As a note, the Israelites would in later generations go on to kill a shitload of people. It’s one of those things where it seems like the Bible only really considers it murder if God doesn’t sanction it. It’s honestly one of the many sticking points that makes Abrahamic religions a hard sell for modern individuals. That said, if you look at it from a historical perspective, it really comes across more like a religious version of the Code of Hammurabi. It’s less “don’t kill” as a philosophical or religious position and more about sanctions against killing in a practical legal sense. A functioning society has laws that formally govern behavior and the Israelites were essentially an ecclesiarchy, with Moses being both head of state and high priest. The same laws that governed social life were always going to intersect with laws that governed spiritual life.

Yes, that will happen when the “problem” lives solely between your ears.

You are more than welcome to block any and all content from that instance. You can do this by going under your user settings and clicking on the “Blocks” tab and searching for lemmy.ml in the Block Instance section. That’s the thing about Federated content. You have the power to selectively engage with the content of your choosing. You don’t get to quarantine others because there is no centralized authority that gets to say “your instance gets stuck in an internet ghetto where it isn’t allowed to interact with other users.” You have to quarantine yourself by excluding content. If that doesn’t work for you, then maybe it’s less that you dislike their authoritarian ideology and more that it isn’t the same flavor as your own.

It’s the Vampire Castle phenomenon of online leftist spaces. One dev and instance admin of Lemmy has problematic personal beliefs, so now we aren’t allowed to be on Lemmy anymore because it’s failed an ideological purity test that OP decided for the rest of us. In other news, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is a hardcore Ayn Rand style freemarket libertarian, so I guess we should all ditch wikipedia and each buy a 400 pound Encyclopedia Britannica set. Because that’ll show him to believe things I think are terrible.

I miss the weird edginess of the internet. The reality is that the internet was a place that kids got warned about being full of weirdos and dangerous types. And they weren’t wrong. The thing is, that also made it interesting and full of fascinating content. And it was largely unregulated and uncensored because the people in power were too old to understand or care about it. Now with things like KOSA and the centralization of the internet around a few megaplatforms, there’s less variety and creativity. The internet has become an endless soup of banal, milquetoast content. Vaguely appealing to everyone, but not greatly appealing to anyone.

“Billionaire has shitty beliefs. In other news, the weather in London is still complete ass.”

The preferred term is NaMP - Not a Magical Person/Non-Magical Person. You could also say “Person of Non-Magic,” but it’s hard to pronounce “ponm.”

number puzzles that need to be solved.

In JK Rowling’s mind the number puzzles are things like “How many genders are there?”

The correct answer, of course, is “Fuck you, JK Rowling, that’s how many.”

I’m assuming that’s just revenue from The Onion, although the wording on it leaves much to be desired.

Forty years? Brother, you think this shit just magically started in 1983?!

10% of Tennessee is so high on hillbilly heroin they don’t know which question they got asked and just said “yes” on the off chance it was “would you like some free oxy?”

That would be reasonable, I think. As you drill down into reply threads comments tend to become more focused on particular topics of conversation, in my experience, and so the size of any given reply might reasonably diminish.

Hmmm, not really. Rather, the community is specifically focused around conversation. But a different type of conversation. Typical internet conversations on reddit (and a lot of other places), especially over the last several years, seem to mainly occur in short bursts and at a fairly superficial level. The kind of community I’m envisioning is one in which there’s a central topic or theme (such as film), but it focuses on fairly deep or complex conversations. If someone wants to respond to a comment made by another user, it’d typically be point by point with supporting evidence and argumentation. Or at least a well reasoned perspective. An okay, if not spectacular, example would be this post on reddit from a couple of years ago on r/TrueFilm (https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/khlrnv/a_brief_rant_about_my_cinema_students_and/). The post itself is a few hundred words and focuses on a central concept or observation made by the OP. Most top level comments are a paragraph or two. There are brief responses in the individual comment threads, but the actual discussion is fairly robust and provides new ideas and perspectives beyond just people saying “lmao same” or similarly useless comments.

Or restrict them to people who have something meaningful to contribute. Low effort vs. high effort. You’d have to be explicit that that’s the purpose of the community and that’s how it works. I remember some great posts on r/TrueFilm back in the day. A lot of it was by people who were either film students or who had degrees in film studies and had the kind of academic background needed to speak at length about a topic without it becoming trite. I have to say, I do miss it. The internet has gotten way dumber and way lazier over the years, in a lot of ways.

I feel similarly. To add to that, I don’t even like the fact that people have been pushing so hard for Lemmy apps. I get that people want something to entertain themselves with on the train or in class or wherever they might be, but phone based social media apps seem to encourage superficial engagement and doomscrolling by design. I much prefer a rich desktop experience as it encourages depth of discussion and debate. One thing I really liked on reddit, though, was something I saw a long time ago on r/TrueFilm. Comments had a hard minimum for characters. If your comment was below 250 characters, or something like that, it was automatically removed on the basis that if you had anything to say, you should have thought about it enough to warrant more than 250 character submissions. It also functionally murdered smartphone or tablet based commenting. I kinda wish you could do similar on certain lemmy communities.

“The server mangles the authentication token after receiving it for reasons we don’t really understand, so this function just checks to see that it’s set in the request, but nothing actually cares if it’s valid. DO NOT RETURN USER ACCOUNT DATA HERE AND YES THAT MEANS YOU MARCUS”

the definition is based around grade-level reading (what can you identify and synthesize from standardized text in English in a given time frame) and inclusive of a broader population. We’re talking about people who can’t pick up a copy of USA today and tell you the main idea of a front-page article.

Purely anecdotal, but I know someone who is a tenured professor at a university that will flat out refuse to answer any question that has too much supporting detail around it. As in, if you say “for this part of the assignment, I’m doing…” and proceed to describe your attempt at problem solving over four or five sentences, asking if what you’ve done is correct or close to it, and he will simply respond with “there’s too much here to unpack, sorry,” and refuse to answer the question. But if you do it in person, like verbally read out the same paragraph you wrote, he can understand and answer it. There’s other things, too. He can type out simple sentences, but has a very poor grasp of spelling, frequently getting very simple words wrong (think different versions of there, their, and they’re). It’s genuinely baffling how he got to that point, but he also hasn’t ever really published material and it kinda makes sense why. Dude has a doctorate in a STEM field and I think the reason for that is that he can understand mathematics, but literally can’t understand complex writing. Any idea that takes more than a single sentence to explicate just evaporates out of his head.