Look at here and the people who complain about it being too hard to figure out are the ones complaining about “I can’t use muh slurs, this is awful.”
“The left of today is very much in favour of censorship to avoid “harm.” This makes those of us in the middle very wary of signing up to any partisan media.” /u/decidedlysticky23
/u/misshapensteed claims he isn’t far right, but explictly only posts on PoliticalCompassMemes and TheLeftCantMeme and KotakuInAction.
If they are too stupid to figure out we know they’re lying, they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy.
they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy
Please let’s not introduce elitism into Lemmy. I just got here and stumbled upon this post. The social network you use does not make you superior. As much as I agree with anti-racist censorship, there is no need to speak as if Lemmy users are superior beings. It was annoying when Redditors did it back in the day and it will continue to be now.
Elitism aside, having a barrier to entry is better in my opinion.
I don’t know how old you are but there was a time from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s where in my opinion the Internet, in its infancy, was at its greatest… and these federated services remind me of those times.
This time before corporations ran the Internet and every moron had access to it at their fingertips. It was a time when it took real effort to get online, and so the entirety of the Internet consisted of enthusiasts and small fragmented communities. It was beautiful looking back at what it once was and how organic it was, and sad to see what it has become now.
Now the Internet is ruled by corporations mining data, and every moron under the sun happily giving it away for the next dopamine hit engineered to keep them online longer. Companies using this data to manipulate specific demographics and eventually larger swathes of society to do whatever they want… no thanks, I’d rather not be a part of that circus.
I’d rather the barrier to entry be higher, in my opinion, it increases the signal to noise ratio… which is at an all time low on most other social media sites.
Quite. Remember narwhaling bacon? Never again.
Exactly this.
As an analogy, I personally think the Linux desktop is better than Windows but I don’t think desktop Linux users are inherently better than Windows users.
Sure, desktop Linux users are probably more tech savvy on average but they are probably also more likely to be less socially capable imo. (like me)
“I use Arch by the way”
(I kid, I kid… I use garuda)
Praise the Arch wiki though
I do actually run arch btw :)
Pleb. I use Gentoo.
(Fedora, actually.)
Pleb. I use NixOS.
(Arch
btwactually)+1 for NixOS
I actually use gentoo and I love y’all
I mean more as “if you can’t look past skin tone and gender, you can’t probably read a sign up sheet.”
Racists are idiots. The ones who learned better aren’t idiots because they applied new knowledge.
Racists just regurgitate what they were told since birth, without questioning anything and doubling down.
Is Lemmy better? Remains to be seen. But if they refuse to join because we won’t tolerate slurs, that’s a bonus.
s/stupid/lazy
I wish the fediverse is able to contain all the ideas, all the political positions and that disconnecting/blocking an instance is only used for behaviors like spamming. Not giving every political stance the opportunity to be a part of the same world fuels extremists.
Beehaw and other instances can kick all the users with far-right beliefs. That’s fair. But Lemmy users shouldn’t be blocked to listen to or even interact with them, in their own instances, if they wanted. Don’t help creating political ghettos.
How would I be blocked from “listening to” (that’s never what’s going on) psedo-Nazis in my own instance?
Sorry, I didn’t understood what you meant. Especially the parenthesis part.
I’m glad that Beehaw doesn’t do it, but the other instances shouldn’t be federating the Tankies.
Authoritarian, genocide-denial, Stalin-praising politics have no place on the left.
That is the one thing that still makes me unsure of whether I should fully support Lemmy or not. I know how the federation works and that those communities can be easily excluded, but what is off to me is that the two main devs of Lemmy itself (and the Android app) are themselves tankies.
There was some chatter somewhere about beehaw.org assessing kbin as an alternative. I don’t think kbin is ready for primetime in that way yet, but I would be supportive of Lemmy instances converting when the time is right given that the two main developers of Lemmy are the two main admins of the tankiest instance
I heard of kbin too and on paper, it looks like a viable alternative. But as you’ve said, Lemmy is (as of now) more robust, and getting Reddit users to switch to something even less mature seems like a hard sell. With the Reddit blackout coming soon, Lemmy is just in the prime position to grab all the refugees, most of which will probably never find out about the main devs.
Even if that is true, it shouldn’t bother you I think. You have to let people have their convictions. The alternative is The Ministry of Truth. :)
Fascists and red-Fascists have no place in discourse. In part because their engagement is never good-faith.
I would generally agree, but tolerance should not extend to the point of accepting genocide denial and defense of clear-cut authoritarianism. See here for the general concept.
