We are at the end of the "free lunch" era of tech. Before, there was a lot of investment in tech because it was very easy for rich people to get loans, and sink it into tech companies or startups. With inflation at its high pace, banks failing, (esp. CV bank for our case) and the hike of interest rates, many tech companies are trying to make up the loss of revenue in anyway they can. Either by cutting staff and laying off people, or squeezing every dime out of every customer they can.
Before it was just accepted that some users would not monetarily engage with a platform, either by just lurking, blocking ads, mooching off a friend's account, or never buying any of the monetary perks being offered. Now they are doing their best to apply pressure to these people. Either they will go away entirely, and not expend anymore of the company's resources, or they will cave and put some money into the system by making purchases and consuming ads.
This has been growing trend since late last year, but this year in particular has caught many tech companies with their pants down. The days of burning free money for tech are over, and they are trying to scrounge together cash by any means necessary.
Solid point. One thing that these companies will realize quickly if they plan to move from ad based to subscription services is that a lot of them won't make it. Especially when the price of everything is so high. It no feasible for people to sub to 8 streaming services between film and music, add on a VPN, the odd Patreon, lots of people with ring and other camera and security subscriptions. I get that people will shuffle between services, but that might not be enough, and the more they go for the customers throat, the more likely people will realize it's a want and nowhere near a need.
Successfully monetising a platform means doing it in harmony with the the user base though, at least to some degree. A platform can't make money from users if it scares them all away. Social media platforms are especially vulnerable too because they rely on users to create their content. Nobody comes to Twitter to marvel at the system infrastructure, they come to read tweets.
The way certain tech companies are behaving currently is too knee-jerk and heavy handed. They are panicking and damaging their platforms in the process.
I rlly feel like 2023 is a year of a lot of things coming to light. Not just because of this but there was some stuff that happened earlier in the year and i got the impression that that'd be the 'theme' for this year (it feels like since 2020 every year has a 'theme' in some way.) This isnt super related tho but i feel like if there was any doubt that these companies are profit driven and WILL put that above user experiences, even if only for pennies, is largely been confirmed this year.
On top of that, we can't expect communities to POOF into existence.
We have to be part of them to build them, which means making them if they don't exist yet as well as posting and commenting in the ones that do exist. I hope that people who are used to lurking on Reddit will go out of their comfort zone a bit and start to participate in fediverse communities so that we can build things up more quickly.
Yea I was a prolific commenter but I think I only created maybe 6-8 posts in 14 years on reddit, and certainly never created a community. So I might have to step up. Regardless of reddit, I absolutely love the idea of the fediverse and the decentralized nature of it, so I really would like to see it succeed. It really does have to be the way forward on the internet to avoid corporate interests.
Same. I think we need some way to coordinate the initial burst of content for some of the smaller subs. I hate to say it, but maybe we need to assign "homework" - Request (not require) new subscribers to contribute unique stories or info relevant to the mag/comm on some type of schedule.
Something like:
"As we try to grow this new community, we want to hear from you. We're asking (not requiring) all new subscribers to start a new post within their first week covering some aspect of the topic they find personally interesting or that they feel could help others. Just add "(1P)" to the title of the post. It doesn't matter if it's something you said elsewhere, if you're new to the entire topic and just want to post a bunch of questions, you have a funny story to tell, or have a super niche specialty.
Also, we should consider having more moderator-level users in subs to reduce the burden of moderation. It's more daunting if you're asked to be one of 3 mods than it is to be one of 15. We should also look into incentivizing moderation duties, but there's probably a much longer discussion to be had about that.
This sounds like a great tradition to encourage and support. On Reddit I was pretty danged chatty & responsive, but almost never started my own post. Maybe at most once a year. I hereby commit to upping my participation game to include some actual posts to some of the quiet magazines I've subbed to. Thanks for the push.
And YOUR exuberance has inspired me to commit to upping my post game. I was never a big poster on Reddit, but mostly because I just didn't want to deal with the contrarian and amateur professionals fallout. It might be best to focus on the niche communities, since that's where the real valuable stuff exists on Reddit.
