Schadrach

As far as the US goes, Democrats are basically the best you get that has any chance of winning an election and she was their choice for 2016. I even held my nose and voted for her in the general (but not in the primary).

I won’t argue that progressives and the like shouldn’t be trying to either drag the party leftward or organize at a scale that they can actually win elections at some levels without needing the name Democrat behind them.

To be fair that’s an improvement over the previous test since you could reuse the frogs while you had to kill the rabbit. Even older ones involved peeing on grain. We’ve known that there was something different about the urine of women when they are pregnant for a shockingly long time, but couldn’t explain exactly what in any real detail until fairly recently.

And I absolutely believe you’d hear some folks joking around about “coming for their children.”

I strongly suspect if he ever responded with a source it would involve a carefully trimmed clip from that SF gay men’s chorus piece that caused a stir a while back, found a link for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOQF4kadHA

An entire piece built around the lines “we’ll convert your children” and “we’re coming for your children” that’s pretty prone to having unfortunate clips cut from it to scare right wingers.

“LGBTQ+” is not an organization. It’s not a religion or a creed. It doesn’t “say” anything - and, in fact, isn’t even an “it” in the context you’re using!

It’s a term for a group of people that have nothing to do with each other, other than some shared traits. In your comment, replace “LGBTQ+” with another word for a group of unrelated humans. “Blondes,” maybe, or “women,” “men,” “dark skinned folk,” “humans,” etc. You can’t put something like “Americans” or “Christians” in that sentence, because those are too specific.

Can you see the problem now?

Except in that case you can’t exclude anyone from “the LGBTQ+ community” provided they are not straight or not cis. See people talking about Milo Yian-etc back in 2014-2020, or people’s reaction to radqueer shit.

It’s not that the left has bad messaging or unpopular ideas

Good ideas, but terrible messaging. For example, imagine you wanted to sell Appalachia on the idea that the coal market is in decline so we should look at expanding other market sectors in the region so the entire region doesn’t increasingly resemble dead mine towns as time goes on. What’s the single worst possible way you could try to express that idea to those people?

“I’m going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business” - Hillary Clinton, 2016.

I’m fond of this one in particular because “They’re putting chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay!” is both one of the craziest sounding things Alex Jones has said, one that was literally memed on for years as THE example of how nuts he is and also one that’s technically true.

Thank you for answering them before I could get back to Lemmy.

Because it’s not in rainwater, it’s in runoff from cities and dairy farms. The chemicals in question are basically synthetic estrogens and their metabolites and frogs are just more sensitive to those in the environment than mammals.

This seems like it would be pretty possible - you’d just need an instance that basically just takes in all the data and just marks moderation/deletion as such rather than actually altering the posts. The hard part would be not getting it defederated by half the instances out there specifically for providing unddit/reveddit functionality.

Which when you try to say it as written sounds like some degenerate version of “lick nuts” which is possibly not intended?

…and let’s be fair, it’s an ad so the corpo bullshit is mandatory.

Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem.

Forums are only as good as their moderators. Always have been, always will be. I’d love something akin to Reveddit for Lemmy though.

Eh, some of them. You weren’t generally banned for “merely” being right wing. But pre-Elon you generally had to toe the line a lot more to avoid being suspended or banned if you were overtly right wing than if you were liberal or left and now it’s the other way around.

Just like how the blue check started as an “I am a public figure and this account is definitely who I appear to be” mark and that’s it, then it became a mark of who you knew/could bribe at Twitter to move the process along and could be revoked for saying the wrong things on Twitter (for example everyone’s least favorite gay right wing provocateur Milo Yianwhatever had his blue check stripped for saying something too offensive well before he was banned), then post-Elon it became just a subscription service.

There was also a tendency to quietly artificially reduce visibility for a lot of right wing voices or hashtags. For example, female MRA and member of Honey Badger Radio Hannah Wallen literally got a bunch of her fans to do some pretty elaborate testing of her account at one point after her engagement numbers suddenly and mysteriously dropped and it turned out many of her posts were invisible except to people that followed her that she also followed, even to people specifically looking at her feed.

Certain right wing hashtags would have numbers that should definitely have them trending but mysteriously weren’t (or would be for just a few minutes and then suddenly vanish despite gaining popularity in the meantime), certain liberal/left hashtags would be trending despite seemingly not having the numbers for it to be organic, that sort of thing. Because Twitter moderation was curating what was and was not “trending”, literally blacklisting certain topics and bumping up others because of the visibility that being trending would afford.

It was all really, overtly obvious if you watched for it, like how certain accounts would be shadowbanned on Reddit for reasons that were both obvious and not spam-related despite shadowbanning supposedly only being employed as an anti-spam tool, or how certain subs would be allowed to openly ignore certain sitewide rules.

Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?

Any idea which subs are banning like that already?

and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading

I’d say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they’re OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.

I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption.

Why? They explicitly haven’t baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don’t have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.

The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.

You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?

Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org.

Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.

Communities work the same way - so for example politics@lemmy.ml, politics@beehaw.org and politics@lemmy.world are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).

This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.

One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).

I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have whatever@otherserver.net instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.

It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.

At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.

Really no different than Reddit in that regard. At least we don’t have people automatically banning you for having ever interacted with specific other communities yet, at least I don’t think we do yet.

EDIT: Shit, somehow I forgot the don’t. Teach me not to proofread.

You mean like they did the Anniversary Edition update for Skyrim that broke a ton of mods, and then two more updates since then that re-broke a bunch of mods each?

Which US politicians typically attend the inauguration of the Mexican President? I’m genuinely curious, it’s not something I’ve ever paid attention to and which US politicians attend it isn’t usually something that gets news coverage here.

Also, those other things were mostly the fallout of military actions performed as part of the job, rather than assorted felonies while a private citizen.