I love the first two suggestions. For anyone not on Lemmy.World or sh.itjust.works there is also [email protected]. And I would add mention of [email protected] too.:-)
I don't know of any great USA specific news communities outside of Lemmy.World or Midwest.Social.
Call me a bootlicker then I suppose bc I stand by them.
Posts advocating class solidarity, or like this one, meta making fun of the drama? Absolutely yes! Capitalism = evil, I know! (caveats: on the large scale, when unregulated, etc.)
Posts mentioning how sharp guillotines can get? Nope. Especially when it explicitly goes against community or instance rules. This will not end well imho. Innocent people are going to get caught up, and overall society, having refused to learn from history (AGAIN) will need to relearn some lessons. Especially with today's level of surveillance... yikes! 😳
It's like someone spent zero minutes reading the dictionary definition of "anarchy" and decided to implement it online nonetheless. Fuck the "facts" about how that actually advocates for the return to a more tribal form of... hey, what it REALLY means is that anyone can do whatever they want, at any time! (unstated premise: but nobody else should have that freedom, only the "right" people)
I just unsubscribed from the Lemmy shitpost and microblog memes communities, and now my Subscribed feed is kinda boring AF except the stuff I've already seen today.:-( Fortunately there are tons of others - Star Trek, LOTR, Star Wars, we've got good content here.:-)
This mostly dashes any hopes I had about being able to recommend Lemmy to people irl one day.
It would be different if someone were to spin up their own instance - like lemmyusa.com just did, awesome! - or to create their own community, then they truly can do as they please. But why use someone else's hardware, go to someone else's home, and absolutely INSIST on doing whatever da fuq you want, not merely ignoring but flagrantly flaunting the rules? Bc of the "rightness" of the cause?
Okay then, so the philosophy used by the Alt-Right it is, apparently. I'm now calling it the Alt-Left. That term used to be made up and falsely applied - but no longer. 😢
I think a lot of discussion on lemmy assumes pretty strong polarization, you are either for all the people or against all the people.
In reality there is some spectrum of potential response to things in our society that aren't good for the whole: you can deal with it (and bitch about it), something along the lines of civil disobedience in the middle, and violence on the other end. There is a lot of spectrum in the middle that seems to be just ignored, people either bitch about things, or they advocate for violence. The number of problems with the violence option is very high. Obviously doing nothing and bitching about it doesn't actually accomplish anything because the system is rigged against us. I do think people really need to start thinking more creatively on that middle path though, is it harder, yes absolutely. Violence is easy, actually solving problems or at least strongly influencing the system in our favor, is much harder but I think it is the best approach.
Just throwing a random idea out there:
I know people care about privacy in health care a lot, but if we had a system where people could publish their claim denials (with personal info redacted), and we could openly compare decisions made by many insurance companies and call companies out on claim denials.
Someone could then start a non profit (and transparent) company that can take in donations and identify and fight outlier cases in court with the insurance companies.
Or hell even your home town childhood friends. The most overbeared ones I knew all went hard AF
If you wanna talk about alt left and alt right. Look where going hard has gotten the right. In charge that is, with the left sitting with their thumbs up their ass. The right took over all 3 fucking branches in the US. And fucking twitter. And making gains all over Europe. Not to mention the trillion$. Meanwhile one guy possibly just did more to fight for the working class than the ‘left’ for the past fucking decade.
Silencing people results in radicalization.
They NEED an outlet. They DESERVE an outlet. So thanks Lemmy.world you’re on the path to radicalize more than many could if they tried, while trying the opposite
Yes I’d like to set up my own instance this upcoming year. Many independent instances growing and .world shrinking is a future I’ll happily seek to be a part of
People bitch and moan about things--irrespective of forum--because they have both things to bitch and moan about, and the time and energy to spend bitching and moaning. That suggests that things are pretty fucked for them. Sure, there are some people who lie, and their bitching and moaning is for show, but chances are that something is fucked in their lives that they want to do that.
To assume that a forum can be created to channel their bitching and moaning about fucked things away from the public eye implies several things: it is okay for things to be fucked for some people, and those people need to keep their bitching and moaning in line with rules and shit, or else to themselves. Instead of "I don't like this, so I'll either not read it, or I'll downvote it." That would be far more reasonable
That implication, that people need to keep their bitching and moaning to a certain format, style guide, and location, is pretty fucked up, because it takes the status quo of the current state and insists that it is correct. (Which, it, very clearly, is not.)
Neither you nor anyone on lemmy get to have a private instance that is still a social network open to the wide world to register on, read, and post on. You pick one or the other. Pretending that you can have both is, of course, what makes you (and the admins and mods sweating so hard) a bootlicker to the people and forces insisting that the status quo is fine, and people need to be 'more civil' about how they bitch and moan (read: they need to accept that their fucked state is just fine, so they can be fucked over more).
The french revolution was not a good time for anyone. Did it make things better? I dunno, I wasn't there. But it happened because things were really fucked for a lot of people. Who are you, to look at history, and say "yeah, they did the French Revolution, but in the end I think it made things worse for people, so they should have just stuck around with the boot on their neck instead?" They didn't know how things work out, they just knew that their current state was untenable, and needed to be changed. Anarchy and violence suck, for everyone, to be sure, but they suck more for the people who benefit most from there not being anarchy or violence. That's just tautological.
All the other social network alternatives are owned, operated, and moderated by the problem, so obviously any Lemmy instance owners, admins, and mods cowtowing on Lemmy with respect to how the problem wants things handled is... Bootlicking. Yeah. That's bootlicking.