What is the consensus on the etiquette of creating new communities/magazines with the names of the still extant old subreddits (particularly when you're not a mod of the old subreddit)?
I'm not really sure... but the way I see it it's probably fair game.
Communities aren't something that somebody (reddit, specific moderators, etc.) owns, they are just concepts that people latch onto. And, for me at least, I would rather see popular communities exist here if people want them to, especially since you can have multiple communities under the exact same name on different servers in the fediverse.
In other words, if you want to bring over a specific reddit community I think you should just do it.
I was on Reddit for over 10 years and it only became a place for niche communities when they got rid of defaults. Kbin/Fediverse will get there in a few years.
agree. Part of why I liked reddit was that I could customize my feed to ignore political diatribe (left and right) and just read the feeds that interest me. Lemmy is so infested with leftists that it spills over into every part of their community
One is the instances is owned by people who praise Stalin. Lemmy.world is not. And the code is open source so Lemmy is not really owned by anyone. All you have to do is switch instances.
What's left wing about simping for dictators? Just because they called their countries "communist" to keep people from realizing, they were both effectively totalitarian dictatorships, and that's about as right as it gets.
@Crankpork they're left wing dictators? The wings are about economic policies. Communism is an ultra far left economic system like pure laissez-faire capitalism is an ultra far right economic system. You can be authoritarian or libertarian in either group. Or you can have more moderate economic views and still also have more authoritarian enforcement or extreme libertarian/anarchic lack of enforcement
I mean, that's exactly my point though. People seem to be knee jerk assuming that the "leftist" accusations against the .ml instances are standard issue right wing hyperbole against progressive liberals and that's not the case. It's just as much that progressives are complaining because we have no interest in associating with tankies.
I think the only real way for anyone to get it is to experience it. I thought it was bullshit propaganda too and I also thought I was relatively far left before first arriving at the .ml domain and further lemmygrad. I am still kind of surprised that we have a community out there that large that seems to legitimately identify with the 'tankie' ideology.
It's a bit of a culture shock realizing that you might just be a progressive moderate.
That's actually really good thing. In the U.S. not wanting to kill trans people makes you a "far left" person according to right-wingers. real "far left" people are pretty nuts, man. The vast majority of us are moderates who are now labeled as "far left" in the U.S. political discourse.
In my experience, lemmy.ml and feddit.de (for example) are in more left wing then milquetoast progressives. It's faszinating and refreshing, and I don't mind people speaking their minds. But I prefer moderate, too.
I would rather say that the average Redditor is milquetoast progressive. Heck, I start to really enjoy this phrase 😉.
As my feed is populated by a lot of German threads it is worth to note that moderate depends a lot on the country you are from. Bernie Sanders would probably be considered part of the moderate left in most of Europe while he is considered to be far left in the USA.
It also depends about what specific topic we are talking about.
In many places in Europe, being a social democrat when it comes to economy (like Bernie) might be considered pretty moderate. But then certain attitudes about non-binary pronouns or supporting special considerations for specific groups of people, are seen closer to "far left".
You don't see the amount of virtue signaling in Europe that you see in USA media productions, for example.
You need to do a little research before you get up on your high horse. They’re literal, self proclaimed communists. Lemmy was made because Reddit wasn’t left enough. They enjoy censorship and deny basic human right violations, and parrot CCP propaganda. They’re tankies. That’s why the devs instance isn’t federated with many of the major ones.
This is partly why kbin exists.
Wtf. I accidentally deleted my comment two times. Lemmy mobile UI fail!
I'm liberal, but I'm not at the "censor users criticizing the Chinese government because they're communist" level. I was also skeptical of what people were saying about the lemmy.ml admins (the original lemmy devs), but they're anything but miquetoast progressive.
That doesn't represent all of Lemmy though. I just wouldn't recommend joining .ml
Oh don't even get me started on the downvote brigades from angry leftists around here. Don't you dare hold a moderate opinion around them, or they call you a nazi and tell you to go back to 4chan. You can read my post history. All I've ever expressed is the same sentiment expressed here, and I've been met with nothing but absolute vitriol.
