Yes

I should need to remind you what happened when the Weimar system collapsed, and it did so in an environment of much stronger left opposition than currently exists across the west. Fascism is far more likely than any idea on the left, followed by ww3 waged against the enemies of the existing system. I’m really not confident in what will emerge after the nuclear hell.

My issue is that as soon as you do any successful geoengineering the incentive to change the economic system and problems inherent to it go away. They will burn everyone in the global south and save the global north with geoengineering and call that a success while continuing with the system that made that happen.

I’m sure this bullshit will have no unforseen repercussions.

Nice nice, this was annoying.

If a US citizen is accused of being a spy and their citizenship is stripped, what stops Russia from granting them a citizenship and using international law to attempt to get them free on the basis of human rights abuse against a Russian citizen?

The government turning around and just saying “nah mate”. Something they absolutely would do in that scenario.

Laws only matter up until they conflict with strategic interests, then they stop giving a fuck.

Not much evidence of russian troop captures, deaths or armour taken/destroyed in this “offensive”. Kinda makes me think Russia just abandoned the area and let Ukraine take it with no real losses. This stands out compared to the repelled Kiev offensive North West of Kiev many months ago where we had a lot of content come out showing destroyed russian armour, captured troops etc.

Occupying land does not by itself achieve very much if your opponent does not fight for it.

I am very concerned for the civilians of these areas who were being told by the Ukrainians as the Russians took the area that if they accepted supplies, aid or the Russian occupation they would be treated as enemies of Ukraine. They are probably in significant danger now.

There are other communities that are suitable to lemmy as well that exist in a weird legal zone, places that I’m sure reddit used to love because they bring in audiences that are usually not the typical reddit audience but then eventually felt pressure to close. /r/shoplifting was one such place. It was exactly what you think, a shoplifting community. The content there was discussion about the topic, it was populated by both shoplifters and by “loss prevention officers” as they liked to call themselves. Both sides would discuss the topic while shoplifters would post images of their successfully pulled off hordes.

This kind of thing is the kind of thing that can not exist anywhere else online but is also not going to attract fascists. Another person here rightfully criticises the danger of becoming “free speech reddit” which is what Voat became, I agree with them. It attracts the wrong crowd and that crowd is not a platform for growth.

The platform should focus on targeting the kinds of communities that genuinely can’t exist anywhere else online, use these as the “early adopter” crowd, then start hitting network-effect where this crowd of people can actually start being the population of more mainstream communities simply because they also want to share and discuss that content with each other. At that point the platform will be past the danger zone and into one where it takes on a life of its own.

I genuinely think that “edgy” is a necessary component of this early strategy. The kinds of topics and communities that have been edged out of the mainstream are fundamentally going to be edgy and making sure that the platform has the right tolerance level for that. Officially and vocally support and encourage it initially then phase out that support at a later date.

Once a decent community has built up all kinds of federation-wide things become possible. Large community events, secret santa used to be wildly popular on reddit until it got too big to run it anymore, they used to take official part in promoting protests and activist causes too. Not saying anything needs to be directly copied but building a proper picture of the growth model that was used is a good idea. There are many phases to growth and each phase is quite different by necessity.

Reddit cannabilised internet forums that were awkward to use and you had to sign up for each and every single one. It centralised the internet forum into something more convenient. Convenience tends to beat other things when it comes to internet platforms.

Lemmy is on-par in terms of technical convenience but does not have the convenience of the vast amount of communities and content that exists on reddit. It can not simply cannibalise obviously less-convenient platforms like reddit did.

Lemmy’s best hope for growth as a platform is initially to focus on things that can not and do not exist elsewhere that people have a very clear desire to consume as a community. Many banned reddit communities can’t exist in the liberal centralised social media platforms but can exist in Lemmy’s decentralised state. Piracy is very likely going to get pushed off the mainstream platforms eventually and will move to Lemmy. There are a number of other banned communities that also exist in a space that has been shunned by liberal sensibilities but would could exist on an edgier platform. These are the most likely sources of early adopter growth.

As time goes on and early adoption starts to move into other phases, the quantity of users will enable the existence of communities that compete with more mainstream topics. This will then drive up the convenience level of the platform and bring it into parity with reddit.

At that point it will start to take on an organic direction of its own.

Police police police police police police police police.

Also the guy who headed TSMC, […] is now heading SMIC

This is interesting. Anything to read on this?

That’s why the fun part happened in October.

Back in the day I used to do that for friends/family and I have seen machines with hundreds. The Kazaa and Limewire days of the internet were the most prolific virus spreading periods.

