No contradiction. Law is a dumb basis for deciding what you like and don’t like.

Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.

There’s plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn’t come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.

(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).

It’s possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn’t really care about those ideals (perhaps they’re only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn’t do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.

For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn’t require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn’t have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.

lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn’t able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.

Almost all of my creations which I share (mostly code and visual art) are entirely volunteer work. Community culture doesn’t cost money. Entertainment does not need to be a job, even if it must take time and work.

Of course industrial large feature films cost full-time money. But I don’t come to online communities for that.

The upvote/downvote button is not a [] petition for making a problem go away by disagreeing with it.

Unfortunately, in a material way, it is. Downvoting a post is a way of lowering its visibility on the platform.

I’m not complaining about it being crypto - I prefer crypto over credit card payments for online stuff. On the other hand, any monetisation of online communities leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I came to Lemmy years ago to get a step further away from for-profit internet treating me like a customer. Root of all evil, and all that.

Carl and the Aqua Team make their position on piracy very clear.

https://inv.us.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=MCTlcJMCSpM

Reminder to be aware of darknet mirrors like I2P sites and Tor .onion services - domains aren’t controlled by a company so they can’t just be taken down by a legal request.

For z-lib, the Wikipedia article lists their .onion and I2P addresses (I haven’t verified them so check before bookmarking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library

For my own learning (not trying to argue), can you list some of those basic facts of property rights?

morality

Agreed. I wasn’t saying morality is pointless or worthless or anything. Even myself, I often ‘do the right thing’ on impulse rather than reason. I’m pointing out that morality is an idealistic structure, referencing the ironic appeal to morality from someone who was trying to critique Marxism for being an “idealist ideology”. Morality is so subjective and unquantifiable it wasn’t even worth arguing against their silly comparison.

It is a powerful tool, although I must admit I have serious issues with the most common frameworks of morality I see today, being framed as absolute rules a vacuum. And like you said, moral arguments can have excellent rhetorical power, and moral righteousness is a powerful motivator. The bottom line is, what anti-capitalists try to do fits into most moral frameworks as clearly good, and that’s great!

what was that ideology again? Oh that’s right, it’s Marxist socialism

Marxist socialism isn’t idealist. In fact, it’s one of the few ideologies which isn’t idealist. It’s based on an scientific economic analysis of capitalism. Contrast this against our current system, liberalism, which is the failed idealization of liberty. Liberalism neglectfully kills hundreds of millions even in developed and politically-stable countries, but it’s just normal at this point.

You’re not morally superior to fascists

Morality is idealism.

If Marxist socialists had a similar movement in size and influence to Trump and MAGA and were in a position to win, the sane majority would be just as terrified

Oh no, they’re going to improve life expectancy and stop billionaires wasting all our hard work! The terror!

If anything, you, SleezyDizasta, should want Marxists to be in a position which threatens the ruling parties, because them being threatened is the only way you will ever get any of that big list of reforms you posted, bargaining to try and deradicalize the masses away from unrest. We saw this happen in Western bloc countries near the USSR such as the Nordic countries, considered the most progressive but gradually sinking back in line with the rest of Europe now.

dissolution is genocide

Dissolution doesn’t even suggest killing, at all. I don’t think you know what words mean.

This is the type of [whole paragraph]

I was referring to Palestine. Perhaps I should have specifically said ‘the region of Palestine’ but I didn’t want to be condescending by stating the obvious.

How dumb do you have to be to think that Americans in America would cheer on for idiots that think their country is evil, illegitimate, and should be destroyed?

How dumb do you have to be to think that most Americans like their governments?

[skipped over a lot of obvious bad-faith bullshit lol]

My mistake, I heard about those but assumed it only applied for state-level politicians, not federal politicians they elect. Thanks for letting me know!

Definitely, and for most people (there are rare exceptions, like seats which aren’t just Dem vs. Rep as the only viable candidates) I’d assume it’s the pragmatic choice for now given the broken system.

When we bump up posts that we like instead of relevant ones, those things get the visibility. I think.

Yep, I haven’t actually checked the ‘Hot’ algorithm code (it’s publicly viewable) but I believe so. And there’s another related tough-to-solve phenomenon in any social media site where the most populist, simple, agreeable things are likely to get the most upvotes/likes/etc., and therefore the most reward. So unfortunately, a front page is often filled with low-meaning content like those jokes, or shallow but agreeable populist platitudes (which there’s nothing wrong with if you’re here for entertainment, but is an issue for more serious communities). I think tons of moderation is also the only cure for that, because I can’t think of an alternate bump system that works (for example, forums which use the ‘last bumped’ system reward posts for getting replies, so flame and troll posts that start rapid arguments rise to the top instead, and posts often just say ‘bump’!)

