Karu 🐲

I kinda don’t want to engage further in this conversation, but I don’t want to leave you on read so to speak.

You had me go back and check and the .world admins did provide evidence of users planning to break .world rules in each defederation announcement post. You’re free to disagree with their conclusions but you’re wrong when you say they provided no evidence

In the post about defederating Hexbear, the entire thread was in response to a post by a Hexbear admin calling for good behavior, and .world admin was rather deliberately misinterpreting and quoting them in bad faith. I read both of them, and while the Hexbear post was like “I know you all want to troll the libs, but please don’t do that, it will suck for everyone and it’ll get us defederated”, all that the .world admin seemed to understand was “hey, time to troll the libs!”. I know it was a deliberate misinterpretation rather than an honest misunderstanding because the .world post was leaving out the many parts of the Hexbear post where the admin was explicitly calling for civility.

The Hexbear post went off in a tangent I didn’t really understand where they talked about a few of their political views, and .world took that as a weird example of extremism that I also didn’t quite get, claiming that stuff such as opposing NATO is extremist. Admitedly, I haven’t gone back to that post, so I’m saying this from memory. Feel free to correct me. But sure, in that case, they did at least point to something as an excuse for defederation, even if wildly misinterpreted.

But when I said that they weren’t providing evidence for hate speech I was talking about the Lemmygrad defederation announcement specifically, where they claimed that the reason for defederation was hate speech rather than trolling, bad behavior etc. In there, they did claim hate speech multiple times, but not once did they provide an example of that. Which is what I was talking about.

Besides that, you sound like you’re sitting on the fence on whether or not they are hateful

I’m not. They’re not hateful. Calling for direct action in the form of violence towards the wealthy and towards genocidal governments such as Israel does not qualify as hate speech, because they are not considered protected groups. You are free to argue that they are misguided, or even dangerous, and it would be a legitimate disagreement, but hate speech is a concept with a rather strict legal definition. You cannot just consider stuff such as “eat the rich” or “death to israel” as hate speech.

I have receipts of the admins cheering on the Tiananmen Square massacre because it was a western plot or painting the CCP’s treatment of Uighur’s as a simple necessary anti-terrorism action rather than ethnic cleansing. Please don’t willfully look the other way because they don’t outright yell “gas the Jews”.

Irrelevant. My point in this argument isn’t that they don’t do this, it’s that the .world admins should have cited specific instances of this happening in the sticky post they made about defeding Lemmygrad. That said, a lot of the time people claim to have seen this, either the context is a lot more nuanced than that, or they are circlejerking and roleplaying the “tankie” stereotype. Specifically with the Tiananmen Square thing, it’s more likely the latter. My own experience lurking Lemmygrad is that people in there actually don’t like China much either, so I’m a bit surprised that .worlders keep saying that they do.

I also question why a “circlejerk” community pointing out the ridiculous shit said by leadership and regular posters on the instances isn’t valid

Circlejerk communities are by design unfair. They crop stuff out of context to laugh at it. It’s funny, but it’s not at all rigorous and may not be cited setiously. A lot of the time it’s screenshots of posts that have either been removed, downvoted, or there is a reply calling bullshit that has been cropped out of the image, and these are outliers to the community that are treated as the average opinion. Other times, the context is all there and the funny bit is just the disagreement between the circlejerk community and the source material, but circlejerk posts are ALWAYS presented misleadingly. The point is to laugh at it, not to do some rigorous examination of the line of reasoning.

Anecdotal, but a few days ago I saw a .world user claimed they had met someone on Lemmygrad that stated that being gay was imperialistic, and they actually did link to it. The link was pointing to a c/tankiejerk thread with a screenshot about a post that did actually say that. Granted, the post itself was bullshit. However, as shown in the screenshot itself, the post was downvoted, and the submitter was… someone with the @lemmy.world suffix. It’s okay that this post was screenshot and uploaded to c/tankiejerk to laugh at it, but it’s not valid to extrapolate that post’s content to the entirety of Lemmygrad when it was already downvoted and posted by a .world user in the first place. This is the kind of bad faith I’m referring to that revolves around these defederations IMO.