USB4 Version 2 FINAL.doc

Bots are a thing Hexbear has dealt with in the past but they were dedicated and committed attackers actively trying to stop the site from succeeding.

In terms of spam it’s a non-existent issue right now.

The nazis tend to be focused on Hexbear which has a bit of reputation over at the forum about a certain fruitfarms I will not name on the closed boards, I suspect the nazis seen on other instances leak over from there interest in hexbear. That or they’re coming from posts to genusa and other anticommunist subs about genzedong’s presence on lemmygrad.

There are certainly some people with posting and commenting bots but I haven’t seen them put to much use maliciously in a while.

Marxists should stand beside the workers that will be displaced by this. The technology would be great in a system that understands how to protect people, reskill them, change industry, etc etc. But in the system we have it will harm these workers and the ““leftists”” I’ve seen refusing to stand by them in that and lauding the technology clearly do not have workers at heart. They enjoy their new toy too much.

Extremely important.

Every person that asks this question should be shoved in re-education, and that’s a charitable response.

It is a question that is singularly only asked by people that want to do very bad and very awful things if they can justify it on the basis of the “gene pool” being “polluted” by “undesirables”.

Literally nobody of good moral standing wants to explore this question because they know damn well what fascists want to do with this information.

EDIT: Lot of downvoters not justifying their downvotes.

There is no reason to ask this question.

If you’re asking this question, why? What do you intend to do with the answer if it’s negative? Let’s consider the possibilities:

1. Nothing is happening to the “gene pool”? Great. Nothing happens.

2. Something is happening to the “gene pool”? Oh that’s bad but we won’t do anything about it because that would be monstrous.

3. Something is happening to the “gene pool”? That’s bad and I am a fascist that wants to embark on a campaign to cleanse our gene pool of this pollution of it.

If you’re asking this question you desperately need to do self-crit because there is no justification for it. There is only a bad outcome, there is absolutely no good reason to be asking it. If you’re downvoting because you don’t think fucking eugenicist fascists belong in re-education you’re part of the problem that is resulting in rising fascism. The fascists continue to grow and you continue to want to do nothing about them, they will not magically go away because you convinced them to stop being fascists through the power of debating them. The options are either rehabilitating them through re-education campaigns or waiting for the situation to boil over and then resolving the situation with bullets instead. The preventative approach of re-education is superior to the liberal approach of uselessly allowing fascists to grow enough to gain power then do monstrous things and only then fighting them later.

Where is this stemming from? Who are you quoting? As you can see on their front page, they explicitly have rules against even things as simple as being unfriendly. Which is suitable to their goal as a community, which isn’t being some free speech haven like wolfballs.com attempts to be. They never claimed to value free speech, that contradicts their site purpose.

I get that, but it feels bad because you’re just participating within the rules of another, entirely different space. You can’t know you’re breaking the rules of their space (if you’ve never been there). And suddenly you’re banned from there for activity that was performed in an entirely different space.

The activity I was banned from there for was me posting in a thread on lemmy.ml. Apparently Beehaw users replied to me and didn’t like the way I replied back annoyed and somewhat aggressively. Thus banned.

From my perspective that didn’t occur on Beehaw, it occurred on Lemmy.ml, where all of my activity occurred. This is the user experience end of it that feels “bad”. And you don’t even get any knowledge that this banning occurred. You just get silenced by an instance forever and that’s that. I responded to multiple threads expecting Beehaw users to be getting my comments after that ban with no knowledge I was wasting my time shouting into the void and that only lemmy.ml users or other parts of the federation would see those comments. It feels like shadowbanning but in a particularly unfair way for rules on federations that you might upset that you don’t even know exist and certainly don’t know the rules of before they get annoyed with your comment. This is the user-end problem, a user can not know what people far and wide they might upset with their comment, they can not know that their comment is appearing in a place where their comment might be subject to an entirely different set of rules. I mean, they can if they understand federation in the way that I do now, but the average person this is like talking in some extra-dimensional shit, it’s going to bend people’s minds entirely. Most people are going to be like “buhhh I only posted on here though why can I no longer reply to them?”.

Serious people don’t flood the joker with complaints or get annoyed, the comedy site get to enjoy their posts. It allows different sites to collaboratively use a community despite having different values and different moderation policies.

Yeah which sounds great if you’re a member of the existing hegemony. Whether that’s liberalism or white, male, cis, straight, beneficiary of the patriarchy, able bodied, neurotypical and so on and so forth. If you are outside of the existing cultural, political and social hegemonies however what that represents to you as a person that will be considered an agitator by the hegemonies is… Suppression.

