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.

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’.

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!).

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.

If someone’s take on 9/11 doesn’t go back to at least the early 1980s, it’s probably not worth taking too seriously. It didn’t start on 9/11, that’s just the date millions of people were forced into hearing about the messy and complex conflicts. A witness on ground zero doesn’t become a 9/11 expert.

The 4th season of the podcast Blowback does an excellent job of covering the background, both within and beyond the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I highly recommend it.

It’s disingenuous to assume the Soviet Union is representative of communism or even the Western communist movement at the time or afterwards. It would be similar to pointing to the unique horrors of the United States history and claiming therefore all those supporting capitalism are disturbing.

Ah, that sucks to hear about.

I was initially siding with Israel as they were hit first, but their response has made me rethink things.

To generalize this out to other wars and conflicts, even regular old arguments, there are almost always pre-existing conditions and tensions leading up to the first major attack. Even things like WWI, where the catalyst was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But there is quite obviously more to the atmosphere, national ambitions, etc. etc. that make it so that the separatists wanted to assassinate him, and make it so that Austria-Hungary wanted to invade Serbia and used this as an excuse. A war would have happened anyway, no matter who attacked first.

Is it even safe to start from the Ottomans?

I had decided to abstain from commenting on this subject further. Pretty much every reply I have received is a variation of ‘fake news’ or ‘racist cunt’.

Yeah, kneejerk reactions get tiring. I tend not to use reddit-like or twitter-like forums much because of how low-effort and unempathetic most posts are. ‘Read the news title, get angry’, might as well be the motto. I’m glad you appreciated it.

Affirmative action based on […] economic prosperity would help the most people in need and capture many more who would otherwise fall through the gaps.

This absolutely is and should be fought for, alongside other movements. The concentration of wealth at the top has just accelerated after the main COVID crisis. Our whole economic system funnels wealth to those with capital, and their influence on our political system and mass media is the root cause of most issues in our society. My caveat is that affirmative action re: economic prosperity won’t solve this, the problem runs so deep that affirmative action will ultimately be inadequate, treating the symptoms rather than the cause. We need a systematic overhaul… far far far far easier said than done.

That said, economic equity doesn’t cover everything, as many Indigenous people have other priorities that aren’t strictly economic, a major one being land rights. A somewhat-known recent example of the issue is mining companies destroying sacred land or historical artifacts, another is traditional use of the land to live off of. I admittedly don’t know enough about land right to explain in proper detail, but it’s one of the main demands that protesters have demanded for decades and decades.

I would argue that abolishing slavery, universal suffrage, and anti-discrimination laws have done far more to solve systemic racism than racial affirmative action.

I agree, and I would say that this doesn’t mean affirmative action isn’t still important. To take a metaphor from the Civil Rights struggle, that anti-discrimination is taking the knife out, there is still a need to heal the wound before we can say things are fine. We’ve abolished the most blatant aggression like non-suffrage, but done very little to make amends on things like colonisation and centuries of repression and land possession.

Generations of loss and disadvantage evidently still exist, and will remain without positive interference. Disadvantage is cyclical, it doesn’t heal by itself, poverty is an self-evident example of the cyclic nature of powerlessness. And to re-emphasise, this applies generally to disadvantage, not just disadvantage caused by colonisation or racial disadvantage.

As a side note, I’m not sure if it’s even correct to frame this as about race, Indigenous classification just inherently matches up with race since the historical inhabitants of Australian land were all, to use a racial term, Black indigenous Australians, and we’ve historically just grouped them all together when it comes to the social concept of race because they’re not White or Asian. The ill-advised and quite frankly worthless Voice proposal was about them being the native peoples, not about them being a certain race or having been racially discriminated.

I am quickly fragged by space-aged weaponry, provided I don’t explode from the strange atmosphere. Best case scenario isn’t good, food seemingly doesn’t exist.

I’ll call for their manager and attack the manager specifically. Is there a term for that yet?