Because we saw what happens with Reddit. People come in claiming to be “moderate”, and very quickly shit like T_D starts popping up. Also center of the road politics in the US has had rights taken away from millions of people in just the past year, and it’s going to continue to erode them from more. I’m not telling you to change your political stance, but I am telling you that people see them as an attack because they have literally been attacked by “moderates”.
It's fair to want to ostracize those who claim to be "moderate" who are anything but, absolutely. Concerning civil and political rights, there should BE no moderate. Either you support people's fundamental rights or you do not. Either you support everyone's right to love, sex, and associate with consenting adults or you do not. Either you support people's right to choose what to do with their bodies or you do not. There's little left to discuss.
Having said that, the US (and the world generally) has a terrible record, left or right, in supporting people's civil and political rights. I'm overjoyed that at least left leaning folk now support those rights, but it wasn't a decade or two ago that those on the left of the political spectrum were parroting many of the same things that the right now parrots. "Marriage is between a man and a woman." "Don't ask, don't tell." So while I am glad they've shifted, I'm always concerned that if the political winds shift again, those in power will sacrifice individual rights in the name of maintaining said power as they did before they decided that advocating for our rights was going to keep them elected.
"Moderate" doesn't necessarily mean centrist or unalienable, it's antithesis is extremist. Being moderate and supporting peoples rights to be who they are just means taking a more practical and slow approach.
You need both moderate and more extreme views of progressivism, otherwise you get drowned in either. They support each other, they don't necessarily oppose each other.
What you call "moderate" is likely viewed very differently by other people, since I assume you're from the US, and US politics has become a far-right fucking shitstorm. The overton window has shifted so much over there that "moderates" are degenerate cunts to more reasonable people.
Your post history shows you are solidly on the right end of the spectrum based on your expressed opinions while trying to justify yourself as moderate.
How? Why would you resort to lying? I'm pro choice, I despise Trump, I'm pro gay and trans rights, I believe in UBI for everyone (as well as keeping the free market in place), pro legalization (of every drug), pretty anti gun but I still believe it's peoples right to own them, I think police should be completely reformed and prisons fundamentally changed to be places of rehabilitation. What opinion of mine shows I'm on the right end of the spectrum? Because I believe in nuance and civil discourse? That I think all humans deserve forgiveness and a chance to grow and become better? Please, do enlighten me.
The forced distillation of every single position to being somewhere on this "left" to "right" spectrum is the single worst thing to happen to modern political discourse, IMO.
I'm a fan of the "8 Views" test, which tries to position views along four different axes instead of just one. Four is still too few but it's way better than what we've got now.
You have the freedom of speech, not the freedom to be free from the consequences of that speech. I read your post history and couldn't really find a 'moderate' position, mostly far-right talking points and splitting hairs about semantics. If the shit that you're saying is indistinguishable from Nazi and fascist rhetoric, I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you that you may have to reexamine the people you caucus with.
I also saw that you claimed downvotes and disagreements are an important part of online social interaction, and yet you're here complaining about "downvote brigades." I thought that was pretty funny.
Pretty insidious of you to imply that what I have expressed here is far right, nazism, AND fascism. Do you have any examples where I haven't been moderate? This is what I meant by downvote brigades, it's not just the downvotes. It's the snakelike way in which people (such as you) are arguing with me that I'm disturbed by.
It's not splitting hairs about semantics when I've been called a nazi (multiple times now) for espousing NOTHING in the realm of nazism, and have in fact only condemned it. That's a huge problem, and it's my current focus here.
I'm against authoritarianism from any side and I'm also against the deceptive bullshit you're trying to pull.
I think part of it is that leftists (myself included) don't like being lumped in with tankies. I didn't downvote though.
The lead devs of lemmy are tankies, basically meaning authoritarian communists of the genocide-apologist variety. They also run the lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml instances.
This is also why I signed up on kbin instead of on lemmy. The other lemmy instances are fine, but I don't want to contribute to the influence of the lemmy devs any more than necessary. Hopefully they try to pull something stupid and get forked off the project.
