Is that possible? With lemmygrad.ml being defederated from Lemmy.World I mean, where this community is located. They could always use alts ofc, e.g. from lemmy.ml.

No…t entirely.

There is a lot of extremist propaganda here - e.g. advocating for literal murder (just search for the word “guillotine” to quickly get an idea of what I mean). Also, if you criticize Russia or China on lemmy.ml, or try to claim that e.g. genocidal practices happen (even share your second-hand accounting of Uyghur family members) you will get banned from communities that you’ve never even heard of across the entire instance, with no prior warning.

The “funny” part there is that both Russia and China are capitalist nations, not communist. It helps to think about children talking about what they think (or rather wish) communism is, rather than the real world. So they’ll tell you to read certain books, while studiously ignoring e.g. that the Tiananmen Square massacre actually did take place, i.e. they cherry pick and only talk as if they care about it, rather than actually doing so. Think Truth Social, but claiming to be leftist rather than right.

But e.g. there’s also Star Trek memes, and… well I am sure there are other things too, somewhere!?:-D More seriously, each instance has its own focus, none of which (anymore) is “conservative”, all of which is left leaning, but the vast majority of which is not extremist. Mander.xyz for instance has some fantastic scientific content.

Check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca - I refer back to it often, e.g. to remember how to do things like use links to communities from different Fediverse instances. I wish it, or something like it at least, would be shared with everyone, but Lemmy is extremely primitive when it comes to such things (case in point, if you go to lemmy.ml, visit their sidebar, and click “What is lemmy.ml”, it takes you to a post that does not exist).

I have been advocating for labeling such communities and instances - that way, like porn, people can enjoy it all they like while also being friendly enough to let others know what’s present therein, and that way we can get along better. However extremists famously resist labeling themselves as such, treating their own views as the sole correct one and rather it is everyone else - yes literally the entire rest of the fucking world - that is “different”. So instead, each person has to find out mostly on their own what these subjects are all about. Kudos for sticking around long enough to do so.

I avoided Reddit like the plague for the first decade - I knew that it had the potential to suck me in and I did not want that. But then during the pandemic, I kept finding myself going to it for answers, and then seeing how I could improve things, and then…

I noticed that at work I would say something “snarky”, which they did too but even so it’s like I was going too far. I typically did not enjoy seeing such things on Reddit, but as a mod I couldn’t block most of it without banning the person themselves from the entire community, so I felt that I had to put up with it - and it changed me, but not for the better. I mean not deeply or anything, but it normalized that style, which still was not good. And now for the same reason I’ve blocked lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - b/c I don’t want that to come into myself. I am no fan of e.g. capitalism but “behead all landlords” seems to me a position lacking entirely in nuance or possibly even substance - like “okay Karen, why do you care what I do so much, and are ready to threaten literal violence unless I comply with your wishes?!”

Yes the mistreatment of all the app devs but especially him b/c he was so careful to document it was a big one for me too, though I glazed over that b/c in retrospect I had realized that I had already started thinking along those lines before that happened. Even so, that was the final straw that crystallized it and made me finally move off the platform. A watershed moment in history, for all of us I think. Well, to be more precise I gave up my mod position and went from checking r/popular quickly from like every few hours to only checking in on my former community once a week, then once a month, then… I can’t even remember how long it’s been now. For awhile I became more active in r/RedditAlternatives than I was in my niche community!:-) But there is only so many times that you can tell someone something before it becomes their choice to not listen, so I just stopped going there at all.

Anyway, the problem is not just Reddit’s toxic AF culture (vision, like bullshit, tends to flow from the top to bottom direction in a company), nor even entirely the for-profit model - though each of those has their own, unique bad things that they add into the mix - and in some sense as you alluded to the issue is social media itself. Like candy, it promises good things, and like candy if taken in moderation it can be absolutely fine (especially during a pandemic when social distancing, especially in countries like the USA where “flatten the curve” was somehow taken as a challenge to encourage doing the exact opposite, to “pwn the libs” or sth I dunno), however also like candy it can leave someone unfulfilled if we always turn to the “easy doomscrolling”, rather than allow our attentions to absorb longer-form content like say, a TV show, or even movie, or even a fully online & free college course like Crash Course World History.

Social media can wreck our lives! Or it can enhance them, depending on how wisely we make use of it:-).

https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb

This is an excellent article. I was just barely beginning to think (still subconsciously, i.e. still intuitively rather than focused) about leaving Reddit anyway, b/c of all its toxic BS, even prior to the blackouts and Rexodus, when I read this. I could not put it down!!!

But I had to, in order to go to work, and yet I picked it back up again ASAP and kept reading through lunch. And as a result, I gave up my mod position of two subs, left Reddit virtually entirely (though I partially stayed for a couple months to post about Kbin/Lemmy), and came here (the age of my current account does not match up b/c I was first on Kbin).

So yeah, it’s long, but like… it PERFECTLY describes what I was intuiting! That Reddit was trying to turn me into a pedantic, narcissistic asshole, by curbing my impulses whenever I wanted to be kind yet encouraging the opposite to let my dark side flow against someone in order to demolish their arguments. Long, detailed answers to someone with specific questions and pleading for answers were penalized, yet short quips like “u suk” got heavily up-voted.

