• 2 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • The concerning thing is how many people seem to appeal to the same system that enabled this to happen. It’s a liberalist attitude of looking for legal loopholes, technicalities and abstract contradictions of ideas instead of recognizing real power and fighting it directly.

    Recall Trump’s first term, all the comments of endless smug “gotchas” and lists of laws and constitutional laws broken by Trump. How’d that impeachment end up?

    Now we see the same nonsense again, people implying that ICE can be defeated by suing them, thinking that the police assisting ICE will be leashed by the mayor, thinking that this time the Democrat Party will do what Biden didn’t and reverse the slide into fascism.

    No, the sad fact is that you can’t just let The System solve this one. You can’t vote fascism away at this point. It requires mass community-led solutions, and the sooner that’s organized, the less people die.

    Admittedly I often see this discussion through the lens of Internet comment sections so hopefully that’s making this seem worse than it truly is.


  • The World Press Freedom Index only uses safety as one part of their score. It’s not a refutation of the statement you’re replying to.

    But since you brought them up, here’s their breakdown of:

    "In 2024, Palestine became the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Close to 200 reporters were killed by the Israeli army in Gaza in the first 18 months of war, including at least 42 slain while doing their job, and dozens more detained in Israeli prisons. Trapped in the enclave, journalists in Gaza have no shelter and lack everything, including food and water. In the West Bank, journalists are routinely harassed and attacked by both settlers and Israeli forces, but repression reached new heights with a wave of arrests after 7 October, when impunity for crimes committed against journalists became a new rule. "







  • So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.

    At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.







  • I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.

    On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like “No politics. No insults. No drama.” Toxicity isn’t inevitable, there’s nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don’t bother with.

    edit: and on the flipside, there are also communities where toxicity is expected and it’s amazing to see someone acting nice there, it might even be done as a trolling method.


  • But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

    I still check mine, but occasionally I’ll know I’ve said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I’ve asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))



  • It’s not only about many people here being technical, of course you’re right that it plays a big part, and it’s also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there’s a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.



  • with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet

    I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.

    Tor is slow

    It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation

    and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers

    This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they’re doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.