The headline is genocide apologia and should be banned.

Wait, it’s already over?

But does it have unicode emojis?

😀 😁 😂 😃 😄 😅 😆 😇 😈 🕧 🕯️ 🕰️ 🕳️ 🕴️ 🕵️ 🕶️ 🕷️ 🕸️ 🕹️ 🕺 🖇️ 🖊️ 🖋️ 🖌️ 🖍️ 🖐️ 🖕 🖖 🖤 🖥️ 🖨️ 🖱️ 🖲️ 🖼️ 🗂️ 🗃️ 🗄️ 🗑️ 🗒️ 🗓️ 🗜️ 🗝️ 🗞️ 🗡️ 🗣️ 🗨️ 🗯️ 🗳️ 🗺️ 🗻 🗼 🗽 🗾 🗿

Hmm it specifically seems to be missing emojis

Yeah thinking about this, individual servers for specialized topics seems like the way to go. I guess it depends on the type of community. Vegan is large enough but still a specialized community that yeah doesn’t need size. It’s specialized but not a niche.

But other niche communities, e.g. av1, jpegxl or velomobile, are too niche to work without more people. I think.

But it would still be good if you could at least set a community to automatically “forward” to a new instance. And maybe that a community could “export” the posts from existing instance to a new instance. Then you could move or merge. I believe something like that is needed.

Ok I’m just thinking out loud here…

Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.

There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.

And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don’t need downvotes since there wouldn’t be too many “controversial” topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn’t enough “tagging” on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post “funny/silly” or “unconstructive” or “misinformation” or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I’m wrong with this.

But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn’t support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can’t filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.

Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more “post-truth”, not just the fascists but the “leftists”, liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it’s bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they’ve been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to “heal”. But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don’t just mean the socialists lol).

And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the europe@feddit.de community lost 75% of it’s users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.

So I think it’s not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.

Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂

Yeah it is thriving, what I meant is that to have a chance to replace reddit, lemmy needs to find some technical solutions (moving / migrating / merging of communities) and somehow stop fracturing into islands.

But maybe that age of the internet has passed and people are no longer willing because of trolls, bad faith actors, sock puppets, bots… and the increasing polarization of ideology and propaganda.

Wait, what? Where can I read more about that?

I tried like 4 different lemmy instances before settling on lemm.ee because it hasn’t defederated from the socialists or “tankies”. So I can participate.

This defederation fracturing lemmy really speaks to both self-censorship of allowable ideologies and also bad quality of admins and mods several servers.

If lemmy can’t somehow federate communities separately from instances I don’t see lemmy thriving.

Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?

Maybe it’s just me but it seems the synchronization of public opinion on reddit / lemmy with Empire seems to be getting worse. (EDIT: It seems to be getting more “convincing”)

Like there was some opposition from the “progressives” and “leftists” about the Juan Guaidó sham and you could argue about it without getting downvoted into oblivion, but now very few dare to talk about the latest attempt to capture Venezuela’s oil.

Yeah if you have nothing to hide, what is the problem with spying?!

What’s wrong with Signal: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/why_not_signal.md

TLDR: Funded by the CIA, centralized in the US and phone numbers make you personally identifiable.

Ah normal people. My apologies

No I don’t use facebook or twitter. But it’s more for personal disgust than for morals. Nothing you or I or ten thousand lemmings do or not do will change the rising domination of social media on our civilization. Same as our individual choices won’t impact climate change. It’s the same illusion that only serves to prevent actual action against a serious threat. Not even thinking or talking about possible solutions. Corporate control of the means of communication is amoral, and accepting it is problematic.

Maybe I’m wrong and network effects can be overcome through a well crafted alternative like mastadon. But capital translates into power for marketing, development, articles and regulation or even legislation.

Normal people have friends and family and would like to use social media to stay in touch with them. There are network effects that make it practically impossible to switch. This is not something that can be done with the power of love and well informed agent in the marketplace.

One solution would be to nationalize facebook and other social media and turn them into public utility coops that are run democratically by giving the workers that work there a vote for who and how they should be managed. And give the users a vote.

Everything else is just fantasy. Facebook is forever. You’d need many billions in marketing and advertising to get enough people to switch. And then it will be the same shit.

Unless of course Elon Musk buys facebook, then it will be trash in less than a year.

New coating that is better or cheaper or harder but worse with temperature. Or maybe some new blue light filter. Or the old coating had lead in it or something lol.

I suspect a lot of the prolific posters are just cross posting curated content from reddit (which is fine). I don’t think Lemmy is big enough for famous people yet. Alternatively:

Lemmy has no famous people. Lemmy needs to famous people.

I’d argue that weird isn’t being used as an insult, but to state that the bullies are in fact not representing the norm. They are outside the norm but pretend to be normal, they insist on being normal - which makes it weird. It’s not an insult to us, but it is an insult to them. Which makes it funny.

Fascists believe in inequality based on identity, while we kinda thought we had this already sorted that we all believe in equality now. Like all people created equal. But their need to define an identity as superior and then attacking anybody outside the norm is being used against them. And it IS weird to do that, most people simply don’t care if you’re a little weird. We still have to learn to be more tolerant to more weirdness and not react with biases or irrational emotions. Respect weirdness.

So weird isn’t being used as an insult but as a way to rob them of their power - their attempt to define a new normal. And their arguments and attacks against anyone else are becoming increasingly bizarre, less founded in reality, absurd claims. Comical. Weird.

There is the metaphor about slowly cooking a frog without him noticing, shifting the overton window. Weird sort of resets that. It is more an attack on what they DO than what they are.

I’ve also thought about something like that for reddid/lemmy through tags. Like you don’t just up or downvote but you vote “funny”, “serious” or “insightful” or “wrong” or “trashy” etc. So you can separate posts and comments about topics. Also things like tagging a post as “repost” should be done manually or mostly automatically through image search so you can still upvote without feeling duped. And once AI becomes smart enough in the future to reliably detect common lies and propaganda you could do more of it automatically.

But for youtube you’d mostly need a common “public” server network of storage and streaming servers with a common fediverse interface. And you’d need some kind of global and voluntary coop subscription where people can pay 5 bucks that is split and paid out to any content you watch. Then you wouldn’t be dependent on advertising any more.

Anyway there are so many good things we could try but we won’t.

I feel like we’d need a scientific research project to figure out how to replace youtube with something that won’t enshitifiy.

Countering your fit with a contrarian feat