If the citizens weren’t tacitly benefiting, in any way from the resource extraction of the bourgeoisie, maybe you’d have a point there; but since they do, you don’t

Someone tacitly benefiting from a state’s imperialism doesn’t stop them simultaneously being victims of the absolute horror that is capitalism. That’s a big part of why even in the most exploitative regimes there are millions of anti-capitalists who engage in international solidarity. The capitalist class like to pretend there’s some national unity at play when they screw over the proletariat, but it’s all clearly bullshit.

Just fuck off if you’re gonna go to bat for a settler before you waste any more of both of our time.

I don’t bat for settlers. I’m publicly replying to your public reply, because it was sectarian in a way which is harmful to the international socialist movement. If you think this conversation is wasting your time, then just ignore it.

If I remember correctly, the admin (a US Lolbertarian) finally closed it down, among other reasons, when they realized the resident nazis there were not just joking to troll da libs and actually believed the things they were saying about ‘jewish shapeshifters’. They wanted a free speech haven, and so they got the people we collectively told to shut up.

Why would it? It seems like it would just be similar to the circlejerk forums they’ve have for decades, alienated from the mainstream and unable to normalize their ideas and recruit so easily.

It sounds as if you’re using the atrocities of the French bourgeoisie as a way to excuse nationalist bigotry against a people. The French state is imperialist and colonist, the French citizens are mostly victims of capitalism, not the settlers.

Obviously it’s a different situation with French people overseas, but we’re not in that context.

Carl and the Aqua Team make their position on piracy very clear.

https://inv.us.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=MCTlcJMCSpM

Don’t know why you’d give a joke answer at all, but there’s nothing wrong with unsweetened yogurt (e.g. greek) on potato. Put chives on there, maybe some zataar. Or use it to offset a chilli sauce, make a barbecue sauce creamy. I’d even just have it by itself on fries.

How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn’t some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.

This is a good point. The pseudonymous internet is like a confessional booth. I can bluntly say all my political beliefs here with little-to-no consequence that I can’t solve by registering a new account. There’s no risk of alienating a friend or family member who disagrees. As an extreme case, I’ve met a couple of people online who can be legally killed for their political views (e.g. not following the state religion). So the internet can provide more comfort in free expression and therefore more people arguing over differences.

I’m starting to feel like all this hate and division is manufactured

Even putting aside biases or conspiracies, mass media and (for-profit) social media has an economic incentive to get people passionate and interested and viewing more ads. So there are systematic factors at play, which I’d say are enhanced by digital technology.

Reminder to be aware of darknet mirrors like I2P sites and Tor .onion services - domains aren’t controlled by a company so they can’t just be taken down by a legal request.

For z-lib, the Wikipedia article lists their .onion and I2P addresses (I haven’t verified them so check before bookmarking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library

@[email protected] This highlights the problem with using relative terms like ‘left’ and ‘center’ and ‘far’. They’re subjective, and in my opinion, shouldn’t be used.

I don’t know what country or society you’re in. “Left” can often mean anything from centrist liberalism (Democrat Party) to nothing less than socialism (socialists often consider liberalism to be in the center). Then you get literal Fascists (as in, Mussolini and Mosley types, unlike Nazi fascists) who throw a stone in the whole thing: their heritage comes from both the traditional left (namely syndicalism) and the right (ultranationalism), and don’t neatly fit into progressive or regressive (BUF notably gained many women supporters for their pro-suffrage policies, progressive at the time).

One can avoid arguments like in the OP just by learning the proper terms for political views and ideologies. Are you a progressive liberalist? Are you a social democrat? Are you a democratic socialist? (yes unfortunately those two get confusing)

For more information about the political compass and examples of why it’s not a useful tool, I recommend this video.

When we bump up posts that we like instead of relevant ones, those things get the visibility. I think.

Yep, I haven’t actually checked the ‘Hot’ algorithm code (it’s publicly viewable) but I believe so. And there’s another related tough-to-solve phenomenon in any social media site where the most populist, simple, agreeable things are likely to get the most upvotes/likes/etc., and therefore the most reward. So unfortunately, a front page is often filled with low-meaning content like those jokes, or shallow but agreeable populist platitudes (which there’s nothing wrong with if you’re here for entertainment, but is an issue for more serious communities). I think tons of moderation is also the only cure for that, because I can’t think of an alternate bump system that works (for example, forums which use the ‘last bumped’ system reward posts for getting replies, so flame and troll posts that start rapid arguments rise to the top instead, and posts often just say ‘bump’!)

As in, I don’t see what would be done besides tons of moderation or short post restrictions. Something I don’t find feasible

I agree. There could be tricks like auto-moderation software detecting replies that a comm/instance staff considers to be an issue (e.g. a reply just saying ‘this’ or ‘lol’) and auto-replying with a caution against low-effort posting, but false positives could be a pain so it all comes back to more moderation staff in the end. It’s ultimately a network with a very open and growing community, unless you’re in a smaller private community. And Lemmy enables those to be created, so I can be happy with that if I ever want to create a more serious place.

I don’t notice that issue with ‘comm’, but maybe that’s just because I’ve been around it and using it for years (just like the indistinct word ‘sub’ becomes meaningful and distinct in context once you see ‘subreddit’ a few times). It was a bit odd the first couple of times I saw it because I already associated the term with ‘communications’, like ‘send out comms’.

The only reason I hang around here is because there’s no forum equivalent

Equivalent of what? A place where you could make your own communities? (without spinning up a server or being a disconnected island) Yeah, I can only think of imageboard examples of reddit-like DIY community sites, and those… really aren’t what you asked for (very few had intelligent discussions, and by their nature, they mainly just attracted people who got banned from more normal communities).

Unless mods wanted to spend 24/7 making sure people didn’t use FOSS Reddit the same way Reddit was used, that was always going to happen, if it hadn’t then people would have went back to Reddit to doom scroll again.

Exactly. There’s not really any point to me crying ‘we’re not a reddit clone! we’re not a reddit clone!’

Good question. Especially since a lot of these are things I only notice in hindsight.

• Volunteer to implement helpful hints at a systematic level, even small things like linking the join-lemmy.org documentation on the signup page by default, and adding placeholder text for instance and community admins to see and tweak for their own rules. I say ‘volunteer’ because the devs were, and are, far too busy to do everything themselves.

• Create and share around image/infographic guides on why Lemmy is different to reddit. This could actually have been a good promotion tool too, back when we really needed it. I actually hastily made a quick one during the sudden migration, but I don’t think it’s worth digging up, it was very basic and not well thought-through.

Then again, some people had no real problems with reddit except for the API stuff. The people who came here earlier often had complaints about reddit’s overall community trends, you know, people replying to headlines and clearly not reading the actual article at all, empty fluff like a random pun being the three highest rated comments, buttloads of junk replies like ‘wow’, ‘this’, ‘i wish i could upvote twice’ to scroll past. And I don’t think there’s much I myself could do to fight things like that, without putting in far too much time and effort (this site isn’t my life!).

Honestly, I regret not putting more effort into setting up a good foundation here before the API drama hit. There was a chance to fix many of the problems of reddit, and poor communication just let people import all the problems right back.

Hell, people are still calling communities ‘subs’. Even basic stuff like that. And I’m not blaming people for coming into a place without learning about its culture, unfortunately that’s just normal and it happens. I’m just annoyed we didn’t create ways to educate them easily, like guidebooks and introductions on the sign-up page.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

Ah, that sucks to hear about.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.