Tankies make the (imo) correct assumption that the US (or the west in general) engages in imperialism and is responsible for a huge amount of problems in the world, in addition to general atrocities, but then somehow decide the everything and everyone that opposes the US is perfectly fine and does no wrong. It’s baffeling.
Sure but look at some of the discussions in the US…they are also completely convinced that the US is the best country in the world.
It’s something with certain human beings it seems, that makes them want to join a team and defend it, no matter if it has flaws and is obviously incorrect at times. They connect their self confidence to their country I guess.
Regardless, the whole point of a platform like Lemmy is that it’s creators have no control over it, by design.
Personally I’m not sure I consider tankies leftists. Although communism is a leftists ideal, it’s based on the premise of people being equal and deserving of basic needs. Tankies often embrace misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and authoritarianism and deny or even support injustices against other humans. Not very leftist of them imo
I get where you’re coming from, but this feels like a no-true-scotsman kind of thing that both the left and right do to renounce and endorse their extremes as and when necessary to ensure they can always claim they were right from the beginning.
Things are what they are (including the results they produce), not what they ought to be. Whether that divergence happens because of orchestrated dog-whistles or poorly set up incentives is irrelevant.
Don’t get me wrong, I have the same tendency and the above is more like a mantra rather than an ingrained belief for me. A good litmus test has always been “Can I extend this argument such that I’m never wrong?” If so, I’m probably wrong already.
The term “Left” is nothing more than a team sport since the inception of the term in the 1800s. It’s not a useful term, nor a consistent term, and we only really use it for convenience. It’s not a meaningful model of classifying politics. That’s why we should consider just saying what we mean: progressive? socialist? egalitarian?
Same with “right”, of course.
Yeah I’ve been going back and forth between this one and lemmy.ml and a recent thread on Ukraine made really really appreciate that beehaw has that instance blocked
Yeah it’s not like theyre uncomfortable with socialism in general, this is like full on self identifying STALINISM. That’s something that comes with it’s own mess of human rights totalitarian crap, and pointing out that the US has also done terrible things(and oh boy has it) doesnt make that any better.
Like they arent the power to the people kind of socialists their logo is literally a tank.
I consider myself a socialist.
But Stalinists and other authoritarians have essentially reactionary politics.
I’m anarchocommunist (though I often say anarchosocialist because of loaded term stuff), and I view all authoritarian stances as truly horrific. The big great huge tragedy with capitalism is that the people with capital control the state, and therefor have authority to harm the populace. Bolshevism does not do anything to fix the tragic part. Vanguard party politics consistently devolves into authoritarian regimes, and those authoritarian regimes then harm the people.
The standard by which we should be judging any political or ethical framework is the degree of agency the most disenfranchised person in the system has.
Fellow AnCom here. Say it loud and say it proud.
China is also an Imperialist state, with borders and a realpolitik firmly grounded in ethnic supremacy.
Worth repeating that line I think. That China is an Imperialist ethnostate, because it is very true.
There is no doubt china is an imperialist state that views itself has having a manifest destiny like right to rule the world
I have to say that I had a really rough whiplash when I saw what kind of communities the admins of lemmy have created and are maintaining (I guess that is what you mean by tankies). Absolutely shocked that this is the credo of people making this “open/free/not controlled by company” software. A company might be preferable at this point >.>
These 2 people are the ones we’re supposed to put the faith into to maintain and develop the framework and architecture for all these potential sites? If we fund lemmy we fund them, if they give up then nobody else is probably going to take over, it sounds like a disaster just waiting to happen.
And okay, nice to hear that beehaw is blocking those communities but we’re still federated with everything else there, if I’m understanding it correctly, and it’s the same users that can easily cross between the instances? That’s not very reassuring either.
Considering that Reddit’s capitalist shenanigans is what brought redditors here, having socialist devs is not necessarily a bad thing.
You’d probably also be shocked at how many communists are strongly involved in FOSS development, and just how nice and great people they are on average.
In any case, don’t worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.
Socialism is not the same as what’s going on here. Socialism means you believe in good for the common citizen, not denying reality and wishing death and destruction on peaceful people.
Minor correction, socialism has one definition and one definition only: worker ownership of the means of production
While I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated by the tankies during my short stay on lemmy.ml, I don’t think that’s a fair representation of their views.
Most I believe seem frustrated by a western world that seem entirely too content in accepting a narrative heavily biased in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and right wing narratives, to the extent that it has blinded them to the cruelty of regimes in China and Russia.
