HOW DID YOU… ah, uh, I mean nuh-uh! 🤥

Also even that number of Lemmy users is an artifact of people leaving instances and creating new accounts across the Fediverse. I have 3 accounts myself that I check usually once a month, bc messages sent to my old one(s) won’t follow me so it’s the only way to make sure that someone trying to reach me can do so. And I had one on Kbin.social as well so there are now 4 OpenStars (3 looking to be active on a monthly basis) - and all of them are me!:-)

The better stat to use then is not Total Accounts but rather Monthly Active Users. In this, Lemmy has been steadily declining. We are now at <41.9k, after we held steady for awhile earlier this year at 45k. The peak after the Rexodus was ~52k - see https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/, the number of instances has gone way down, the number of accounts per instance gone up, it looks like people are abandoning single-user instances in favor of the larger multi-user ones. But Lemmy.World used to hold ~80% of all Lemmy users while now it is closer to like 37% iirc, so overall we are becoming more centralized on average, but also stabilizing into a few established instances, and decentralization at the peak is also happening as well - especially after yesterday’s announcement that will drive even more people, and entire communities, away from Lemmy.World further.

Overall engagement is up though - so more posts and comments from fewer people, those of us who remain here have become more active.

It is a complex situation for sure. Like despite being a blanket rule it will not affect all communities equally bc some are more prone to such behaviors than others.

And what if someone says something promoting murder - like if it is directed at a billionaire, does that make it okay? Okay then, what about the reverse: saying that it should be okay for billionaires to murder the lesser people?

Different people have a wide variety of takes on those true, valid, actual straight-up “facts” (that killing = violence, regardless of justified or not), bc as human beings we cannot help but add in our own interpretations to them. e.g. do you remember that post 18 days ago to TenForward (titled “Do you want a star trek future?”) - I for one found it shocking and blocked several communities after that, bc I choose not to see such.

Someone else’s “freedom of speech” is my own freedom to STFU or else leave, apparently, and more’s the pity. But that’s just how the Intolerance Paradox / phenomenon of a Nazi bar works, and there is no getting around that. We seem to be inching closer and closer to being a Nazi bar, and strangely also a leftist version of that at the same time, on different instances.

I for one won’t blame you if you end up needing to move a community elsewhere, in the worst-case scenario. But… perhaps it is too early to judge, and maybe this post is merely worded confusingly - not that it is not inching ever closer towards being a Nazi bar, but just that it is inching rather than outright sprinting? Heck, I even agree with the last sentence, as you do as well, it is - as you have said - everything else going along with it that is so troubling.

But at the end of the day, it is their instance, to do with as they please. As too is yours, and you wouldn’t want mods counteracting your admin mandate? So while it is sad to see this sudden and radical departure from how LW used to do things, we must respect their decision and each of us switch to think about what our own will be in response.

Blaze is recommending over in r/RedditAlternatives that anyone from there and in the USA wanting to check out Lemmy to join Discuss.Online. You might think about that one for a new community, or dubvee.org if you are okay with the increased traffic. If need be ofc, though perhaps it won’t be?

One issue there is technical limitations: PieFed (a Lemmy alternative) and some apps will show the sidebar of a community, but some others bury it behind several clicks in long-ass (>5 items) menu structures.

Then again, what should the expectation even be for someone who comes in via All without ever having posted to the community before.

Ultimately imho the community belongs to the userbase that enjoys using it, so if they don’t want to see something, then they should not be forced to have to.

If they’re just saying something you don’t like, respectfully, and they’re not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.

This right here may be the key to the whole thing. If not, then it’s time to move communities to other instances bc ultimately the communities are merely rooms inside of someone else’s house.

Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats.

For a moment I thought this was some kind of AI-written glitch, but apparently it was taking “artistic license” to use the name of the character rather than actor without acknowledging such - and is real (wow I hate trying to mess with Forbes, it kept changing the link to some other article entirely).

It seems like I’ve heard this story many many times before throughout history, and elsewhere besides.

It might be the best show in the universe. Or maybe not, but either way it’s funny as hell 🤣.

It is much worse than that: the game and pieces are real, yet one side keeps chewing on the pieces and then rolling them as if they were dice.

I think… I think we might end up losing this one, everything else being equal (fortunately the latter is not the case, and I’m hanging on to that sliver of hope with every fiber of my being:-).

There are lots of possibilities.

One being mere FUD - remember that he doesn’t have to succeed to cause disruption, and even the attempt will draw focus away from Russia’s own annexation of Ukraine.

And if that can simultaneously be accomplished while also acting to isolate the USA away from its allies - and perhaps more importantly them away from the USA - then so much the better (for Russia I mean, though at the expense of the Western nations).

