comfy

Good idea. I have seen some instances using mod-privileged bots for automating some tasks, like making weekly posts in communities, but I don’t think I’ve seen an auto-moderation bot yet.

I personally think having pre-filled ban reasons is a great moderation tool which would be useful for Lemmy.

Avoiding them is how you get a Nazi bar.

(Sorry for linking an article about tweets, just skip to the images)

It looks like lemmy.ml didn’t remove it, but their staff are certainly anti-ICE, plenty of posts there for weeks full of outcry.

I agree with trying to find and support a local instance. I personally find it nice to have this account (made before my local was made) for a global feed and a local account for playing more into local culture and news which are too niche to get visibility on a regular instance’s feed.

They often leave a dogmatic impression when someone says something which is completely normal to hear and say in (for example) the USA, but is unknowingly bigoted or ignorant misinformation. The .ml admins have no time for that and I think its unfortunate that there’s little attempt at linking them to resourced that explain why their post was prejudiced, because it’s usually not intentional or heartless.

One can absolutely critisise China there and you’ll probably end up banned if you aren’t critical of the Russian Federation. I’ve made posts on Lemmygrad challenging their notion of China’s form of worker democracy. But certain popular critiques are just bigoted or unfounded propaganda which the admins will ban people for, so it comes off as just shutting down opposing viewpoints. And that’s really unfortunate.

500 word mini-essay on demsoc vs socdem inbound. ETA in 3… 2…

There’s been 2 attacks on CEOs since

List 'em pls

If I’m not mistaken, instances like Hexbear already eliminate downvotes. I haven’t looked into whether that’s just a default setting for everyone or if it mechanically disables them, but it certainly creates a different social dynamic.

but what’s happening to older users? Are they still active?

There are certainly names still around who I remember from my first year on the site. Like Blaze said, I’m also not sure how to get some concrete numbers.

“My collection of rare, incurable diseases! Violated!”

The first time I heard about him beyond a vague “electric car person” post was from a tech co-worker in 2017, where they said they read a biography of Elon where they basically labelled him a sociopath. So, just to emphasize to anyone in the back-row, it’s certainly not news.

One of my sites was close to being DoS’d by openAI’s crawler along with a couple of other crawlers. Blocking them made the site much faster.

I’d admit the software design offering search suggestions as HTML links didn’t exactly help (this is a FOSS software used for hundreds of sites, and this issue likely applies to similar sites) but their rapid speed of requests turned this from pointless queries into a negligent security threat.

The amount of voter suppression, the broken FPTP system and mass media influence over the US electoral system, means that for all intents and purposes, the USA federal election is just picking your favourite of the two viable owning-class-endorsed candidates. “The people” never had a realistic chance of representation or empowerment. This is not a new critique, it’s been discussed for at least a century and a half.

There is simply no real value in calling the USA a democracy at any point during our lifetimes, regardless of whether you are allowed to vote or even write-in candidates, regardless of the two-party system, because the power imbalance between the working class and the owning class surrounding that vote makes it as much a sham election as Russia’s sham elections. But even compared to other (until recently) close allies, the US implementation of federal voting has long been an absolute circus.

If any agent of the government tells you otherwise, you must educate them and enforce the free exercise of your own rights.

How exactly does one enforce the free exercise of their rights?

Remember that agents of the government are often armed and generally don’t like being told what to do.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT IM BEHIND SEVEN PROXIES

why not just Linux?

Choice paralysis is a real obstacle for casual users who don’t have specific needs (e.g. anti-proprietary values) and don’t want to know what a kernel or a binary blob is, we’ve even seen this with Lemmy and other Fediverse options. So giving a specific distro suggestion is effective for this, and then later enabling them to move to other distros if there’s one more suited to them.

Linux Mint is generally well-received by beginner users, especially those moving from Windows which is similar enough to Cinnamon. Even if it’s not the ideal distro, it’s one which I believe casual users are less likely to reject. Hardware is more likely to ‘just work’, including graphics cards and non-free codecs. Non-free software readily appears in the app store, which is important if users are still dependent on them (e.g. their hobby group only uses Discord). While I personally believe in, support and create FOSS software, I don’t see how FSF-endorsement is important to the target audience, and if it risks them complaining that their NVIDIA GPU is acting weird or they’re having trouble installing proprietary tools they need for work, then I’d compromise and give them the smoothest reasonably-free option possible and allow them to decide to move to another distro later when they’re more familiar with Linux and how easy it is to try out distros.

So you are against democracy.

No. I am against the simplistic idealistic approach of just unconditionally allowing the most popular candidates to rule, especially given the surrounding circumstances like mass media propaganda turning this nice idea into a pay-to-win scheme, and the broken implementations in most countries (FPTP, systematic voter disenfranchisement, etc.). Just look at how that turns out in the USA, repeatedly. There are many other ways democracy can be structured. Most ‘democractic countries’ have extremely broken federal electoral systems which fail to represent the voting people, despite it seeming democratic on the surface with elections.

Who gets to decide the leaders now? If you live in a modernized country and a federal candidate does not have the support of the rich owning class, they won’t have much chance at competing with airtime on television and news, support of paid ‘influencers’ and other celebrities, commercial advertising spots, social media astroturfing campaigns and all the other ways to make a candidate seem important enough to have a chance of winning. The bottom line is, realistically speaking, the only viable candidates at leading on a federal level are those promoted by the ultra-rich, every other candidate and party is fringe. I assert that you effectively having to choose between candidates pre-selected by the owning class is not a valid democracy. Even if you have the right and the freedom to do due diligence and vote for a minor party which is closer to your views, that freedom is ultimately useless in a popularity contest influenced by mass media. That minor party, in real life, never had a fair chance of winning, no matter how popular their policies are.

…the leaders generally get to make the laws, so I don’t think legality is a useful safeguard.

I dont think its good, but its people right to have the leader they choose.

Well, that’s all well and good in an idealistic liberalist abstract, but in reality it often leads to (and Romania’s own history did lead to) mass suffering, extermination of minorities, getting invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union after their fascist leader Codreanu allied with Hitler. So, it’s best nipped in the bud, no matter what the majority believe.

Șoșoacă, in fact, is under investigating for commemorating Codreanu in public.

Trying to fight against the rights of the majority of the population is a dangerous battle only previously tried by authoritarian dictatorships and similar regimes.

That’s definitely not limited to authoritarian dictatorships. Seeing as you’re posting from an aussie instance, Whitlam’s dismissal comes to mind, along with lockdown laws (whether the majority approved or not).

Also worth mentioning, in Romania, political left and rights seem to be flipped.

The left-right framework just isn’t useful. As you’ve pointed out, it’s relative and changes massively between each country.

This video helps explain in more depth and proposes a more useful, effective political model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k