I think that in order to foster a fruitful discussion here and avoid the trenches that often form between differing political views on the web, trying first to understand and empathise with an opposing view is crucial. It’s been a good heuristic for me at least, except in those cases where there is zero intention of even trying to understand each other (where just ignoring works well).
The beauty of it is that we don’t necessarily have to use lemmy.ml at all. Beehaw and Sopuli.xyz, two of the largest instances outside of lemmy.ml and the tankies, don’t federate with the tankies. It some ways it’s a good thing, as it encourages people to branch out instead of clustering around a “main” instance.
Do you know if the lemmy.ml owners run join-lemmy?
As far as I’m aware, yes.
So considering that those individuals are supportive of genocide- not even denying, but supportive- That is a fairly big problem for the ecosystem.
Presumably, with their extremist and toxic views, they will be acting to keep criticism of their favorite Imperial states (say, China) from being too prominent.
They’ve actually been quite tolerant of all of us, to be honest. I don’t think they have any desire to be exclusive to tankies.
I think Lemmy is too political, but still joined a long time ago. Things can improve with time. We’re seeing this happen now.
claims he isn’t far right
Right-wing extremists do this to make it seem like their position is widely held and “normal.” The worst extreme right-wing party we have here in Finland (Valta kuuluu kansalle or “Power Belongs to the People”, aka Valta kuuluu Kremlille or “Power Belongs to the Kremlin”) claims to be center right. The head of the party is a pro-Russia flat earther who doesn’t believe in climate change, and the party is staunchly anti-immigration
Performative Overton acrobatics.
Yes. This is a different platform, I’d rather we don’t just transplant all the reddit problems here.
Lemmy is inherently political. It was and is a revolt against reddit’s staff, their business model and the influence of US politics, media and corporations on their platform due to their advertising model. This place wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t political differences.
We’re not here to impress people who were banned for spreading Nazism. Go to all the reddit-clones that started in the early 2010s when reddit got called out for hosting toxic racist-or-fascist hate communities and communities sexualizing minors (e.g. /r/jailbait).
Everything is inherently political. If anyone thinks it isn’t, it’s just because the politics favour them.
Very true. A good phrase is “the personal is political”. Politics refers to organization, power, and decision-making, and so much of our lives is determined by decisions outside our control.
This is true, politics is not something distinct which can be considered separate from or optionally added to society, culture or economics, although Lemmy is also explicitly political. That might be more what I intended to say.
(The real kicker is realizing that abstaining is not politically neutral.)
Yeah, I think 2020 made a lot of “neutral” people realize that not taking a stand on certain things is picking a side, so to speak, on certain issues.
Exactly. I’m not exactly hiding my politics.
If anything, I’m glad being open about it means that a lot of bigots aren’t going to use lemmy in the first place. A natural filter to keep the transphobes and McCarthyites elsewhere.
Yes, exactly. If we can have the equivalent of Reddit without the bigots, it’s a big plus. Tired as a trans woman to go on r/Gaming and see transphobic comments
It’s like when Voat started. It was spawned out of Reddit’s hammer coming down. Admittedly, some decent communities popped up over there, and I stuck around for a bit, but it was also the dumping ground for all the degenerate behavior Reddit was cracking down on. I ultimately ended up on Reddit again after the decent communities lost steam and the only stuff that seemed active were the things I didn’t agree with or wasn’t interested in, legally or otherwise.
Voat was a school project that blew up in popularity and became infamous after the Nazis decided to use it as an easy platform to fester. It was not created as a response to anything reddit may have been doing at the time. It was just another link aggregator with comments that had user overlap with reddit.
What’s funny is there is nothing stopping them from making their own instance. I think the hesitation stems from them coming to grips with reality that few people really want to engage with their messaging when they step out of their bubble.
Because they can’t make people who don’t agree with them miserable if they’re all relegated to their own bubbles.
One of the funny events on Mastodon was that someone set up an instance that was far right and almost within a few hours, all the other instances had de-federated from it and blocked it
No-one was stopping them setting up their own instance but they all said “you don’t play well with others so go play on your own!”
That’s how a healthy society should be. Bigotry is always a minority of society. The media has been inflating its perceived reality to attract more people away from criticizing the current economical system. Fashism 2.0.
As Buenaventura Durruti said:
“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”
How can someone honestly claim to be “in the middle” when one side openly embraces Nazis, sexism, and other forms of bigotry? What’s the middle ground there?
There’s a difference between needing a safe space and not wanting to hang out with the KKK.
They only want to murder half of all trans people, not all?
