On the other hand, if my workplace was on a list of announced missile targets, I’d stay away.

Assuming that there’s no real chance of their enemy setting up a defense in time:

• It reduces probability of civilian causalities (improves their international image, reduces incentives for affected people to join the fight against them)
• If there is some failure and the center isn’t disabled, they still reduced productivity. I’d say indefinitely
• Tactic could theoretically be used to threaten or feint. For example, publicly list five target but only bother bombing three, and you get the benefits of scaring away people at the other two without spending weapons. This could also be used to manipulate enemy logistics, like moving their defenses or response teams to one place and then attacking another.

Perhaps its too late for the largest instances, but the idea of a site like this being a spectator activity, about consumption, rather than creating communities. Some smaller instances, and even some larger ones, have an actual unique atmosphere and have larger projects across the instance. When we suddenly got a flood of reddit users escaping from the third-party API fiasco and the Luigi bans, that was huge enough to dilute some of the communities with large amounts of people used to simply voting and commenting, or having a website premade for them.

Codeberg works for me. I used to use a couple of indie instances of gitea for various smaller project, but both have either gone down or been at risk, so I mostly use Codeberg which is more organized and failsafe.

It needs to [snip]

Yes, but that’s answering a different question.

When I talk to co-workers about our material conditions, my aim isn’t the immediate implementation of utopia. Our legs aren’t long enough to get there in one step.

Am effective protest needs to be disruptive.

What do you believe the (realistic) aim of the protest is mean to be? Its demand is obvious, but that’s different.

This is a sincere question, I don’t know the stated aims, if any. If its aim is to bring together concerned people and expose them to progressive groups, including socialists, then even a passive sanctioned protest can contribute to the labour movement.

You have to build dual power to organize things like strikes and work stoppages. That’s what hurts capital. The protests come after that.

Yes, although protests can complement that process of building dual power, they don’t have to come afterwards. Like you’ve said, protests on their own accomplish nothing, yet they can still be an important way to gain awareness and introduce a broader range of people to these politics and groups involved.

I am speaking generally, I haven’t paid attention to these No Kings ones, but they’d surely be an avenue for fresh faces to meet socialist parties among all the spectacle.

It’s pretty funny to see someone travel to a lemmy.ml thread and complain about lemmy.ml users being there.

Clean McStainKill

My approach if adblocking isn’t an option is switching tab/window and muting the tab (on a computer, that’s just two click at the top of the screen) or on a phone, muting and putting the phone out of view.

I was already no longer posting on reddit through alternative front-ends since around 2018, because I disliked privacy issues with it. I was just lurking via alternate frontends (the precursors to Redlib, there were more before the API fiasco). I was already into the FOSS community and so I forget exactly how I came across Raddle and Lemmy (maybe through /r/piracy or /r/datahoarder, but could have been many other places), and Lemmy was far far far slower then, but when I landed on Lemmy I really wanted it to become a viable alternative to reddit.

RSS feeds. It’s digital so probably not what you’re asking for, but I would often drain time checking tabs or bookmarks for updates each day. Now I just have a specific list of updates from feeds I’ve subscribed to: no ads, no recommendations, no scrolling, no manual refreshing every hour. Just what you ask to see.

Website doesn’t supply one? Luckily some RSS tools let you create one from most websites.

Also, relevant youtube video from Technology Connections about feeds in general.

And, on the topic of digital simplification, learn how to mute specific conversations on your chat apps. Many even have temporary muting (mute for 1 hour). You don’t need constant pings distracting you from life.

All black t-shirts, same pants, same sweaters, same socks, share socks with my wife.

I’ve similarly simplified my wardrobe. It’s been great.

Most of my clothes are made from the same (or at least non-delicate) materials and all my daily wear aren’t light clothes, so they all go in the same wash.

Did this next one with a few things, so for example, socks: Bought one type of daily-wear sock, made sure I liked it and then bulk bought them, so apart from a few special pairs (sports, decorative pattern, other colors), I don’t need to care about pairing socks because they’re all the same. Growing up with 3-pair packs of socks all in different paired-colors, and then socks with the same brand and same colors but different length, was a waste of time.

We saw ICE disarm and shoot a citizen who had a gun. A lesson from this is that a weapon is only threatening if we create an environment where it’s a credible threat, like outnumbering them with armed citizens.

Masks? I could go either way on this. Masks can be protective, and can also be seen as alienating from the community. That alienation is not some unchangeable truth, it’s just a result of how they’re perceived in our cultures (often associated with crime). For a counterexample, look at the Zapatistas who regularly wore masks to protect them from cartel and state violence:

It’s much easier to find organic art in a community, outside the art industries.

Sure, unless you set up a lot of subscriptions it won’t just come on a consumption conveyor belt, and some people might want or expect that, but it’s much better to be in a place where you’re actually interacting with artists.

Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.

Yep. Finding the small scattered imageboards which ban or reject politics and combat spam is difficult, but rewarding. And they tend to be special-interest focused sites, like erischan or lainchan, so they’re not all going to be interesting to everyone. trashch /comfy/ is a possible counter-example.

To oversimplify a complex multifaceted question: money went online. Pre-2000s and early 2000s was dominated by self-hosted community sites, like forums. It was often a personal sacrifice to host them, rather than a business like with modern social media platforms like reddit, YouTube, etc.

I’ve often preferred to stick away from the middle of the internet, the smaller community sites are so much better than for-profit grifter-filled addiction machines. When I see a few people (less of them now) saying “Lemmy is too slow/dead”, I think about the sites I love that get 10 posts a week. One particular board occasionally has some new kiddo arriving to a thread and asking a question to (or getting annoyed at) a post made over 10 years ago. And since these aren’t sites dedicated to sharing things that other people make, they develop their own cultures. Anyone there to advertise and make money will leave dimeless, anyone there to insert political propaganda will be ignored or laughed at and banned.

Lemmy has some shared traits, and some of the benefits are glaringly apparent when we compare to reddit, but it’s still largely a content sharing site more than a creative community.

Not since 3 October 2002 (81 years after Mongolia’s first declaration of independence)

Billionaire-owned mass media is a hell of a drug. It’s easy to forget just how much selective news reporting can distort a person’s worldview.

Except this isn’t a war, congress hasn’t declared authorized it.

What difference does that make?

I think we’re used to the USA and its mass media not bothering to declare war, and simply starting war (bonus points for claiming the other side started the war once they counterattack, as is tradition)

The USA has started a direct military conflict with Venezuela, the state.