• 2 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • 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.





  • When things get extreme they get similar.

    ‘Extreme’ is a vague word, but when you’re talking about communism and fascism (or more generally ‘far-left’ and ‘far-right’ ideology), that’s a false generalization known as ‘horseshoe theory’.

    There are many clear counter-examples when talking about communism, like the entire school of anacho-communist ideologies and the existing societies stemming from them (including the Zapatista territory in Mexico with a population of around 360,000, or the FEJUVE federation in Bolivia, or the many anarchist communes around the world).

    As for the more authoritarian versions (Stalinist, Maoist and related ideologies), despite their strong one-party systems, they are still extremely different to fascist ideologies in their goals and how they use their strong state to achieve them. To say ‘they are the same in many respects’ would apply just as equally to liberal capitalist states like the USA and allies, with their infamously militarized police, constant wars and imperial militarism, strong cult of nationalism (for the US, it’s centered on the Founding Fathers), mass imprisonment and state interference in bodily autonomy.


  • If the citizens weren’t tacitly benefiting, in any way from the resource extraction of the bourgeoisie, maybe you’d have a point there; but since they do, you don’t

    Someone tacitly benefiting from a state’s imperialism doesn’t stop them simultaneously being victims of the absolute horror that is capitalism. That’s a big part of why even in the most exploitative regimes there are millions of anti-capitalists who engage in international solidarity. The capitalist class like to pretend there’s some national unity at play when they screw over the proletariat, but it’s all clearly bullshit.

    Just fuck off if you’re gonna go to bat for a settler before you waste any more of both of our time.

    I don’t bat for settlers. I’m publicly replying to your public reply, because it was sectarian in a way which is harmful to the international socialist movement. If you think this conversation is wasting your time, then just ignore it.


  • If I remember correctly, the admin (a US Lolbertarian) finally closed it down, among other reasons, when they realized the resident nazis there were not just joking to troll da libs and actually believed the things they were saying about ‘jewish shapeshifters’. They wanted a free speech haven, and so they got the people we collectively told to shut up.



  • It sounds as if you’re using the atrocities of the French bourgeoisie as a way to excuse nationalist bigotry against a people. The French state is imperialist and colonist, the French citizens are mostly victims of capitalism, not the settlers.

    Obviously it’s a different situation with French people overseas, but we’re not in that context.





  • @Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com This highlights the problem with using relative terms like ‘left’ and ‘center’ and ‘far’. They’re subjective, and in my opinion, shouldn’t be used.

    I don’t know what country or society you’re in. “Left” can often mean anything from centrist liberalism (Democrat Party) to nothing less than socialism (socialists often consider liberalism to be in the center). Then you get literal Fascists (as in, Mussolini and Mosley types, unlike Nazi fascists) who throw a stone in the whole thing: their heritage comes from both the traditional left (namely syndicalism) and the right (ultranationalism), and don’t neatly fit into progressive or regressive (BUF notably gained many women supporters for their pro-suffrage policies, progressive at the time).

    One can avoid arguments like in the OP just by learning the proper terms for political views and ideologies. Are you a progressive liberalist? Are you a social democrat? Are you a democratic socialist? (yes unfortunately those two get confusing)

    For more information about the political compass and examples of why it’s not a useful tool, I recommend this video.



  • 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.




  • I just want to say the maintainer who wrote that appears to have handled this gracefully. It gives me hope.

    They’ve made a transparent public announcement, making it clear what we should and shouldn’t expect from them, and how we should handle it. They understand the FOSS paradigm (no, I correct myself, the digital paradigm) and have given their blessings for the community to do what they do best. I’d guess the smart thing to do is play along with the cease notice to avoid consequences, go underground and make YouTube play whack-a-mole with sock-puppets and hostile jurisdictions.

    Cut off one head and three shall take its place. Wind in your back lads, wherever you go.