imaqtpie @ imaqtpie @sh.itjust.works

Posts

19

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1,264

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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Mad lad!

I agree with you, but I feel that you're glossing over the bigger point. In my view, you're right about the way most social media users behave, but that behavior is also bound to slowly change as people get a better grip on how it is effecting them in a negative way. We as a society are learning the hard way about how toxic social media can be.

Most people are dumb and they don't have time to consider whether something is better or worse, especially something as new as social media. But when they start to notice other people (like us!) doing something differently and having a better experience, they eventually catch on and change their behavior.

It's like how it took a long time for people to stop smoking cigarettes, but once the tide turned it happened within a couple generations. Or wearing seat belts, or any other new, cool technology/product that people eventually started to understand better and adapt to after a few generations. Social media is like that, and we are simply the early adopters of a more humane and healthy form of social media. It takes a long time, but people will eventually start to understand how corporate social media is an unhealthy and exploitative habit, and this decentralized, community driven model is a much better experience.

We've kinda been hibernating since July 2023, with the userbase rapidly declining from that peak and then remaining nearly constant for the entirety of 2024. Honestly it's quite impressive that we held such a steady monthly user count for the past year.

But now with all the publicity around the fediverse, we are beginning to pick up some organic momentum again. We've grown by about 2k active users in January (~5% growth). Keep that up for a few more months and it will start to become noticeable with more activity, which should hopefully start a positive feedback loop.

Regarding finding and subscribing to communities on other instances, I'm pretty sure this tool addresses that problem fairly effectively.

https://lemmy-federate.com/

You may want to add your instance to that.

The quuuuuuuuill, spitting bars

Nice comment.

We just need more users. Simple as that.

That other site is the 6th most visited website in the world, so clearly having upvotes/downvotes doesn't preclude growth.

Does mbin only have upvotes or am I misremembering? And boosts I guess. That's not my personal preference but the beauty is we can still access the same content from different platforms.

Well, never say never. It happened once already, in June/July 2023 the userbase grew more than 10x.

And we have seen a nice bump of 2k users in the past week or so as the fediverse has gotten some publicity. Reddit is not an option so we have no choice but to try to make Lemmy better, and I genuinely believe that the federated, decentralized concept can be the solution in so many ways.

Piefed and Mbin are also huge boons to our chances of success. Lemmy may not ever take off, but I expect one of the fediverse content aggregators eventually will. Reddit is simply too shitty of a user experience, they are guaranteed to fail.

Lol I read this thread first, then went to the article and his comments were supportive of the potential for anti-trust legislation under the new administration? That makes him a Nazi? Wtf 😂

This is a huge reason why Lemmy faces an uphill battle in terms of growth, these absolutely batshit insane political takes pollute most threads about newsworthy events, which are in many ways the lifeblood of a content aggregator.

I can't even count the number of times I've seen people say they tried Lemmy for a little while but eventually stopped because they got sick of every thread and community being constantly flooded with Nazi comparisons, accusations of genocide denial, and guillotine the rich stuff.

Like I get it, I really do, but maybe direct some of that righteous anger into some kind of real world activism instead of constantly bitching at anonymous strangers on Lemmy. These people are so outraged and the situation is so dire, and yet they continue to scroll online forums and farm upvotes? Have some ideological consistency ffs, if it's a matter of life and death, go out there and do something to help.

Doomposting on Lemmy accomplishes nothing, and in fact continues to marginalize one of the few tools that we could potentially have to fight back. If Lemmy were to grow significantly and become a place where people could organize and communicate without being subject to corporate control or censorship, that could potentially do a great deal of good for people IRL. But constantly whining Nazi this, Nazi that is preventing that growth from happening.

The original post had a typo where the word states was omitted, OP has since edited.

For those who are confused by this comment.

I'm not sure. That could probably be left as a gray area, ultimately it will be up to individual moderators to remove these posts so maybe we leave that to their discretion.

Like if someone writes multiple paragraphs and they happen to link a tweet to help support what they're saying, I think that's fine. But if the body is just a link to a tweet to get around the ban, then obviously that should be removed.

I like this idea. Two things to clarify, although they may seem obvious.

• it should only apply to posts, not comments
• screenshots are fine

Otherwise it sounds good to me.