Or Putin could have meant it as a jest, and Trump did not realize that.😜

But I also think there’s a halfway decent chance that Trump himself won’t even bother trying - he could back down, and then claim: “see how reasonable I am, I wanted to do this crazy thing, but you didn’t want me to so I didn’t, yet now I want to do this other much more ‘reasonable’ thing and it’s my turn to win so you gotta let me have this new thing I want, if you want me in return to keep doing things your way occasionally, that’s called ‘compromise’ btw” (it’s actually not btw, as a better term would be rather “shifting the goalposts”, but whatever…).

And if that was the case, then we wasted all of our efforts trying to understand the “strategy” behind something that was only ever meant as a distraction to begin with - unless that’s what they WANT us to think, and then they push it through and actually get it DONE!? That’s the thing when facing against an opponent who actually knows what the word “strategy” means - whereas the voting public seems to have no clue, which is why we probably should not have been in charge in the first place 😞 (at least I heard that sentiment a lot after Brexit, by people in the UK - like “whoopsie, can we get a do-over?!” then doing the identical thing again every single time that the latter was granted, proving just how impossible it is to help people who are absolutely dead set against receiving that aid).

Also, bold of you to presume that the USA will ever have another election again… - it is now legal to assassinate his opponent if he so chooses, so the playing field has changed entirely. Probably he’ll allow bad candidates to run that have no chance of actually winning, so it will appear as if his preferred choice had won entirely legally (Jared Kushner? or some other handpicked candidate - in all likelihood by Putin, or whoever succeeds him and inherits whatever other dirt he keeps on all rich and powerful people around the world). The gloves are off now: this is a brave new world.

Mostly, though there’s also fire-fighting too.

We all know who. But if anyone does need help connecting the dots: https://ponder.cat/post/1252517.

The best case scenario for these scenarios is that some other shiny toy distracts him, or rather than Putin for whatever reason decides that he wants something else more (which come to think of it, is not the best case anymore… at least not overall).

But while I may be too naively optimistic here, there’s a non-zero chance that the institutions left in the USA are too solid to allow for such a unilateral takeover? At which point this operation serves to pull those into the light as “problem areas” for the next push forward, plus whatever he backs down from serves to make the remaining crap he will do seem more reasonable by comparison - like a negotiation, The Art Of The Deal style? You gotta love that ratchet effect that conservatives always do… which somehow always manages to work on those who allow themselves to forget? 🤢🤮

Oh I think we all got it! 😁

At least, the vast majority on the Fediverse and probably at some on Reddit too. Sadly, his followers will never manage to get it, even after something were to happen - the party line would spout some BS that would instantly become dogma.😓

Sorry for misunderstanding / misremembering your “mod” status but you got the point perfectly regardless: it’s one thing to be the absolute best worker that we can be, though it’s quite another to be put in charge of things. The latter should kinda terrify us tbh, bc one has to balance so extremely very many things.

I’ve heard it said - and I don’t know enough about the truth of the matter to either verify or contend - that the job of a manager is to say No to things. At a guess I would think it’s far more but perhaps deep down, it’s not? Either way, it highlights how very different the job of someone “in charge” is from us mere plebes. I railed against this thought for my entire life… but now I think I was wrong, all that time. And it is these newer kinds of thoughts then that give me pause when attempting to judge others who display knowledge that I am aware that I lack. e.g. the situation in Gaza is complex as fuck, but I just don’t understand how people think that Trump could possibly in any way help there more than Harris would have - but hey, perhaps the people who scream BoTh SiDeS sAmE the loudest and/or most often must surely be correct? (/s)

And that’s why I am against joining any kind of “revolution” until and unless I totally understand the issues, bc otherwise it’s the same as the people who showed up on January 6 at the capital of the USA, ready to “defend the constitution”… except that’s NOT what they were doing there AT ALL! But worst of all, they of all people didn’t know themselves why they were there, or what they hoped to accomplish - how can you “defend” something that you refused to read in the first place? Real revolutions take time, and more importantly effort Case in point, if we want to wean off the world’s dependency upon Reddit, then we need to actually make the Fediverse a place that people want to visit. Instead, we choose to remain a Nazi bar. And yeah, that bothers me, though I have little say in the matter. Except when it comes to myself that is, which is why I am commenting here from PieFed, which is not Lemmy at all (and yet the community we are both commenting in is). That more narrow issue I feel like I understand perfectly, so that one I’ve already joined a revolution for:-).

I’ll leave you then with this thought: let’s assume that the/a revolution has already occurred: what then?

Like “defund the police” is a slogan that people say often, or did before they switched to ACAB, but if we ever achieved that goal… what then?

In one sense, the internet was already an example of what comes next: like socialism, everyone is equal and can do whatever they want. Hence why virtually nobody wants to be a mod, bc it requires effort. Those who scream the loudest that their voices should matter (though curiously never their opponents, for some odd reason?:-P) are the very ones who absolutely refuse to lift a finger to do something for themselves - like spin up an instance, or create a community, or help mod an existing one. And those that do, like Midwest.social, end up making it an echo chamber where only people who agree are aloud.