Why would anyone downvote for that reason though? That reason is why I upvoted. I'm firmly left-wing but absolutely not far enough that I can support their BS views.
Most likely because American politics frequently pound the talking point of "far left politics" when talking about the political opposition (moderate left at best from an overseas PoV), to the point where American liberals have been conditioned to assume that they are being spoken down to when this type of language is in play. American leftists are also very anti-authoritarian on average and do not appreciate being lumped into the same category as tankies by simple virtue of people only discussing left versus right.
What's the moderate position between "trans people should not be allowed to exist in society" and "trans rights are human rights"? You have to understand every time you or anyone else says some shit like this you're basically crying that people are taking a position instead of just watching the right wing try to ruin peoples lives.
The supreme court literally ruled to allow businesses to discriminate against people based on sexuality yesterday.
This. While things are new, and nothing has taken the place of "service that everyone uses", LGBTQA+ people are going to avoid the unsafe places which is going to push discussions further and further right. A "moderate" position that treats the bigots the same as people who just want to live and feel safe isn't moderate at all.
An actual moderate position there is to just not go out of your way to be an asshole. But some people want to be assholes and vilify those who may not be able to protect themselves. I can't stand the people who want to 'debate' human rights. No, that line of thinking isn't welcome going forward.
I firmly believe everyone has the right to live freely and to find their own path, provided they don't harm others. Hate speech and violence have no place in our society, and I wholeheartedly stand with the trans community in advocating for their protection.
Nonetheless, here's a viewpoint I have that I know is not accepted, but I'll share it anyway. I believe the compulsion of speech, particularly insisting that all of society adapt their language to accommodate individual identities, is a terrible approach. The notion of forced speech is problematic to me, and worries me greatly.
That said, I believe it's important to work towards a society that respects every person, but without mandating how we perceive them. Life's journey is all about confronting adversity, and part of this involves learning to navigate the world as it is, not necessarily as we'd like it to be. Instead of dictating specific definitions, it might be more beneficial to cultivate a culture of empathy, understanding, and open dialogue around these issues. This perspective is unpopular and contentious, but it is a conversation that we should be willing to engage in.
Anyways that's what I see as the moderate take, and it's what I believe. I had to tiptoe pretty hard there and I'm sure what I said still comes across as hate speech to some but I don't feel it is. It's just my opinion. I wish there was a place I could express it and have an open debate with people about it. We can't eliminate half of society, and we're going to have to learn how to empathize with people we disagree with in order to actually see where they are coming from.
Nonetheless, here's a viewpoint I have that I know is not accepted, but I'll share it anyway. I believe the compulsion of speech, particularly insisting that all of society adapt their language to accommodate individual identities, is a terrible approach. The notion of forced speech is problematic to me, and worries me greatly.
Is this the fucking Jordan Peterson position? Whose speech has been compelled? A man walked into a Philosophy of Gender class this week in Canada and stabbed three people, so sorry if I'm a lot more concerned with the constant hate speech being levied against LGBTQ+ people than I am with the anomalous concept of "compelled speech" which has not as of yet been an issue and only exists in the fever dream of transphobes who want to actively misgender people while working in public positions in Canada.
I agree with you, but this is a really bad counterargument to what they said. Even widely agreed politeness conventions to a degree 'compel' speech, so the debate is really around what speech is acceptable for society to encourage/suppress, rather than whether cultural changes are changing what people are compelled to say. Also, I don't think they said anything that suggested they are more concerned by that than hateful violence?
I believe the compulsion of speech, particularly insisting that all of society adapt their language to accommodate individual identities, is a terrible approach. The notion of forced speech is problematic to me, and worries me greatly.
...
Instead of dictating specific definitions, it might be more beneficial to cultivate a culture of empathy, understanding, and open dialogue around these issues. This perspective is unpopular and contentious, but it is a conversation that we should be willing to engage in.
Anyways that's what I see as the moderate take, and it's what I believe. I had to tiptoe pretty hard there and I'm sure what I said still comes across as hate speech to some but I don't feel it is.
