The headline is genocide apologia and should be banned.

They are like the minutemen, but have worse PR.

Is it simply impossible for you to imagine that other peoples have different opinions and viewpoints on things?

Just because it’s been ingrained into you that arabs are bad and they are all “shithole countries” or hezbollah is evil, doesn’t mean that others share that view. Ask yourself: Does Lebanon and Iran and Palestinians have a right to defend themselves?

And no that doesn’t mean I agree with either of those groups. I just realize that framing everything as a fight of good vs evil like it’s some fantasy movie where you can just slay the mindless orcs. These are human beings sick of imperialist aggression. Do you expect them to just lie down? Solutions are complicated and don’t involve just killing everyone who opposes you.

So of course Iran would have communication channels with Hezbollah or even support them.

The problem isn’t that my argument is weak, it’s that I have to make it in the first place. It’s fucking obvious except to the severely brainwashed, and then there is little point of making it instead of mocking them.

If they have nothing to hide, why don’t they let themselves be killed?

Communication? Lebanon has a right to defend itself. It’s like questioning why Biden has a line to the Israel Prime Minister.

How good does it work on an external 4K monitor? Can you watch 4k video? I imagine youtube and browsing reddit or news online shouldn’t be a problem.

Basically I’d like an ultra low power PC for boring desktop stuff on 4k monitor.

Don’t they HAVE TO open their messaging app now with the “EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act”?

EDIT: Huh, no they don’t (link) cause they are not “core platform”…

What’s ABI? API compatible with linux kernel? EDIT: Never mind, Application binary interface

And what’s TCB?

Yeah. Worst offender is r/climatechange which is still moderated by a “both sides” climate skeptic. It’s practically aiding genocide / omnicide.
Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t have good solution to fracturing and default instances either.

Wait, it’s already over?

Yeah that’s my main problem with the article, it argues “as if” it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it’s all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.

You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.

Maybe the “age of the free internet” has passed and people just expect bad faith and react completely radicalized today.

So if every users would spin up their own instance or “email server” like “me@matcha_addict.com”, could that actually work? Or would that break the activity pub protocol with too many instances?

Yeah thinking about this, individual servers for specialized topics seems like the way to go. I guess it depends on the type of community. Vegan is large enough but still a specialized community that yeah doesn’t need size. It’s specialized but not a niche.

But other niche communities, e.g. av1, jpegxl or velomobile, are too niche to work without more people. I think.

But it would still be good if you could at least set a community to automatically “forward” to a new instance. And maybe that a community could “export” the posts from existing instance to a new instance. Then you could move or merge. I believe something like that is needed.

Ok I’m just thinking out loud here…

Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.

There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.

And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don’t need downvotes since there wouldn’t be too many “controversial” topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn’t enough “tagging” on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post “funny/silly” or “unconstructive” or “misinformation” or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I’m wrong with this.

But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn’t support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can’t filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.

Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more “post-truth”, not just the fascists but the “leftists”, liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it’s bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they’ve been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to “heal”. But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don’t just mean the socialists lol).

And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the europe@feddit.de community lost 75% of it’s users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.

So I think it’s not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.

Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂

Yeah it is thriving, what I meant is that to have a chance to replace reddit, lemmy needs to find some technical solutions (moving / migrating / merging of communities) and somehow stop fracturing into islands.

But maybe that age of the internet has passed and people are no longer willing because of trolls, bad faith actors, sock puppets, bots… and the increasing polarization of ideology and propaganda.

Wait, what? Where can I read more about that?

I tried like 4 different lemmy instances before settling on lemm.ee because it hasn’t defederated from the socialists or “tankies”. So I can participate.

This defederation fracturing lemmy really speaks to both self-censorship of allowable ideologies and also bad quality of admins and mods several servers.

If lemmy can’t somehow federate communities separately from instances I don’t see lemmy thriving.

Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?

Maybe it’s just me but it seems the synchronization of public opinion on reddit / lemmy with Empire seems to be getting worse. (EDIT: It seems to be getting more “convincing”)

Like there was some opposition from the “progressives” and “leftists” about the Juan Guaidó sham and you could argue about it without getting downvoted into oblivion, but now very few dare to talk about the latest attempt to capture Venezuela’s oil.

For example someone liking controversial content

On reddit you basically have to sort by controversial today and lemmy isn’t far behind. There is a hive mind today where people jump on the hive mind and hate wagon. And public voting will increase that, the whole idea that we need to watch out for the dissident malicious actor stalking social media attests to that. That is something that needs to be tackled through a kind of automated or extremely efficient moderative response to detect bots and voting patterns of malicious actors. Of course the question is if anything can be done at all against this shift in zeitgeist.

What is needed would be a way to anonymize voting through some kind of clever algorithm or blockchain or token or something. Or maybe that can’t work or then prevent any protection against bots.