Same, I stay away from /all and only follow my subscribed communities by new.

This is the exact reason email never took off. /s

Ew, blooskie.

You say “chance”, I read “intent” 🤷 Mainstream isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

While true, covering up fundamental faults to keep afloat is hardly an example of best practice.

Same. My web host is already creaking under the strain of Wordpress, I’m not going to chance it by adding two-way federation to the rickety database.

That is certainly an improvement over Signal, yeah.

Yeah, “Matrix as IRC” with general interest rooms is an unmonitored cesspool. “Matrix as IM” for staying in touch with mates is doing just fine.

“Slightly biased”, yeah.

There is also MicroBlogPub, although development has wound down in the past year. I spun up a test instance before that, though, and it does what it says on the tin.

Of late I’ve tried out the Translate You Android app. Not necessarily an endorsement of the app itself, but it offers a selection of 9 translator services, a few of which are libre.

Certainly LibreTranslate and Lingva [my bad, it’s a GTranslate front-end] Apertium are open source, probably a few more on their list. Give them a try and see which works best for you!

Looks like Mastodon have been hiring accountants 😆 https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/112769333503182077

I mean, Deepl is useful, and more accurate than Google Translate — but I’d prefer a libre alternative. Haven’t found one yet that hits the mark.

But anyway, that’s OT for the Fediverse sub 🙂

Yeah, for one thing deepl is defo not part of the fediverse.

without relying on destroying the third world

Whether you’re talking about Russia or China here, both of those countries have massive resources, both natural and in terms of population. I’d argue that they didn’t have to look for (other) third world countries to ruin; they had plenty of area and people of their own to turn to.

Also, a Lemmy ML user charging into the comments to defend state capitalism in oppressive regimes kinda proves my point.

I don’t disagree, therefore the attempt to disentangle the actual ideologies from the totalitarian stans who got stuck on '80s propaganda.

No, completely fair point! I think on a platform with a lot of Americans (currently locked in an election where many seem to consider the centrist candidate “too far left”) it’s good to call out the differences on the [edit: international] left that aren’t otherwise discerned.

Sure, those [Medium posts all by the same author that I’ve never heard of] look interesting enough at a glance — but I’ll admit to only skimming them, and I’m not going to go any further down one random, person’s online ruminations. Thanks for the offer, though.

I think that, more to the point, no matter the culpability of communism in Soviet politics, tankies seem more enamoured with the latter — the militant, strongarm regimes — than the actual ideals and principles of ideology.

Just to weigh in here with a bit of political nuance — “tankies” are certainly defined by their leftist politics, but moreso by their apologist defense of regimes that more or less transparently use socialist or communist maxims as a cover for state capitalism or straight out autocracy.

Tankies may be the loudest voices to claim themselves Marxist or socialist, but please don’t mistake them as actually representing those ideologies truthfully or completely. Personally, I see tankies as more indebted to a cold war-style school of Soviet dogma transplanted to current autocracies. Marx and Trotsky would have rolled their eyes at either.