OpenStars

But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned… we must become intolerant.

To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.

So long as conversations can be kept “fun”, there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.

I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.

Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just “no thank you, if you don’t mind” but “FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?”. I mean, I’m no lover of capitalism but… if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of “Truthiness” to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very “discovery” of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn’t going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you’ve never so much as heard of existing (yes that’s a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there’s Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/tenforward@lemmy.world are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there’s lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won’t, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the “joke”? It’s really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we’re declining. I mean, I’m writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

Don’t put “it” there…

One of those upvotes is likely mine:-).

What if all I have is a stationary phone? Oh, forgot to say, it’s in a box… and there’s no actual phone.

Oh that’s good to know, thanks. I wonder if it was something special for my instance, or perhaps using Blokada (I thought there were no ads in it, but I can’t imagine running a phone without that:-), or something else entirely. If I hadn’t moved to PieFed already I would have submitted a bug report. Perhaps I still should if it would help others.

But your scenario at least lessens the projected scenarios of who may be affected, which is good for the sake of making the Fediverse easier to use by more people:-).

The video topic overall is thus, but within that is mention of how the “massively fatal pandemic in recent memory” has affected change, in the sense of doing some harm to people on disability, and thereby pointing to how some very foundational issues need to be worked out in order to even begin to make “real change in public health funding/policy/etc”. In particular, there would need to be some stability in terms of governance. Which the end of that video actually points to quite a success story in terms of reaching that, especially illuminating how stagnation != stability, yet that can be accounted for and dealt with by lawmakers if they so choose.

The graphic was to forestall an objection as to why “bUt MuH gOvErNmEnT” is non-functional: it is non-functional b/c it was literally designed to be that way. Two examples that readily spring to mind are how the post office used to deliver mail in 3 days time, while now it can be weeks if your letter ever arrives at the destination at all, and how horrific taxes are to have to be filled out and filed - despite how the government mostly seems to know how much you owe regardless - due to heavy lobbying by the tax preparation software industry.

In the membrane, ofc!

John Olivier (of Last Week Tonight) has an interesting video showing how those checks automatically sent out did some active harm in some cases.

Mind you, this is after government was defunded for decades, thus offering strong “who killed hannibal” vibes.

I had loads of communication problems trying to use Voyager on Android - I wonder if it was b/c it may not work as well for non-Lemmy.World accounts? (the one I tried to have it work with was on Discuss.Online) Like I would reply to someone but not be able to see my reply, or receive a notification and not be able to see their message to me, and refreshing did not work, nor did simply waiting minutes of time, though force-quitting the app and reloading always did.

Now I switched to PieFed so it doesn’t matter, but basically I think you have to just download apps and try them until you find one you like b/c there’s always going to be something.

Hehehe, boy are you in for a treat!

https://www.homestuck.com/stories

There are multiple whole entire industries dedicated to fleecing such individuals. Health care in the USA for one… Donald Trump’s campaign to name another…

They lived in a different time period. Climate change hadn’t already happened yet, and the USA especially was sitting on top of the world, as the rest of it had been if not quite decimated then at least heavily damaged by all the bombing from WWII. And we were a socialist nation! Schools, roads, bridges, a fully functioning post office, and so much more. The top marginal tax rate was ~90% and… well anyway.

So yeah, like the Kings of Old, they accumulated “stuff”. It made sense to them at the time. Surely nothing would ever like… “change” or anything like that, would it? And they even okayed the dismantling of things like social security, and maintenance of infrastructure - so long as such did not directly impact themselves, it’s all good, right? So long as women also lose bodily autonomy, anything that went along with that is A-okay, r-r-right?!

On the bright side, do younger people have less stress, knowing that they don’t have to save up for retirement, bc they’ll surely die sooner than it would be able to keep up with anyway? Especially with inflation like we’ve seen lately?

Anyway that was quite a tangent wasn’t it? TLDR: people’s lives are so very different now, and look to remain that way permanently. And not just in the USA, but due to Brexit, in the UK too. Disinformation campaigns are strikingly effective.

I’m guessing that what they are calling political homicides are direct politicians being killed, as distinct from murders of civilians that involve political motivations.

But stuff like this is why I am unsubscribing from this community. It seems more like it’s trying to foster “engagement” and that’s not why most of us came here.

Local health departments are chronically understaffed. For every 6,000 people in rural areas, there’s one public health nurse — who often works part-time, one analysis found.

“State and local public health departments are decimated resource-wise,” said Lurie, who is now an executive director at an international organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “You can’t expect them to do the job if you only resource them once there’s a crisis.”

Another explanation is a lack of urgency because the virus hasn’t severely harmed anyone in the country this year. “If hundreds of workers had died, we’d be more forceful about monitoring workers,” Chessher said. “But a handful of mild symptoms don’t warrant a heavy-handed response.”

You get what you pay for.

I mean… yeah, ofc, but that ship has sailed, and I for one hope that this message gets spread far and wide, to help counteract the message being preached from the literal and actual pulpit in America that a vote for Trump = a vote for God.

Also, as we could have guessed, this is an enormously clickbaity “news” title, as this excerpt explains:

“In a moment like this, I am compelled to be clear that every voter must make a choice, and my choice is to oppose the dangerous politics that (Donald) Trump and the MAGA movement have unleashed by supporting the ticket that can defeat this potential for American fascism,” Barber said in a statement to CNN, while stressing that he was backing Harris in his personal capacity.

In their personal capacity they are endorsing Harris, but in their professional (or whatever that word should be to mean non-personal) capacity they are only endorsing “not-Trump”. As it should be.

Edit: which reminds me that I wanted to block this community - that issue of EXTREMELY misleading headlines (especially those that mean the precise polar opposite of what a natural interpretation of the sentence would seem to indicate) comes up FAR too often here for my tastes. !globalnews@lemmy.zip significantly cleans up such trash by limiting what is allowed to be shared.

Wow, can you imagine having that?

A house that you could put “stuff” into?

Oof.