Mouse clickability 🤯

It's weird how you asked me a question and immediately pivoted to some tirade about racism when I answered, without clarifying whatsoever. Thanks for nothing.

I literally googled (via duckduckgo) queen Charlotte and that was every single result on the first page. Then I looked at Wikipedia for 30 seconds and responded. Apparently math = racism? Nice.

I naturally assumed you were talking about altering historical facts to suit a contemporary narrative. But I clearly gave you too much credit, I'll avoid making that mistake again.

Edit: aha, you were referring to this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haida_Gwaii

Pretty obscure reference, but my fault for assuming. Instead of ignoring you like everyone else who had no idea what the hell you were talking about, I tried to roll with it and give you a response. You may want to refer to them as the Queen Charlotte Islands going forward...

Pixelfed's monthly userbase has gone from 15k to almost 300k in the past month. Absolutely massive for the fediverse.

I'll probably try it out eventually^TM

You're referring to this Queen Charlotte?

Yeah I mean she obviously wasn't black or biracial in any sense of the word. Even if you simply take the speculation about her ancestry at face value, you're talking about 15 generations removed, which equates to one of 32,768 ancestors at the same genetic distance, contributing 0.00305% of DNA apiece.

What an absurd topic of discussion.

Good on you for doing some more research. Imo Denali and the Gulf of Mexico are like Mount Vesuvius and the Mediterranean Sea, i.e., the names are eminently suitable and essentially permanent. I'm going to expound on this at length, specifically in regard to Denali, because the case for the Gulf of Mexico is so incredibly one-sided and obvious. The case for Denali is also one-sided, but it's much less well known.

To clarify, the name didn't originate in honor of President McKinley, it was created while he was still running for president.

In 1896, a gold prospector named it McKinley as political support for then-presidential candidate William McKinley, who became president the following year.

In other words, the mountain which had been locally known as Denali for centuries was arbitrarily utilized as a political pawn to boost the candidacy of McKinley, who turned out to be a mediocre president at best.

Also, it wasn't officially recognized as such until 20 years later by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, potentially as a conciliatory political maneuver towards the Republican party, which was dominant under the Fourth Party System. Little known fact, from 1869 through 1933, there were 11 Republican presidents and only 2 Democratic ones. This is somewhat misleading because Grover Cleveland was elected twice and the Republicans had a couple deaths in office, but still drives home their political dominance at the time.

Speaking of which, William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist by the name of Leon Czolgosz, who appears to me a significantly more sympathetic figure than our contemporary Luigi, whom I personally find quite lame and reprehensible, but apparently the rest of you consider to be some kind of folk hero 🙄

A few notes about the circumstances and trial of this anarchist. See if you notice any parallels between his situation and ours.

The context which I have just provided should be reason enough to refuse the name Mount McKinley, based on the sentiments that have been superficially expressed on Lemmy and social media in general of late.

However, the fact that local Alaskans never stopped calling it Denali, and indeed successfully petitioned to have it officially renamed Denali in 1975, is even more damning. As per the Denali Wikipedia article

Indigenous names for Denali can be found in seven different Alaskan languages. The names fall into two categories. To the south of the Alaska Range in the Dena'ina and Ahtna languages the mountain is known by names that are translated as 'big mountain'. To the north of the Alaska Range in the Lower Tanana, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, Holikachuk, and Deg Xinag languages the mountain is known by names that are translated as 'the high one', 'the tall one' (Koyukon, Lower and Middle Tanana, Upper Kuskokwim, Deg Xinag, and Holikachuk).

All of these names are essentially different pronunciations of Denali

Asked about the importance of the mountain and its name, Will Mayo, former president of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, an organization that represents 42 Athabaskan tribes in the Alaskan interior, said: "It's not one homogeneous belief structure around the mountain, but we all agree that we're all deeply gratified by the acknowledgment of the importance of Denali to Alaska's people."

In conclusion, Trump can go fuck himself in his fat fucking ass.

Who cares? Just because multi-trillion dollar corporation Google has to deal with it doesn't mean we have to play along.

The politicians and corporations can do whatever bullshit they do, but average people can also choose to ignore that crap.

At least when it comes to changing well established names. There's other stuff that has real world consequences and that sucks, but we can at least hold the line in this case.

Denali.

Gulf of Mexico.

