up for a new account just to subscribe to communities on other instances. Also no point in subscribing to all the dead ones with no posts in months, but I'm subscribed to some technology comms on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and they both get posts. (There might even be some users who are only able to see one of those comms because their instance blocked another instance, so that's a reason why one of those comms might not become the only one everyone is using.)

There are a few exceptions like /c/196 or politics subs where different ones have different-enough rules and moderation where it might actually matter which one you subscribe too, but for general interests, might as well just sub to them all because the worst case is they just don't add any extra posts to your feed.

Generally agreeing with Cowbee's reply. I joined lemmy.ml years ago when it was explicitly "leftist" (as in socialist) but that's not written in the instance description anymore, and I am interested in FOSS discussion but you don't have to care about that to use the instance. This was the first instance, which was created by the two core developers who are both communists. I wanted an instance that was socialist-leaning, stable and isn't trigger-happy with defederating or regularly getting defederated, so this one is great for me.

I have mixed feelings on Hexbear, I like dropping in sometimes and some of their comms are nice, but I see them as prone to mod powertripping and the culture is (overall, not always) a bit low-effort for my liking and prone to idealism/sloganism/dogmatism. So I'm usually only using a couple of specific comms or laughing at /c/slop.

I haven't kept up with Lemmy software updates so I don't know where it's at with migrating an account. I've had a couple of different accounts simultaneously (one on an instance which died years ago, one on an interest-themed instance) rather than just having one main account. And like they said, there's little downside to abandoning an account beyond inconvenience. There's no 'karma' score shown by default, and you can re-use your username on the other accounts if your name had a reputation you want to keep.

On that note: cache

Not the user you asked, but my impression is they're tolerant (or undermoderating, I'm not sure) of the kind of behaviors many of us left reddit to avoid, like flame trolling, bigotry, propaganda levels of US-centrism (and labeling anti-US-government or anti-Democrat-Party attitudes as Russian bots), anti-socialism and straight-up platforming US reactionary users like Trump/Musk supporters.

The instance takes a general lax liberalist position, and as a result, allow a sizable amount of toxic users who we don't tolerate in our communities. So some people take the easy option and just block the whole instance, unfortunately blocking a decent amount of good considerate users too.

There's also a bit of bad reputation due to the staff being far stricter on deleting support for Luigi Mangeoni, like anyone suggesting what they did was positive or appreciated. Lots of people left reddit because there were banned for the same reason. Whereas my instance (and the one this thread is on) allows me to say that, while I believe history shows PotD assassinations are not the right strategy to solve this problem and there must be a social movement surrounding direct actions, the shooter's assassination was cathartic, Brian Thompson deserved to die early and quickly, the owner-class mass media's widespread failed attempt to demonize the assassination as immoral showed clearly their values lie in opposition to the worker class (regardless of electoral alignment), and the fact that healthcare CEOs were terrorized by the event was a benefit, however small, to humanity. You would probably get a warning for saying that on lemmy.world's communities.

It's unfortunate that such a big diverse instance goes on the block list. A huge amount of people get blocked just because the platform tolerates enough reactionary jerks that people begin associating it with the instance. And to be clear, I'm blaming the overly-liberalist position of their administration, not you or the typical user.

Sympathy as a lemmy.ml user. There's usually a few people in these threads saying "just ban .ml" for various reasons.

Classic example are the few people who go around flaming inter-community drama in comments, then someone else replies showing that poster had recently been banned from that community and clearly deserved it. Modlog ftw.

It's rare, and mostly the same people, but I see it about a dozen times a year.

See https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/18452090

I remember a thread where someone had put a mining rig inside a hotel or apartment's cleaning room and was running it off the stolen electricity.

lemmy.world mods don't. They're an outlier, and an easy problem to avoid once you're aware.

edit: I should reframe that, rephrasing your post is a bit lazy: The rules of that server don't allow posts that support the act in question. The mods enforce those rules, they have to follow orders to keep their mod position. I don't know (nor does it matter) if they like personally like Luigi.

The instance I'm on is one of the many which does not have such rules. Make of that information what you will.

For what it's worth, the school computers in my school weren't running Linux and they had Tuxpaint installed. Even proprietary OS users benefit from FOSS.

I just don't think a pre-packaged comeback (hilarious as many of these are!) can truly 'destroy' someone. It needs to be personal to the situation to really hit them deep. Unfortunately I can't think of an example.

"Criticism" has multiple meanings, and I believe the user you're replying to is using one of the definitions which means more than just simple disagreement - obviously a downvote is expressing a negative judgement.