Most of us need to wake up and realize that we are no good at like… things, and stuff, and junk. Hence why it behooves us to listen to a wider range of inputs. Except that’s nearly never the real goal: that of appearing to win some argument online in order to salve our egos:-). Also truth really does take some additional effort to understand. And it lacks that sexy “punch” factor, i.e. it enrages people less hence gets shared less. For instance, if you want to know why I personally learn more towards a less extremist viewpoint, it is due primarily to videos such as this one: https://youtu.be/6spSrC9c8WE. Tbh I don’t know fully how I should think about it all, except that I realize upon watching that there is more that I don’t know than that I do.

But to reiterate the issue at hand: mod your community however you wish. I literally stepped down as head mod of !AskUSA@discuss.online after creating it so that the community could move into a different direction - allowing for more serious discussions of contentious topic areas (like jury nullification). And that is what I wished: to both not hold anyone back from being able to discuss things if that’s what they wanted, but also not having to be ultimately responsible for getting my instance in trouble with law enforcement agencies in the USA. I feel that I may not be explaining this well, so one more try from a different angle: you definitely have responsibilities as a mod to set forth good rules that people want to be governed by, but after that the users also have responsibilities to follow those rules. A few people who refuse to do that shouldn’t be allowed to destroy all that you have built - which would be bad not only for yourself but also all the other members of your community. I hope that makes more sense!:-)

Supposedly the reasoning is that whatever you do that is less than total overthrow of the entire system is not good enough. So strikes are “not good enough”. This ofc ignores how totally overthrowing the government is also not good enough - see e.g. how Putin is managing “communist” Russia, or Whinnie the Pooh bear is managing “communist” China. Communism has never been managed to be implemented successfully irl. Yet somehow the tankies kNoW bEtTeR than literally everyone else world-wide about how things should be done? (Or else they are, however unwittingly, part of the disinformation campaign designed to further advance the Russian and/or Chinese agendas? indeed it is eery how both the Alt-Right and Alt-Left messages point to overthrowing the USA and UK and other governments, almost like that’s the real goal all along, and whatever means to achieve that are simply convenient tools to use?)

Despite the lack of success of communism irl, people still advocate for murdering CEOs, as if that would somehow solve… anything? For one thing it’s the system that is broken, and for another, the current level of technology is very much not on the side of isolated lone wolves who want to overthrow things. Moreover, the people I see espousing such ideas can’t even seem to articulate a cohesive argument, much less a convincing one, i.e. they are full of shit and their ideas don’t hold weight, and just bc they make the claim that they should have total freedom to speak their minds (which is ironic, considering how little “freedom” places such as Lemmy.ml offers its userbase), does not make it so. TLDR: liars often lie, perhaps first and most notably to themselves.

And even if they were going to actually do something - what makes it okay to discuss such a thing on the clear open web? On an instance that isn’t theirs? And in a community that they don’t bother to put in effort to moderate? And given how very often done from mere hours to days old accounts, even so much as contribute to at all? Like people were putting down Lemmy.World admins and mods for placing a brief (~24 hour iirc) hiatus on discussion of the very controversial and charged topic of jury nullification, which they (rightly imho) worried could have actual legal repercussions for instances in the USA. I mean, if you want to make your own instance, or your own community, then go ahead, but otherwise what right does someone have to complain about how some other admin/mod decides to do their business? Modding is a hard job, and people take it far too much for granted how much EFFORT is put into such by so many people across the Fediverse.

When people refuse to acknowledge the latter, that’s when I know that they are not clear thinking people: totally ignoring the long- or even short-term ramifications of an action (like, what if the current mod were to be forcibly removed: what comes next, when so few are willing to do the task in the first place?!) is merely one sign among many that everything else that they say is similarly likely to be totally false.

Which doesn’t make them subhuman or whatever, but does, to me, mean that they should not be in charge. So don’t let them sway you, if they lack any convincing evidence to back up even the smallest portion of whatever it is that they are trying to say. Not everyone is equally likely to be correct on the Fediverse. Not even if similar things are said from one hundred accounts. What makes something correct vs. not lies in its agreement with actual reality, period.

And that’s the problem with modern “leftism”: it is not actually “leftist”. The states lifted up as being such (Russia, China, North Korea, etc.), and the spaces put forward as espousing those belief structures (hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.ml, midwest.social, etc.), are the very ones that look to me to be the MOST authoritarian instances across the entire Fediverse? Someone can debate all day long how “oh no, the USA is doing genocide!?”, but just try saying “oh no, Russia is doing genocide?!” or “oh no, China is doing genocide?!”, or on midwest.social merely downvoting a post from the admin there, and see how long until you are banned. That’s authoritarianism, regardless of whatever words are used to describe it.