Just to clarify- I didn’t claim that they aren’t hateful instances, deliberately so to avoid starting an argument. I mean, I will say that they aren’t if you want, but the point I was making was that .world admins did not provide any example in the thread where they announced this. You could be the worst criminal on Earth, and the judge sentencing you must still be expected to provide proof before taking further action. Likewise, no matter how “obvious” it seems that Hexbear etc are “hateful” instances, responsible admins are still expected to provide concrete reasons for defederation.

This isn’t just semantics. This is important because when you get into the specifics, when you force people to provide examples of Lemmygraders or Hexbears supposedly cheering on the murder of Israelis or denying genocides like Holodomor, no one is able to quote anything that can be remotely interpreted as that without engaging in really bad faith, other than maybe using sources such as circlejerk communities making fun of them (such as Meanwhileongrad).

Anyway, it’s honestly not that easy to find, because Hexbear and Lemmygrad themselves are circlejerks most of the time, so I’m not bothered by regular users not having proof or anything when stating that they dislike these instances. But when it’s the whole admin of a large instance, I expect more seriousness.

The controversy you are referring to is regarding specifically .world defederating Hexbear “preemptively” before the latter could federate with anyone, out of fear that the “annoying tankies” may overrun everyone else. Since Hexbear is a relatively small platform run by volunteers like .world is, and the basis on which the defederation was justified was shaky at best, a lot of users raised an eyebrow. There was a similar move by .world later on where they defederated from Lemmygrad, another “tankie” instance, due to alleged hate speech of which the admins failed to provide a single example, and it was clear as day that .world admins just wanted some excuse to defederate away “the evil communists”.

In this case, the situation is different, because it involves a lot more than just .world. A large, for-profit instance Threads, run by Meta, is opening up to ActivityPub, and people are afraid of the reasonable possibility that Meta is attempting to either destroy or absorb the Fediverse as a whole. Besides the shitty corporate attempts in the past, Threads is also overrun by a lot of algorithm induced hate speech and far-right extremism, and there is a legitimate concern that this will spread to instances that federate with Threads.

Hexbear (and others like Lemmygrad) are different in that they are still part of the Fediverse, they are run by volunteers like most instances, and remain federated with other large instances such as lemm.ee. But the fact that hate speech is rampant in Threads yet .world admins want to “wait and see” make the Lemmygrad defederation even clearer and funnier in retrospect, lol. I complained back in the day when Hexbear was defederated that I’d rather let users choose for themselves whether they wanted that or not, and I got told to go to another instance. Now that we are federating with Threads anyway, might as well do that.

Edit: Typos

It’s possible that it eventually ends capitalism, or at the very least forces it to reform significantly.

Consider that the most basic way a company can obtain profit is by extracting as much surplus value as they possibly can, i.e spending less and earning more. Extracting high surplus value from human workers is easy, because a salary doesn’t really depend on the intrinsic value of the service a worker is providing, but rather it’s tied to the price of that job position in the market. Theoretically, employers can all agree and offer lower salaries for the same jobs if the situation demands it. You can always “negotiate” a lower salary with a human worker, and they will accept because any amount of money is better than no money. Machines are different. They don’t need a salary, but they do carry a maintenance cost, and you cannot negotiate with that. If you don’t cover the maintenance costs, the machine will outright not do its job, and no amount of threats will change that. You can always optimize a machine, replace it with a better one, etc. but the rate at which machines get optimized is slower than the rate at which salaries can decrease or even become stagnant in the face of inflation. So it’s a lot harder to extract surplus value from machines than it is from human workers.

Historically, machines helped cement a wealth gap. If there was a job that required some specialization and therefore had a somewhat solid salary, machines would split it into a “lesser” job that many more people can do (i.e just ensuring the machine is doing its job), driving down salaries and therefore their purchasing power, and a specialized job (i.e creating or maintaining the machine), which much less people can access, whose salaries have remained high.

