[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 week ago

wow the /c/greentext community has posts that remind you of 4chan

:0

94
submitted 1 week ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/greentext@lemmy.ml
[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 months ago

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

25
Yakko is an Anarchist (nuclearchange.net)
submitted 2 months ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/memes@lemmy.ml

Which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone!

(Found this on Nuclear Change /social/)

209
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/fuck_cars@lemmy.ml

Dear consumer: do not operate this motor vehicle while experiencing emotion

edit: I've updated the title as I've discovered more information: a credible death threat isn't quite the same as attempted murder

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 32 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Ultimately, it's important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don't have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It's no co-incidence that you're feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! 'Fediverse' programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I've had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it's not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn't.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 35 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Their argument is that the Voice isn't even something good. It doesn't give Indigenous people any powers they didn't already have, and the Voice can be ignored just as easily as the advice of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody recently was. Interview with the Black Peoples Union describes in better detail.

But even if that weren't the case and they did think it wasn't worthless symbolism, successful collective bargaining doesn't just settle for every first offer. So I don't know why you're claiming it's a bad strategy, it's how unions have won important gains for workers. It's a strategy that has been historically shown to work when applied correctly.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 17 points 8 months ago

I've done that. You just bring something appropriate to carry it in.

Although now that I live closer to a smaller grocer, I just walk twice.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 150 points 8 months ago

pls no more punchlines in the title!

32
submitted 8 months ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

For details, see the Release notice section Bigger new windows.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 12 points 8 months ago

It's very narrow-scope to frame this conflict as just about one attack at a music concert, and furthermore to think that a decades-long invasion, colonization and blockade shouldn't be compared to other acts of colonialism.

Also, please read the community rules before posting, there are only two of them.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 25 points 8 months ago

Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.

The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.

1
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/hexbear@hexbear.net

This is mainly so that emotes will not be so disruptive to users on other instances. Due to how they are implemented, most of the emotes have the effect of flooding the comment sections when viewed from other instances, and due to the large amount of cross-instance posting, this is a real issue that makes even sympathetic users annoyed.

Downsizing can be done pretty effectively with an automatic script, using something standard like ImageMagick to downsize them. So, it should not be hard or timetaking for the devs to do.

This will also decrease their filesize, making them load much faster for everyone!

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

eh, reddit leans left

The left-right spectrum isn't a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you've seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn't... there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.

they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking

Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 18 points 9 months ago

Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can't remember too well if they got much attention with the 'they're not all like that' line)

It's always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we're going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 31 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??

Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it's especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won't sell out and extort the userbase.

[-] comfy@lemmy.ml 32 points 11 months ago

If this was a specific-purpose non-politics instance like many are, I'd say power to you. But for an general-purpose instance that advertises itself as being:

A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.

Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.

...then there's a need for some serious self-examination. Preemptively blocking thousands of users, and talking about blocking another long-lasting substantial community because some other community made comments about them? This is disappointing, this does not sound properly thought-out.

You're right, defederation should only be considered as a last resort. Not as a broad-spectrum discriminatory first action.

0
submitted 1 year ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/meta@lemmy.ml

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

I've already started seeing a lot of redundant communities being made here that have already existed on other Lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml is at risk of centralization and overload, so now is a great time to raise awareness of other instances.

For science topics, mander.xyz has a lot of good ones set up, and !solarpunk@slrpnk.net on slrpnk.net has been great!

edit: for new users - you can type ! to begin autofilling a community, even for ones on other instances, like I did for the solarpunk community above. It may take a few seconds for the autofill results to show up if you have a slow connection like me.

16
submitted 2 years ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/fuck_cars@lemmy.ml

[yeah it's twitter junk, I know]

11
submitted 2 years ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/greentext@lemmy.ml
11
submitted 2 years ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/greentext@lemmy.ml

(technically it's /games/ but that's a dumb title)

11
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/meta@lemmy.ml

"Leftist" is not a helpful label here; its meaning changes internationally and personally. It was always vaguely defined and just became more vague and misused for the past two centuries.

This is an issue because:

  1. It leads to unresolvable persistent conflicts over what is leftist and what isn't, and therefore who is welcome here and who isn't.