Hence why I have started taking to calling it the “Alt-Left”, b/c it’s not the real Left, it’s an “alternative” one, which has wrapped so far to the Left that it is all the way Right again. Eating its own, excluding rather than tolerating people and ideas, advocating for violence - including literal genocide (e.g. Uyghurs + Ukrainians). Watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt-Right Playbook, play for play the tactics of the Alt-Left are precisely identical. BoTh SiDeS sAmE for instance has no logical basis in factual discourse, but to someone not paying attention, if it is said often enough, can take on the seeming resemblence of truth? I can’t tell you how many times someone with an account on lemmy.ml ignores >90% of what I say, hyper-focuses on one tiny bit, manages to get that wrong too, and blatantly tells me the exact opposite of what they just told someone else mere minutes ago (cough Cowbee cough). Such “control the conversation” tactics are just too childish for me to enjoy engaging with anymore these days, and yet sadly are all too common (I can only assume that it somehow “works” inside of their echo chamber? or else that they simply don’t care yet keep doing it anyway. you really can get a LOT of mileage out of just sticking to your position no matter what facts are presented to the contrary, b/c a lot of people just give up arguing against that, mistaking that stubbornness for a form of “strength”).

Identically then to the people who are inside the Alt-Right movement - but who never seem to actually be aware of that? - the people in the Alt-Left are perhaps kind-hearted, well-meaning, and may e.g. show up to try to overthrow a government (all while claiming to be there to “defend the Constitution”), but it’s not their intentions that I take issue with so much as the fact that they need to read a book prior to going to such an extreme (or two, or even three - and yes, I am sure that they think that they have, but I mean here that it would be helpful to read all the variety of SIDES to an argument, before claiming to fully “know” what to do there?). It does not help that the internet is anonymous and thus that I could be arguing with a literal teenager, or someone with the intellectual equivalence of such. It always comes down to: they can do whatever they want, but so too can I, and yet the burden therefore falls onto me to decide what to do, since they apparently refuse to have the discipline themselves to read or to understand things prior to pushing for their chosen philosophy.

If you think about it more I suspect you will come around to my way of thinking there. For one thing, the form of argumentation looks precisely identical to those often used by the Alt-Right, while for the another the content looks at least functionally identical to it as well. e.g. here’s an image from a post on lemmy.ml that was shared just prior to the election:

The translation here is “bOtH sIdEs SaMe” - which actually worked to sway the election of the USA. Over time I’ve heard the argument shift from “we’re not the Alt-Left”, to “okay so we’re the Alt-Left, but you don’t have to worry b/c unlike the Alt-Right, we have no actual power”… but if such messages are swaying the election of the nation with the most nuclear warheads on planet Earth, then isn’t the latter no longer true?

Question: and how is this not likewise advocating for genocide?

(shared in this post to !memes@lemmy.world 7 days ago)

Answer: b/c murder is okay when our side does it.

And how is this post to !memes@lemmy.ml any different at all from those style of posts that I used to see on Hexbear.net? Reaction-baiting, spoiling for a fight, picking on points of contention for the purpose of “dunking” on one’s opponent, rather than attempting to find common ground and have discussions of greater depth and substance.

100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having done so, b/c of the extremist content. And it’s not just “over there” - by federating with these instances, we choose to host it over “here” as well. e.g. a poster on the wall of a Nazi bar may have been constructed thousands of kilometers and multiple nations away, but if it was transported to you and accepted by you and pinned up by you in your bar, then it is “you” who are advocating for that (Pro-Nazi) message?

I’ve already given up checking Lemmy while at work - I don’t want these server names appearing in those logs, in case something happens and they start wondering why I am visiting this Alt-Left space. *I* am not planning on doing anything illegal like murdering a CEO, but if I am hanging out at this “Nazi bar”… I can well understood why someone might question if I myself am a “Nazi”, or in this case the Leftist equivalent?

I’ve had to block a lot of communities in order to maintain my sanity. Like, others are free to do as they choose but I should have that freedom as well too, yeah?

It’s the Nazi bar problem: how do you be friends with a Nazi, who is nice to you most of the time? (The difference here is that Nazis were and neo-Nazis are Alt-Right, while the ones we are talking about here are Alt-Left, but is there all that much difference, really? both are okay with murder as not the last but somehow rather almost the first resort, having no clue about the horrors that they would unleash upon society if they got their way - and just exactly like the Alt-Right, their way is the only way, no openness to discussions to the contrary).

Highly ironically, Reddit used to have this problem, and do you know what they did about it? They banned the leftist extremists, enticing them to create Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. i.e., this is not merely a Nazi bar - it’s their bar, while we are the freeloaders here. I find that thought highly interesting…