If you had to tiptoe pretty hard then what you wanted to say was worse.
What, exactly, is the harm in calling someone a "He" who considers themselves a "He" or a "They" if they prefer, or "She" if they prefer?
Do you consider all social conventions about how we address people to be "dictating specific definitions" or "compulsion of speech?"
Can I decide to call you the opposite gender of what you know yourself to be, and you have literally no feelings about that? What about using words like "Sir", or "Ma'am?" Have you felt unfairly compelled each and every time you've had to use them? How about "Doctor?" "Mr.?"
That's a lotta words for "I don't respect what people want to be called". When you call someone by the wrong name and they correct you, is that also compelled speech to you? Because that's all pronouns are. By your definitions all of language is compelled speech, because you're being forced into using specific words to communicate.
It can be your opinion all you want, but it's one you should evaluate and change, because it doesn't make any goddamn sense.
The problem is that nobody (or at least very few people of actual influence) are legitimately saying that trans people shouldn't get to exist. I have yet to see any politician, for example, express such a belief.
Michael Knowles called for the "eradication" of transgenderism at CPAC this year. Please shut up (E: corrected the wording he used, because he said "eradication" not just that it shouldn't exist)
No, it's not an important distinction. If you remove the ability of trans people to transition to their identified gender then you're relegating many of them to suicide.
I mean, you don't have to be a tankie that defends North Korea or the uighur genocides, to respect those values? Which is the main problem with Lemmy devs and main instances.
You're gonna need to be a bit more specific than that, because "defends" often does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to issues like that being discussed from a leftist perspective. Did they outright say North Korea is perfect or there was no human rights issues with the treatment of the Uighur people in China? Or did they say the situation in Korea is more complicated than is presented by the west because we've embargoed them for more than half a century at this point and point out how the Uighur genocides are not that different from what happens in ICE camps in the US to this day?
Bad things happen all over the world, and I don't think China or DPRK are perfect by any measure of the word, but presenting them as the axis of evil and ourselves as the good guys is just silly. It's not that they're good, it's that we're cartoonishly evil too.
You're being downvoted because people don't understand you're not talking about "far left" like some Trumper. You mean literal tankies, which absolutely yes some of the Lemmy Devs are as well as Lemmy.ml. It's also a reason I selected Kbin.
While I'm quite left wing, I have huge problems with them (as well as the main dev) being authoritarian, genocide-defending tankies. That praise China, Russia and DPRK. It's maddening.
Turns out people who work on open source in their free time to make the internet a better place for all are usually left wing, while the righties try to make money and fail.
Way back in the way back we used to call comments like that “flame baiting”. It’s trying to start a fight, nothing more. Forums and BBs I moderated used to technically ban it, but generally the rule has always just been “don’t feed the trolls”. Meaning: don’t comment, don’t downvote, don’t bother reporting. They just want attention, the only thing that hurts them is realizing that this board will ignore them just as completely as their parents already do in real life.
Yes. Back then there wasn't any upvoting or downvoting, so the only way you interacted with a troll is either engage them or ignore them...preferably the latter.
Harassment, hate speech, or any other form of harmful behavior will not be tolerated.
Now, I can't read ernest's mind to determine what he meant by this line exactly, but this kind of mean spirited, bad-faith jab falls under "harmful behaviour" in my book.
i think it's dangerous to be too broad with this definition
harmful in my mind is saying explicitly racist, homophobic, promoting violent, etc type of stuff
i think freedom of expression is something we should not give up easily. in actually harmful speech, i think the pros outweigh the cons. but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful
but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful
It implies that being against hate speech and harassment is a wrong opinion and while completely isolated and out of context it might not seem harmful, it's part of a cultural shift towards normalizing those things, and implies that anyone who cares is wrong. Seeing that go unchallenged just emboldens buttholes like that.
If you want to be neck deep in that bullshit, you're more than welcome to join exploding-heads.com. Can we have ONE space online that isn't infiltrated by assholes?
You don't have to be a dick to others on the Internet. You can make that choice. Just because you CAN post hateful shit anonymously and not have to face real life consequences doesn't mean you HAVE to.