But it’s not merely Reddit ofc, it’s also Twitter, now X, and FaceBook, and any for-profit social media that prioritizes “engagement”, e.g. talking rather than listening. e.g. why is Reddit’s search function virtually nonfunctional, and why can each sub only have a maximum of two pinned posts? (I almost started looking into what it would take to write a bot that would allow for a megathread of megathreads, which the native Reddit refuses to provide for, except I could see the writing on the wall that bots were going to be obliterated, so I didn’t bother.) Every single time such limitations line up with making new posts, their profits always magically seem to be increased - bc recall that ads are between posts, not between comments, so more posts = moar ads! Even if people stopped responding to people’s questions… although usually someone somewhere would at least try, so it increased “engagement” of the type that furthered profits, while decreasing it overall. Hence these items were never going to be fixed.

Hence Reddit was enshittified. e.g. in r/Android people would constantly ignore the begging, pleading, demanding, and threatening from mods to put requests for new phone recommendations into the weekly megathread… and some huge fraction of posts to it were always like “what phone should I buy?”, “what Android phone should I purchase?”, “Which model phone should I get?” (until they could get removed) - often with no other details given, somehow extremely often back to back, as if nobody else in the whole entire world existed with the same identical damn question, these childish minds (of whatever age) just continually blurted out their requests for attention, spamming the entire world and preventing serious discussions about Android, which basically had to move elsewhere - i.e. the kids got so noisy that the adults had to flee the room looking for a more contemplative quiet.

Which is why we all find ourselves here:-). But even here, the addictive nature of even not-for-profit social media still has its dangers, as too does eating too much food etc., it’s not the thing itself (once the profit incentive has been removed) but the amount that can be deleterious.

If you go far enough back, the data turns quantum - as in having multiple simultaneous solutions to the waveform equation as to presence & location in time. And roughly every 20-30 years, it keeps splitting up again! :-P

This is exactly what I was going to ask: “Did they burn down the state of California as a result?”. But instead, take my upvote!:-)

Who has the money for that?! :-P

That said, *I* get to decide what my own fucking gender means - not anyone else.

-Link

The quote is burn crosses, not carry them!? 😜

Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses.

System Update

I was assigned one, but decided that it was wrong. Now I’m arguably the same one, but I feel like a massive improvement.

Oh yes, and if that is how you interpreted what I said, then thank you for taking it in stride and responding in a good-natured way. But if you go back and re-read it… I feel like what I said had a lot more to do with him than you pointing that out about him:-).

i.e., he is pretentious, claiming to “know” things, but (seemingly?) lacking in the area of humility, or even just precision, which is to know and express clearly where one’s own knowledge ends and instead one’s lack of knowledge begins.

And that is exactly what Tyson has built up his career around trying to tell people! e.g. “you don’t know shit!” (while ignoring the limitations of his own sphere of knowledge)

In point of fact though, YOU know where your knowledge ends, i.e. have humility, thus it is quite obvious that you are nothing at all like Tyson:-P. 😅

I suppose what I am saying - and I may not express myself clearly here but I will try:-D - is that Tyson is correct: for people in a LEADERSHIP role (like scientists & educators), rather than blurt out whatever thoughts first come to our mind, we would do well to think it through and stfu with our interjections of things that go beyond the plain and simple facts. The weird part is, he made his career out of doing precisely the opposite of that! He blurts out his own thoughts about their thoughts, and people loved that “drama” so he just never stops.

He is a victim of his own success in a way, except as you say, he is the one who stepped up into that role, not you or I.

If you click “Cancel” on the comment, it does not do that, at least for me on the web UI.

You know, I find it the absolute peak of irony that this sounds like something that Neil Degrasse Tyson would say about someone else:-).

I like to think that he forgets, keeps trying and then makes a new post about it

I like to think that he forgets, keeps trying and then makes a new post about it

This headline would have carried a ton more weight if it wasn’t so extremely click-baity.

The ends do not justify the means?

She had best be prepared to regain those 125 lbs and remarry her husband then?

(I have no idea what I’m saying here tbh, but that does seem in keeping with this headline!)

Wait a minute… realization slowly dawns: exactly who is the “bear” supposed to be here?!?! 🙃

I enjoyed seeing that on the RiF (Reddit Is Fun) app - it even helped me moderate a sub bc it would show the newest comments regardless of what posts they appeared in, so that a single new reply could be isolated out from the hundreds of older comments already in a post. Though those were available as well, being just a click away.

Another thing that drove people away from Reddit, besides the horrible ethics of its CEO, and also wanting to be in solidarity with content creators and mods, was how not only were the third-party apps killed off, but the official app just absolutely sucked in comparison. It provided only the tiniest fraction of the functionality found in those other apps - especially the ones preferred most by mods.

Not that the users left on Reddit care about such. All they seem to care about is the ability to doomscroll endlessly, but whether the content is made by AI, scraped from X or Mastodon or Lemmy, seems to matter not at all. Long live Reddit! No seriously, it might not even die at all at this point, just be relegated to obscurity while forever limping along, desperately attempting to achieve for Huffman the payday that he believes (unfounded on facts) he “deserves”.

And look what we did for cows, sheep, etc.

Ironically this holds a bit true for humans as well, not that we are stuck that way as you mentioned for dogs yet our gestation time most definitely is severely elongated. It takes us 9 whole months just to get out of the womb, then basically 20 years to reach adulthood. And with that increased plasticity of our brains we can learn so much more. 🐒

I’ve heard that but I think it’s not as deeply embedded in their root psyches. Like, cats can hunt in packs, whereas dogs flat are “pack animals”. But I am no vet psychologist so we’ll have to defer to the interwebs for that knowledge I suppose:-).

Make sure to feed them from your actual hand at first - otherwise, like with one of those auto-feeders, they may not even associate food with you! But they definitely appreciate gift bags to rip to shreds:-).