I think I understand and recognize your point about how blocking you for what you said in a different context (a site with different rules and people!) is unfair, because that blocks you from Beehaw communities where you would have acted in line with their rules, because it’s on their site and not the other less strict site. And I agree.

Yes that’s exactly what occurred. Banned from Beehaw before ever actually participating in a Beehaw thread. The issue is that when your respond to any given thread from a user perspective it feels like you’re posting within the jurisdiction of lemmy.ml, and then when you get slapped by somewhere completely different for your activity that you definitely didn’t feel like you were posting there… It feels quite bad, and it feels very confusing if you don’t particularly understand it, and it’s hidden so you may end up wasting your time participating in threads at a later time that you don’t even know you can’t participate in. Again, not particularly whinging about that. I’m raising the point that it feels bad because it’s a significant part of the user experience that is going to be how a very very large number of people end up learning how federation works. There may be ways to mitigate and improve on that user experience, particularly the issues with it feeling like shadowbanning, lack of visual communication, etc.

When hexbear federates this thread is going to happen again and someone else is going to end up asking the same questions and saying many of the same things I’m saying too. I’m also a little worried that how those threads and questions play out may have a significant impact on whether some people abandon the project entirely, I hope the devs can uhhh, be a bit more understanding about how their responses will cause people to judge the project itself. I don’t want people leaving Hexbear because they decide they don’t like a Lemmy dev or w/e and I don’t want to see Hexbear’s userbase fall prey to smart wreckers that realise any grumpy comments from the devs are an opportunity to rile up hundreds of community members into a drama frenzy aimed at causing issues. Most of my thinking is about getting ahead of potential problems.

I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but I think the problem is that you’re trying to debate what federation is.

I’m not trying to debate what it is, I’ve come to terms with what it is in its currently designed format over the course of the thread. I’m questioning whether it’s actually better for the left in the existing format because it feels like it will result in absolutely massive suppression of everything outside of the current hegemony. Not just for leftists but for every other battle occurring out there too. Maybe the fact that i misunderstood it to begin with, then learned, then quickly came to some pretty negative conclusions about what that will develop into over the course of its growth has led to the confusing that I’m “debating” what federation is. I see what it is, if I’m debating (not my intention) it is over whether that’s what it should be and whether it should in fact be something else.

On reddit the manner in which the left gets suppressed is at the admin level, and it comes in the form of having successful communities cut down when they start to boom. This is actually at quite a sizeable and impactful level when this occurs. In the background too the admins are consistently banning effective communists, especially moderators and community builders. The smallest possible infractions are used to do this. This all sounds pretty bad but it pales in comparison to the repression the left would receive if you gave every single modteam on reddit the ability to block their userbase from ever seeing responses or content from communists/leftists, who are quite easily identified by their subreddits of origin over on left-reddit. Every single modteam on reddit would take action against leftists, one after another, and the ones that do not will be infiltrated and eventually take action against leftists. That is the troubling ecosystem I am imagining Lemmy developing into in the future. Lemmy instances are in essence, subreddits but with the functionality of reddit in that they can have sub-subreddits(comms), the wider reddit side of things is filled in by federation.

Should it work differently? Maybe, but that would mean changing the definition of federation.

Yes. I understand this.

Here’s your opportunity. You can create that model. If you believe it is better maybe others will rally to it. Can you outline precisely who has control of what data on each server? Can you explain how a person or group hosting an instance can satisfy their moral and legal obligations under your system of ‘federation’?

The legality is the sticking point. Server owners NEED to have control of the content on their server. The issue is providing this while also building in some sort of organisational structure that limits the capability of servers to act repressively along ideological lines. As I mentioned in another comment, the solution that makes sense here is for the technology to work as it does but for the federation itself to have an organisational agreement between federating participants on moderator jurisdiction of things that are not illegal and perhaps a voting method for federation participants to defederate a member that is not abiding by the federation agreement. A combination of federation and some of wiki’s systems perhaps.

I don’t necessarily have a complete answer. I just think talking about this problem is essential at this point in time. Anyone that has been involved in multiple subreddit teams knows how fucking stupid reddit politics are, none of that is going to go away as things scale up, and with the systems the way they are and the behaviour of modteams I’ve seen I am concerned. That’s not even getting into the fact that I’ve watched entire communities be riled up into a form of digital colour-revolution against their modteams by bad-actors, as well as the infiltrations and takeovers by crypto-neoliberals. Antiwork has undergone so many purges and internal battles I have lost count and it has absolutely lost most of them to the liberals aiming to disarm it.