If it doesn't literally break the local laws (which were written by and for the problem in many jurisdictions, so that's another source of fuckery to birch and moan about), then the mods need to calm their shit and moderate... less. Community and instance rules past that are all nice to haves, not must haves, because, and this is important, they were written by some rando preparing to be a real NIMBYist. If the community wants to laud a guy who did murder as the people's hero, and laud his methods as the methods of the people, and you don't like that the community is doing that on your hardware, fucking turn that shit off. The mere existence of large instances that draw the majority of discourse does not mean that the community needs to fucking adhere to the guidelines imposed by the instance admins. The instance is there for the community, not the other way around. It means the instance admins are in the position to be fucking public fucking servants. If they don't want to shell out the money and expertise to be public servants (which, by the way, means serving the public how the public wants to be served), they need to fuck right off. None of this "start your own instance and run it how you want" bullshit while the old instance still exists makes any fucking sense.
When the people in power act in a way that the people see as not in the people's interest, that's when the people are fucking pissed off. If that shit applies to governments and health insurance companies (which it clearly fucking does), why do you think it shouldn't apply to, oh, I don't know, Lemmy instances and their stewards?
It's not about channeling - it's about being respectful. And no I don't mean to the wealthy, I mean to one another here.
Lemmy.ml for instance says that it is "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers", so surely it must be all about software enthusiasts r-r-right? Nope, instead go there now and see things like:
Meh, they can do whatever they choose. And I choose not to advertise for them anymore by telling people irl that I use "Lemmy". I've also figured out how to block all the users of the instance as well.
BTW I'm worse than a bootlicker - I'm a "collaborator".
Also, I guess my own complaining isn't as worthwhile as others complaining, so that rather than simply scroll on it warrants "a talking to", in order to uphold the status quo of Lemmy that pushes ever more to the extremist state. Translation: ONE side is, shall we say, "mOrE eQuAl" in its right to complain than the other.
You next explained the "rightness of cause" and "ideological purity", yup. Particularly interesting is how the admins don't have the "right" to do with their own instance what they choose and must instead kowtow to "the community" - which somehow excludes the entirety of all of its non-extremist members, yet for whatever reason includes solely the extremist ones? Interesting... I feel like I have heard this identical Alt-Right Left message before somehow, just phrased in different terms.
I don't disagree with the mods for enforcing their rules (I think online spaces ought to moderate and set rules according to their goals and purpose), but I really can't see how anyone would be surprised that this reached such an unfortunate end. And it's frankly kinda true that rights we take for granted today largerly WERE earned through bloodshed. The US ought to know that better than anybody; it was literally our violent refusal of monarchy that inspired the French with their guilotines. We were where they got the idea. And those are grotesque outcomes, but the ideal out come would be exploitation and abuses being prevented or resolved, a reality that people did not live. And the outcome of that reality was that violence really DID play a fundamental role in building the world we appreciate today.
The CEO destroyed a horrific number of lives and the positive outcome would have been the US government effectively protecting its people from exploitation. That never happened, and when people's justified anger at being treated so abusively at a terrifying scale just SITS for that long, eventually it's gonna boil over. And the consequence is that society is actually paying attention to how horrific of a death and abuse machine the company he built was. I don't like that someone was murdered. I do respect the willingness to fight back against a man abusing you and a terrifying number of others, and reject that somehow it's okay to intentionally abuse people if you're making money doing it and call it a business. More than anything I hope it moves us forward and we address the issue. And it's entirely possible it won't be addressed, but to be perfectly honest it's really apparent it wasn't gonna get addressed without this happening, because our representatives demonstrated OVER AND OVER AND OVER that the only thing that matters is that someone is getting rich.
But this country really was founded on a violent rejection of abusive authority. Our declaration of independence was written in British blood. And the insistence that if rights and saftey are denied they will be taken by force (through protest, collective action, and at time throughout history, outright violence), really did create many of the rights and protections we now enjoy.
At a certain point people don't just blindly accept that being abused is the way the world must always be, and sometimes that violence really has forged a better life for people. I just hope this violence actually yields that end. I'm tired of people being abused, and I also know that there will be more anger and violence if the abuse and destruction of lives continues to be the status quo :(
My sentiments exactly. Honestly, it's a waste of breath to have an opinion on Lemmy. I have been thinking I might as well put up with the reddit ads at this point. I don't really fall in with the hive mind. But of course, they'll say Reddit is the hive mind here.
I saw a post on one of the pro union groups (I believe it was lemmy.ml) where they started naming him Saint Luigi and how he should kill more CEOs... like what am I even supposed to think about that? Am much as I agree with a lot of the ideologies on these instances, It doesn't feel right despite the circumstances.
"They" will say all sorts of things. When it is true, then it is true, when it is not true, then it is not true. Being able to tell the difference though is exhausting. The hive mind makes things so much easier, to never have to "think". Ofc we all do it - the difference is that some of us fight against that trend:-).
And Luigi is a legit difficult narrative to talk about - even if he helped spur a(n inter-)national conversation, what about when we get to one person per day, and the corps instead of budging an inch just tighten the screws all the harder? Surely communism is working out GREAT for the likes of Russia, China, and North Korea? Except how come the people espousing that thought never seem to move there to "enjoy" the fruits of their labor?
Those mods put in WORK to curate their communities. I respect that. Even If I did not agree with their actions (although I happen to agree, but I am saying even if I were not to), I still respect their commitment to service to their communities. And if someone wants to spin up their own instance or make their own community and mod it, that's one thing, but to simply complain about it without bothering to invest even one iota into understanding those decisions... seems childish to me.