From now until the end of time.

That's a very interesting take, I hadn't thought of it in those terms before but I think you're onto something. I definitely agree that people have a limited capacity to receive/understand abstract ideas, and therefore each transmission from human to human loses some of the original meaning, and also gets mixed together with some other meanings imparted by each individual in the chain. The analogy of ideas to living organisms facing evolutionary pressure to reproduce is very cool.

I also see what you're saying about crazy religions that have moderated with time, but I'm not entirely sure about drawing a distinction between bad ideas that tend to moderate for the better and good ideas that tend to moderate for the worse. Intuitively, I do agree that ideas such as Christianity and Marxism are better than phony religions such as Mormonism and Scientology. But that requires a whole bunch of other arguments to support conclusively.

I feel like it's really the same process going on with all abstract ideas as they spread among human societies, and it would be somewhat reductive to describe them as changing according to any firm law, or getting better or worse. Rather, it's probably more accurate to say that they change and adapt according to the specific chain of humans through which they are transmitted, which causes them to become more moderate and simpler in the vast majority of cases, but also has the possibility of augmenting or intensifying them in some ways, albeit rarely.

This allows you to take into account that some bad or irrational or wrong ideas can also be transmuted and reframed into good ideas in an instant, and vice versa. I am thinking about the work of great artists who are able to evoke a certain perspective such that a wrong idea might actually help us to understand something true or beneficial, and conversely of the despot or authoritarian who fancies themself as following a noble ideal, but ends up causing immense suffering in service of that good idea.

You've gotten a bunch of solid answers already, but I just want to chime in with some food for thought.

In my view, Marxism is itself a form of religion. Instead of having faith in a higher power, a Marxist chooses to have faith in an ideological system that lacks definitive evidence of its accuracy or applicability to human societies. It certainly sounds much more plausible and rational to our ears than traditional religions with their paradoxical and seemingly arbitrary assertions, but it nonetheless requires some degree of faith.

The specific interpretation of historical events and human social behavior that Marx asserts is by no means certain, and requires that you have faith that Marx was correct in a majority of his arguments.

The doctrine of Marxism was famously critiqued by Karl Popper due to his belief that it was unfalsifiable, and thus unfit to be described as a scientific theory. I'll quote a relevant passage from the Wikipedia article here

In his early years Popper was impressed by Marxism, whether of Communists or socialists. An event that happened in 1919 had a profound effect on him: During a riot, caused by the Communists, the police shot several unarmed people, including some of Popper's friends, when they tried to free party comrades from prison. The riot had, in fact, been part of a plan by which leaders of the Communist party with connections to Béla Kun tried to take power by a coup; Popper did not know about this at that time. However, he knew that the riot instigators were swayed by the Marxist doctrine that class struggle would produce vastly more dead men than the inevitable revolution brought about as quickly as possible, and so had no scruples to put the life of the rioters at risk to achieve their selfish goal of becoming the future leaders of the working class. This was the start of his later criticism of historicism. Popper began to reject Marxist historicism, which he associated with questionable means, and later socialism, which he associated with placing equality before freedom (to the possible disadvantage of equality).

I must admit that my Marxist and socialist leanings have been significantly shaken during my time on Lemmy, where it appears that the tankie servers tend to reproduce the very same flaws that have been evident in the majority of communist and socialist nation states that have existed thus far. Namely, a lack of free discourse, a refusal to question and debate, and a blind focus on ideological purity to the extent that truth and pragmatism become secondary or entirely irrelevant concerns. One begins to question whether such tendencies are not in fact a perversion, as they are so often framed, but instead an inevitable outcome of strict adherence to Marxist doctrine.

I realize that many will probably argue that tankies do not represent Marxist beliefs accurately, but it seems to me that as Marxist thought becomes more dominant within any particular group or society, that specific brand of Marxism seems to overwhelm and outcompete more libertarian varieties.

Circling back to the original question, this is perhaps not dissimilar to the discrepancy between Christianity as originally conceived in the New Testament and the subsequent manifestation of Christianity as an organized religion in the real world, which seems to bear little resemblance to the teachings of Christ.

It's almost like no matter how noble the abstract thoughts and philosophies might be, human beings will find a way to misinterpret them and repurpose them in service of horrific and selfish actions.