Some people literally would prefer to see the world burn. No idea what’s up with that form of psychological gratification from destruction, but fuck them.
Welcome. It's gonna take everyone's effort to make KBIN fun. Upload content daily, and interact with other people's content that you have something to say about. It's gonna take effort from all of us.
We need to quickly move past Reddit. We cannot be consumed by it or we will repel newcomers. This needs to become it's own special place with it's own character. It'll take time. Be patient.
The Right wins by default on men's issues not because they have anything to offer men, but because the Left is so sandbagged by misandry and anti-male paranoia that simply doing nothing is an appealing alternative.
I am not prepared to let go of my left-wing values the way most of the people claiming to be left-wing have been doing. I am an egalitarian, and I am not prepared to treat men as less deserving of human rights, of care and consideration, of protection against discrimination, and so on.
But yeah, if you are on the left and care about men, you often have to carve your own way and swim against the stream of normalized misandry. But that's why we have this community.
I'm starting to realize that even in the localized leftist communities we're involved, we need to start creating spaces where men can freely talk about these issues in a leftist environment. Unfortunately, we don't have much power to be open with it in our own communities due to how they'll react. Even more dangerous when they're brainwashed by ideas of men that make them automatically distrustful of men, even at the start.
The guy that manages Kbin has been having personal issues and stepped away from the fediverse so yeah Kbin is kind of in limbo at the moment and indeed not well moderated. There's mods but there's just so much they can do. The software doesn't federate the deletions so even if they're gone on Kbin, they remain everywhere else.
One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.
There's at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That "at least one" is me, which is how I know. I'm not here all the time and wouldn't be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.
I hope it goes on. And being open source, it definitely will! (e.g. Mbin)
Ernest likewise will be remembered, fondly or otherwise, for his contributions in starting it.
That said, I'm close to personally blocking it due to all the spam hitting other servers from it, and the FBI may come knocking soon as well if people decide to hit it with illegal stuff like CP.
This isn't "the fediverse." This is one instance. "The fediverse" is a network of interoperable instances, each one owned and maintained separately.
Personally, I think the best way to interact with the fediverse is to maintain accounts on multiple instances. I have a dozen or so accounts total, and regularly use four or five of them. They're all under the same name, so they're all "me," but they're spread out instead of everything being on one account on one instance.
The main reason I prefer that is that every instance is different. Even though they're all interacting with the same broad pool of content, they each have a different userbase with different preferences, which means that they each have a different set of federated instances and subscribed communities. There's a fair amount of stuff I'll see on one instance but not on another, and it follows the overall focus of the instance. So whatever my mood might be or I might be interested in, I have an account on a suitable instance to match it.
Another advantage though, and directly on topic, is that I always have an alternative if one of them is having problems. Since each instance is privately owned and maintained rather than being owned by a corporation and maintained by its staff, there's any number of quirks and difficulties and failures. And that's just the way it is - the people running these instances are just ordinary people who are basically donating their time and resources, and they don't owe us anything. We get whatever we get, and have no right to demand any more than that.
With accounts on multiple instances, it doesn't matter if one or another of them has difficulties at the moment, or even if one shuts down completely (as two of my favorites have), since i can just switch to a different instance any time.
Kbin is special. It's an entirely different piece of software from Lemmy (and a better one in many ways). But it was written primarily by one person - Ernest - and he's also the owner of this instance. And while he's a great guy, he's also a single individual with other interests and responsibilities, and with some health issues. So it's a great place running on a great piece of software, but it has some difficulties and is often slow and/or glitchy. That's fine - I still like it here, so it's one of my most-used accounts, and I can always use a different one on a different instance if this one is too much of a problem.
Does anybody happen to have contact with Ernest outside of Kbin? It's a little concerning that his last update over a month ago was that he was going in for a medical procedure and that he'd only be gone for a few days. I hope he's doing alright.
It's increasing. It's up to about 12 hours. I've officially migrated off of kbin for now. I'm sure it's started to throw errors to other instances. Last time it did that we got temporarily defederated.
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