  2. The admins' definition appears to be different from some very common definitions. In the post 'What is lemmy.ml?', they imply that a 'liberal instance' is 'something that [lemmy.ml] is not'. This will at best lead to repeated rejection of people who consider themselves 'leftist' but whom many users do not (an annoying and useless exercise for everyone involved), or at worse subversion by people who think they've found home and need to defend it against 'extremists'.

Maybe consider 'anti-capitalist' or 'socialist' as less ambiguous terms, assuming that is what you meant. This will avoid users who identify as leftists mistakenly signing up and defending the place against those it is explicitly made for.

As a demonstration of the wide range of political positions reasonably considered by people to be 'leftist', here is the Wikipedia article for 'Leftism'. Common definitions include ''pro-egalitarianism'', ''liberalism'' and various 'progressive' social rights movements.

0
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
What is this post?

A quick and dirty look into Lemmy instances, their size and interactions, and some insights.

Disclaimers
  • I AM NOT AN EXPERT OR WITNESS: I only started using Lemmy in March 2022. Lemmy was around for around 3 years before that. I am not a developer or instance owner.
  • I DID NOT GO AND TALK TO PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF: This is just me exploring for fun and starting a conversation. This is not a proper study. Consider telling any one who links you to this page as if it's an expert historical account that I called them an idiot.
  • This is limited by my experience and my searching, it's not comprehensive. If someone made a dark instance, I probably won't find it. If there's some deep lore, I probably don't know it.

Thanks to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for many of these stats.

Alright,

Now for the casual rambling.

Organic posting started on lemmy.ml from April 2019 so I will consider that the start of Lemmy as a service (my understanding is that lemmy.ml is the oldest non-dev instance)

As of now (May 2022) AFAIK, the Lemmy-based sites with the most total user comments are:

  • hexbear.net (2.5M)
  • lemmy.ml (114K)
  • lemmygrad.ml (105K)
  • bakchodi.org (42K)
  • wolfballs.com (15K)
  • szmer.info (15K)
  • feddit.de (3K)
  • [dev instances ignored]
  • sopuli.xyz (1504)
  • lemmy.eus (1262)
  • lemmy.ca (974)

The count of users active in the last month is similar:

  • hexbear.net (unlisted, approx. 1.3K in the last 14 days)
  • lemmygrad.ml (508)
  • lemmy.ml (474)
  • bakchodi.org (286)
  • szmer.info (65)
  • feddit.it (51)
  • sopuli.xyz (31)
  • wolfballs.com (29)
  • feddit.de (29)
  • lemmy.ca (17)

My guess is that the difference at the bottom of the list is due to highly federated instances spreading their user comments over many instances with more activity, and also due to some instances peaking a few months ago and then declining. For those new to user statistics, you'll notice that popularity usually tends to be exponential: more popular things get more popular.

What was that first one? Hexbear?

Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy. In that sense it reminds me of Gab, another huge island fork, but only due to size and isolation. While I can't find an admin statement, various Hexbear Gitea issues from 2020 and this comment from December 2021 "We’re working on bringing Lemmy up to speed with some of the features our “fork” (it’s more of a rewrite) has. When that’s ready we’ll switch to that which will already have federation ready for us." and this from Feb 2022 "The only issue is that [Hexbear] doesn’t support federation for semi-technical reasons (happy to explain), but that’s going to be fixed (later this year maybe)?" indicate Hexbear is open to the idea but unready (this 2020 comment even states they chose Lemmy precisely because of its federation goal), and Bakchodi appear to have just not set any up (the admin states "Federation is not functional as of now." in a post and nothing more). Contrast both against Gab who cited abuse/security issues and lack of local federation users for their voluntary removal of existing federation.

Another point regarding Hexbear and Bakchodi is that they are continuations of existing popular communities: I believe that Hexbear is a continuation of reddit's banned subreddit /r/ChapoTrapHouse, and Bakchodi is a continuation of the banned /r/chodi (which I believe was banned around the same time as /r/GenZedong's quarantining caused a mass exodus to https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzedong ). To the best of my knowledge, lemmy.ml, most of lemmygrad, wolfballs and szmer are new original sites rather than an existing active community migrating as a mass.