I guess the other option is only half-murder all the trans people, but yeah; these compromise-always people need to take a second and actually THINK about what they’re asking us to compromise on. They sound incredibly foolish and disconnected.
They know what they’re asking for. They’re aiming for plausible deniability.
I think the answer is the words we use, which are incredibly myopic, literally two-dimensional with LEFT and RIGHT.
This reduction to the binary is exhausting, and probably forces people to think in bad faith. It is all bad faith. The middle ground is meaningless. Bigots don’t like to be called out as bigots, and many people are too afraid to call bigots out.
I think the step forward is to be significantly more precise with our language, avoid the temptation to simplify, and to stop using tired labels that are easily hijacked by bad actors.
Actually, left and right can even be one dimensional. Heh.
It’s an Overton Window thing. They’ve watched so much “fair and balanced” far-right media that it has made them believe that they’re centrists.
The “centrists” that all all in favor of letting the oppressor and the oppressed talk their differences in a neutral playground are great.
Requires a level of love for the status quo and lack of reflection that never ceases to amaze.
Dude, you are not in the center. You are three steps from the neonazis and a thousand kilometers from the tankies. Even if you are opposed to the “extremes” and “mu horseshoe” yo are not equidistant.
I’m not that kind of communist so I won’t likely interact with lemmygrad but for the rest of lemmy I’m not concerned with the devs being tankies unless they lean hard into silencing disssenting views from the rest of the left like anarchists and other flavors of socialists
The beauty of the system is that they really don’t have that power. It’s open source and federated, so at most they can ban people from instances they run
True, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth I suppose. Just another of the many many grey areas of life and trying to be as ethical as possible under a capitalist system
Yeah no disagreement there, as a non-auth leftist tankies really activate my almonds
The fact that guys like that dont feel welcome on Lemmy is a testament to Lemmy getting it right. I think it differentiates itself from the awful social media clones of the past like Voat or Vidme. I’ll leave it at that because we should probably shy away from outrage bait. As much as I’d like to i cant do anything about him and he is driving his buddies away from us
My teenage son and I recently had a conversation about how the people complaining something is “too political” are the ones with a political agenda you have to watch out for. He pleasantly surprised me by being 2 steps ahead of me (he told me he liked the thing people were criticizing because of the political aspects).
Is there a Lemmy equivalent of r/SelfAwareWolves?
https://lemmy.ml/c/selfawarewolves Last activity was 9 months ago though.
It is funny how the only viable Reddit alternative I’ve found so far (here) isnt led by weird libertarian tech bros but communists lol
What does political even mean here? I guess the usual “Don’t be racist, don’t be homophobic, don’t be transphobic etc.” I really don’t see much real political topics in my frontpage (local and all).
Historically, Lemmy has been very political (Marxist, pro-Russia/war, etc). But as of a few days ago the userbase is now mostly reddit users, so it feels quite different now. This is especially true if your instance admins choose who to federate with.
Oh no… Well I really really hope that this is in the past with the new users. Nothing but unpleasant experiences with Tankies.
I suspect most of them sit on lemmygrad. This is the beauty of instances and federation - nuance! Some users might be assholes on some instance communities, but if they’re not maintained in a way people are happy with, they can splinter off and make a better place. For instance, Beehaw can maintain a gaming community which is set up to be safe and avoid bullshit gamergate stuff, and they can call it “Gaming” because it’s not the only instance that can host one of those.
The issue with default subs and subs with obvious names on Reddit is that they build a certain personality and approach, foster certain views or don’t moderate well, and then new people come in and amplify that because that’s how they’ve seen the interaction working before. In that case, the best you can do is make a secondary one that has more strict rules - /r/truegaming, /r/games etc etc - which are difficult to grow because they’re unlinked. Being on beehaw means it’s part of the beehaw umbrella, so has to abide by the rules of the instance. Kind of a neat system.
I’m a software engineer and even I find the UI of the apps confusing and mediocre at best, actively terrible at worst. Once you figure out the quirks it’s relatively straightforward, but it’s honestly just a bad user experience.
Yeah, I told a guy today his hate of communism was totally his own prerogative, but he might want to put it aside to make a unified front against the impending Reddit changes. He flipped out on me and called me some choice words. Just another day on Reddit I guess.
Ah, perhaps you needed a translator to put things in terms this particular individual could understand. Let me help:
Woke woke WOKE wOke, woke wOKe WOKE!!! 😡
You gotta define what the hell you mean when you say “communism” before I can tell you if I hate it or not. The word has essentially no meaning in American political conversation.