So far, machines haven’t really replaced human workforce, but they have helped cement an underclass with little purchasing power. This time, the whole schtick with AI is that it will be able to, supposedly, eventually replace specialist jobs. If AI does deliver on that promise, we’ll get stuck with a wealth distribution where a majority of the working class has little purchasing power to do anything. Since working class is also the majority of the population, companies won’t really be able to sell anything because no one will be able to buy anything. You cannot sustain an economic model that impoverishes the same demography it leeches off of.

But there is a catch: All companies have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI which can replace specialist jobs. Having those would give them a huge advantage for them in the market. AI doesn’t demand good working conditions, they don’t undermine other employees’ loyalty by unionizing, they are generally cheaper and more reliable than human workers, etc. which sounds all fine and dandy until you realize that it’s also those human workers the ones buying your products and services. AI has, by definition, a null purchasing power. So, companies individually have an incentive to pursue that perfect AI, but when all companies have access to it… no company will be sustainable anymore.

Of course, it’s all contingent on AI ever getting that far, which at the moment I’m not sure it’s even possible, but tech nerds sure love to promise it is. Personally, I’m hopeful that we will eventually organize society in a way where machines are doing the dirty work while I get to lead a meaningful life and engage in jobs I’m actively interested in, rather than just to get by. This is one of the possible paths to that society. Unfortunately, it also means that, for the working class, it will get worse before it gets better.

I didn’t know about Nostr, and honestly, thank you for letting me know. I find the idea behind the protocol to be pretty interesting, but wouldn’t use it myself. I’m not keen on the idea of removing moderation altogether.

However, I do think that it’s about time we rethink how moderation works on the Internet, and the fediverse should be a good place to start doing so. Perhaps my biggest gripe with the fediverse is that moderation works exactly the same as in corporate social media. Right now, moderators are picked under discretion of whatever the criteria of the admin are, and they are not subject to “the will of the people” so to speak. If a mod or admin acts in bad faith, the only recourse for the rest of the users is to leave, and maybe setup your own instance if you have the technical know-how. And while corporate media admins are somewhat constrained by investors, fediverse admins don’t have to respond to anyone. Which is better than being bound by investors, but here, admins can and do take harsh decisions on a whim without having to justify anything to anyone. Which is honestly not a good thing.

So, while I imagined the fediverse as some network of interconnected small, self-managed communes, what we actually have is a network of petty fiefdoms, some of which do listen to their users even though they are under no obligation to do so, and others outright don’t. I don’t mean to say that centralized services are better at this, but in the end I’m having some of the same problems regarding arbitrariness of moderation and admin decisions here that I had on Reddit and Twitter.

I see the fediverse as the future of social media, but not in its current form. The way it currently works keeps us bound to drama and petty feuds between admins of instances, and that is unavoidable while large fedi platforms are hosted by single people or very small groups of people. Perhaps the way that this could be avoided would be by using a protocol that enforces decentralization of hosting, like Nostr does. I imagine it would work sort of like a torrent, where we are all sharing and hosting the instance or the communities we use, whether completely or only partially. Or perhaps an instance is made out of multiple relays which are hosted separately. This way, we wouldn’t have issues such as admins unilaterally defederating instances because of a disagreement or stuff like that, since we’d all be admins in a way.

I wouldn’t want to do away with moderation, but decisions such as who gets to be moderator, who gets to keep being moderator, and who we ban, fed with or defed from, is consulted via democratic process enforced by design. Otherwise, it’s not going to be meaningfully different from centralized media once the big instances become big enough.

I’m missing r/vexillologycriclejerk. Sure, it always was the same joke for like a month, but it used to be one of the highlights of my daily Reddit experience.

If they’re unaffected by gravity, chances are they don’t have mass. If they don’t have mass, they’re not constrained by the Higgs field, which in turn means that they can never move at any velocity below light speed.

Their unfortunate fate is to roam across all of space at the maximum possible velocity in perpetuity.

I used to run a yay -Syu on my system almost daily.

Now, I run a pacman -Syu once every 2-3 weeks, and I only ever update a package from the AUR if I do need it updated or is there a serious vulnerability.