Connections

Most instances are connected into the Fediverse. Hexbear and Bakchodi appears to be the only active non-trivial instances that don't federate.

Due to the political environment of the internet today and the content currently on Lemmy, I personally think it makes sense to classify the current federation networks of Lemmy instances into four loose groups:

  • socialist 'left': Primarily value socialism and/or anarchism, and related topics. Generally explicit about their instance's political alignment. The largest group. Examples are lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, midwest.social, and would include hexbear.net if it were connected.
  • liberalist 'right': Primarily value freedom of speech and other liberty. While none yet are e~~xplicitly politically-biased through administration~~[correction], they do overwhelmingly have users with views typical of the American 'right-wing' as an inevitable result of where they are promoted, the ideas only they tolerate and the existing posts. Examples are wolfballs.com and exploding-heads.com.
  • general open: Overall mainstream OR diverse political views, will generally tolerate political instances on both sides of the above divide. Often national instances or 'general-purpose'. mander.xyz is an overt example, gtio.io is also an example. lotide.fbxl.net would be an example, but it's a lotide instance rather than Lemmy.
  • anti-intolerant: Primarily value friendliness and inclusivity, and so will readily block instances that tolerate intolerance, such as those in the liberalist 'right' category and potentially those further in the socialist 'left' category. An example might be sopuli.xyz.

These are all politically determined, as unlike Mastodon and Pleroma there don't tend to be any instances based around controversial single topics or around graphic content that causes instances to defederate. I thought there were more instances that blocked both sides of the 'left'/'right' divide, but they don't seem to exist yet (which is a good sign) beyond lemmy.rollenspiel.monster. It is also worth mentioning that lemmy.ml has blocked some instances due to abuse rather than any cultural disagreement.

The first two of the four categories are by far the most popular, even if not the most numerous in instances, probably due to them picking up users being kicked out of reddit and reddit alternatives as they block more and more political subreddits or become unsavory. The earlier kicking of many 'harassment' subreddits from reddit around 2015 lead to many 'right-wing' users to populate Voat and then later bannings lead to communities.win becoming popular, which I believe explains why Lemmy doesn't yet have a strong influx of users who align politically with those banned subreddits and more-so with recently-banned communist subreddits (the core developers' political views and lemmy.ml's reputation may have impacted people moving to instances named after Lemmy or considering hosting new instances, but I suspect it wouldn't affect people who were invited to a place called Wolfballs).

Interestingly, there is already a mirror instance that reposts from reddit: goldandblack.us.to

Growth

fediverse.observer has some stats. Ignoring the huge outliers in the middle, there has been a jump in growth in the past two months which I would mostly attribute to the influx to lemmygrad.ml wow look at that second graph and the launch of unfederated-but-included bakchodi. Apart from that, there has been a remarkably consistent growth in all the active instances. That's a good sign that this group of communities could last a while.

Some concluding thoughts, with regards to reddit

As someone who hasn't really used reddit in many years, I like to promote the view of us being independent, growing our own culture, our own norms and not merely aiming to mirror the same shallow emptiness. The bottom line is, we grow a lot when reddit shuts a place down, and as you can see in some of those stats, growth creates more potential for growth. I think it's important to think about what habits we see now both here and there that we want to encourage, and which habits we don't. Think about what should each community tolerate and reject and enforce (and make no mistake, that answer differs depending on purpose and audience!) and how do we redirect people in the wrong places or teach those who are mistaken? (protip: typing these things out each time is very dumb! That's why we invented FAQ pages!) What struggles did Mastodon face as they started to grow more and more?

Parts of reddit and similar groups will continue to arrive. Look at this list of communities that used to be allowed: it started off with the very blatant controversies like sexualizing minors, moved on to open blatant racism-focused places that conducted raids, and now they're at banning subreddits about a US (former) president and pro-China memes. Now that Lemmy has established itself as the home of some of the most recently banned communities, I personally think it's only a matter of time before reddit pops off a few more communities as they face pressure from media flak, investors or other major influences, and we should prepare for how to handle this: make potentially targeted communities aware that we exist before an incident, and make sure communities have a clear set of rules and guidelines written for the people that come in expecting this to be reddit again. I think this is an opportunity to fix the things we don't want repeated.

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comfy

joined 2 years ago