• 101 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • It was an interesting read. I’m willing to do certain parts of that like listening more to marginalized voices. What bugs me though is that basically the text says that we need to disrupt the system, because its racist; but on the other hand, it basically assumes that the system was and always has been racist. And this is again identity politics: based on Focaults post structuralism; societal, liberal progress is a myth, etc. etc. There is no actual believe in societal progress (which I do believe in primarily through technological progress).


  • I think the topic of racism and discrimination needs to happen on the Fediverse if its an issue. However, I’m worrying that your approach is more counterprodctive. I think its fine to ask for proof for the supposed racist culture on Lemmy, because I think every argument needs to have some argumentative ground. I’m against discrimination (which certainly happens on the Fediverse), but I dont think identity politics have come up with productive tools to tackle the issues they point out.






















  • I do think that the book carry some important messages like questioning authority, being agents of one’s own life. On the other hand you it is rather conservative and some bad stereotypes.

    But the question is: for which novel doesn’t this apply, too? I think one can look past those things if one looks at the overall message here. Also, the universe and the fandom has developed since the original series. Look at the game: its very diverse. Ok, you still have the antisemetic stereotypes, but its definitely a step forward.

    So yes, I think the H.P. still has something for society to profit from. The popularity also speaks for itself. If you like it or not, it will stay a part of society for a while.

    So instead of banning the whole thing (which is unrealistic in the long run anyways), I think it would be good to embrace its healthy parts for the Fediverse.


  • Well, the H.P. fandom stands in the center not Rowling or her books. I think one should differentiate with that.

    Also: yes, the books contain antisemitic stereotypes, but Rowling herself hasn’t said herself anything antisemitic to my knowledge. Some of her statemets are transphobic, but the Fediverse has enough room to carry out this conflict.

    We are not in centralized social media anymore, where you have to be on the same site as everybody else. If you are on the same instance as a transphobe and you oppose that: change instances. If you don’t want to be on an instance that federates with any transphobe content: change to an instance that de-federated with any of those instances. That’s all possible in the Fediverse.


  • Yeah, that’s definitely a problem. One reason I think is that now you are by default signed up for mastodon.social, which results in a huge mastodon.social.

    Maybe. One can hope. In the end though, my impression of how the broad structure of the fediverse has panned out is that we really shouldn’t underestimate the tendency for people to centralise.

    I also think that most people are so used to centralized services by now. Like, I’m not blaming them for being immature, but there is still a long way to go for people to become mature digital actors. That’s a big problem.

    I hope that much of this will even itself out as the Fediverse grows. With Threads, soon there will be another big player in the Fediverse that will be the next center of it :D

    My personal opinion is that

    1. We need to get more people in the Fediverse
    2. We need to educate people in the Fediverse towards more digital agency

    If we get this done, the Fediverse grows heathily. But I think this will not happen necessarily with Threads joining. The people there are quite comfortable with their central services.

    Instead, we should try to ally with the traditional communities of the web. I would be for Harry Potter fans, because they are themselves able to create their own spaces on the web, as they have managed to do for many years. There should be one or multiple Harry Potter-themed instances that attract H.P. fans and at the same time promote digital agency.