As in, I don’t see what would be done besides tons of moderation or short post restrictions. Something I don’t find feasible

I agree. There could be tricks like auto-moderation software detecting replies that a comm/instance staff considers to be an issue (e.g. a reply just saying ‘this’ or ‘lol’) and auto-replying with a caution against low-effort posting, but false positives could be a pain so it all comes back to more moderation staff in the end. It’s ultimately a network with a very open and growing community, unless you’re in a smaller private community. And Lemmy enables those to be created, so I can be happy with that if I ever want to create a more serious place.

I don’t notice that issue with ‘comm’, but maybe that’s just because I’ve been around it and using it for years (just like the indistinct word ‘sub’ becomes meaningful and distinct in context once you see ‘subreddit’ a few times). It was a bit odd the first couple of times I saw it because I already associated the term with ‘communications’, like ‘send out comms’.

Liberalism (I don’t mean that as in ‘left wing’ or ‘progressive’, I mean it as in ‘the Enlightenment political ideologies about liberty which the USA was founded upon’) is founded on ideals like free speech and political association. They won’t be prosecuted in the USA for being Nazis, they’re constitutionally protected. Institutions will protect their ability to do this.

It allows us to identify them, but justice will not be delivered by the institutions here. That’s where the community must come in and act, legally or otherwise. They can’t offload their responsibility onto police this time. The community must organize and defend itself against fascists. Them being out and about just means we haven’t made them scared and hurt.

The only reason I hang around here is because there’s no forum equivalent

Equivalent of what? A place where you could make your own communities? (without spinning up a server or being a disconnected island) Yeah, I can only think of imageboard examples of reddit-like DIY community sites, and those… really aren’t what you asked for (very few had intelligent discussions, and by their nature, they mainly just attracted people who got banned from more normal communities).

Unless mods wanted to spend 24/7 making sure people didn’t use FOSS Reddit the same way Reddit was used, that was always going to happen, if it hadn’t then people would have went back to Reddit to doom scroll again.

Exactly. There’s not really any point to me crying ‘we’re not a reddit clone! we’re not a reddit clone!’

Good question. Especially since a lot of these are things I only notice in hindsight.

• Volunteer to implement helpful hints at a systematic level, even small things like linking the join-lemmy.org documentation on the signup page by default, and adding placeholder text for instance and community admins to see and tweak for their own rules. I say ‘volunteer’ because the devs were, and are, far too busy to do everything themselves.

• Create and share around image/infographic guides on why Lemmy is different to reddit. This could actually have been a good promotion tool too, back when we really needed it. I actually hastily made a quick one during the sudden migration, but I don’t think it’s worth digging up, it was very basic and not well thought-through.

Then again, some people had no real problems with reddit except for the API stuff. The people who came here earlier often had complaints about reddit’s overall community trends, you know, people replying to headlines and clearly not reading the actual article at all, empty fluff like a random pun being the three highest rated comments, buttloads of junk replies like ‘wow’, ‘this’, ‘i wish i could upvote twice’ to scroll past. And I don’t think there’s much I myself could do to fight things like that, without putting in far too much time and effort (this site isn’t my life!).

As someone else said, the secret is that the US isn’t ‘turning into’, it’s been bad for at least a century. We’ve finally gotten to the point where racism is starting to get unpopular enough that it’s not just normal and largely ignored.

Even without guns involved, there are many regions with antifascist groups which come and give them a beating (see Patriot Front getting run out of Philadelphia). Collective violent resistance intimidates them. Non-violent tactics are essential, they come first and are more important overall, but violence makes them scare to come outside. Just look at the dissolution of the British Union of Fascists after the '43 Group threw bricks at them enough times for a big example (there are many smaller examples - especially since modern neo-nazis tend to recruit scrawny teens online who can’t handle getting beaten up).

Honestly, I regret not putting more effort into setting up a good foundation here before the API drama hit. There was a chance to fix many of the problems of reddit, and poor communication just let people import all the problems right back.

Hell, people are still calling communities ‘subs’. Even basic stuff like that. And I’m not blaming people for coming into a place without learning about its culture, unfortunately that’s just normal and it happens. I’m just annoyed we didn’t create ways to educate them easily, like guidebooks and introductions on the sign-up page.