Turns out I don’t have a real need to have my personal system running bleeding edge new software at all times. Sure, the updates are larger, but I no longer feel like risking my system stability on a daily basis. I’m a lot happier this way.

You pull animal-like creatures from their natural habitats to make them fight each other in a way that they somehow consent, in a franchise that systematically weeds out the good ideas from each game while retaining the bad ones.

Yeah, I agree. I just think the decision to defederate should not be taken unilaterally & on a whim by admins. I don’t know why it took them so long with exploding heads, but if it was because they were consulting the userbase, I can see a justification for it taking so long. Defederating from Hexbear on the other hand, before telling anyone and even before they have the chance to federate back, is unacceptable IMO

Same, ever since I joined lemmy.world I had a feeling that they were way too trigger-happy with the defederation button, but I was trying to not pay a lot of mind to it and just assume good faith in the admins. But the Hexvear fiasco was absolute bullshit that made that assumption impossible for me. And I don’t even particularly care about Hexbear lol

So I have been visiting other instances and made an alt account on lemmygrad just in case.

I usually support that sentiment, but it only applies when it is in your hands whether we listen or not. In this case, the admins singlehandedly decided that none of us can. This is pretty much a form of censorship IMO

I don’t really know the reason, but it would be cool if that screen included a reason for defederation alongside the name of every defederated instance.

That said, wasn’t Hexbear using a Lemmy fork that split off really early and then added lots of features of their own, making it particularly incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse? I read somewhere that federating with Hexbear was not possible at the moment and that it’s unclear whether it will ever be possible.

Edit: small rephrasing

Funny, just a few hours ago I was telling a friend that I noticed the opposite. This conversation started because while r/antiwork and r/work_reform had mostly incompatible ideologies, with antiwork being more radical, Lemmy suggested to me a community titled “Antiwork/Work reform” which is noticeably more status quo compacent. Additionally, the rate of posts going “capitalism isn’t that bad, actually” and “fuck tankies” in my TL is higher than in Reddit.

I think this has to do with the amount of active users. If, say, 2% of active users are very vocal about abolishing wage slavery, if there are like 1000 users, that 2% is just 20 people, which wouldn’t make a very active community, whereas if it’s 100 000 users, then that makes 2000 people who can already make a sort of “echo chamber” where they can openly and actively discuss their ideas.

Also, not to forget that Reddit, like all mass social media, has algorithms meant to maximize your session lengths and that usually involves exposing you to more extremist ideas, both left and right.

I admit I wasn’t intending to leave Reddit. Sure, I absolutely wasn’t going to install the damn official app, but I browse Reddit way more on desktop that on my phone. But it turns out my time spent on Reddit absolutely tanked without me doing much. Lemmy turned out to be a better replacement for me than I expected, I could find a lot of interesting activity here unlike, say, Mastodon where I had to dig further.

That does not mean I left Reddit entirely lol, but I sure enter way less now.

Organic Maps is OSM-based? I switched to it for a few months for the reasons stated above, but it really did not work out for me. Mainly because it was lacking a lot of major locations and facilities in my city, and I could never reliably ask for indications. Plus it had no info on public transportation other than the subway, which was unfortunate. I guess it was because I’m in Europe? Either way I eventually had to switch back to GMaps 😔

If you don’t disable the feature where it plays the videos directly in the thumbnail by hovering over it, it also counts as viewed if you let the thumbnail play for like 3 seconds. I hate it.

Fair enough. If it worked the way I said, I reckon there should be some proof of authority or good will before proceeding, and I just don’t see it. I like the idea where you can make a suggestion to a mod from another instance tho.

If you don’t want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can’t understand

Mastodon has a feature where you can set which language a post is in, and a setting in your account where you can select which languages you want to see. Is this not viable for Lemmy?

Edit: Nevermind, I just found out this feature is in Lemmy as well 😅

Yeah VSCode is the GOAT. I reached a point where I basically only ever use any other IDE if I’m explicitly told to, or if I don’t have a desktop environment to work with. Or if I have to work with Java, because sadly I found the Java support on VSCode to be rather lacking.