• 45 Posts
  • 221 Comments
Joined 8 years ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2019

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  • Are you seeing your instance as a means to patiently persue a certain ideology rather than allowing free speech and open uninterupted and respectful discourse?

    We have no obligation to platform pro-genocide, patriarchal, white supremacist, cissupremacist, homophobic, or otherwise oppressive speech, and more, we have a moral obligation to silence those bigoted groups, deprive them of their right to speak, and prevent them from spreading their harmful views, and not only for the mental health of our users, of whom many are members of those targeted groups, but because we know that its the modus operandi of these white-supremacist/bigoted groups to set up nazi bars on social media platforms to spread their views, get people to associate and agree with them, and grow. The correct answer has always been, and remains, to deny them a platform.

    If other servers, following the line of reddit and other US social media companies, want to platform those views to increase ragebait engagement and their user counts, there’s nothing we can do about that, but at least here we can think about the long-term mental health of our users, which is far more important than user counts.

    Fediverse instances are like email servers, if they call something spam and don’t want to host it, then that’s their prerogative. Arguments for “free speech” do not require them to host what you want them to host.

    We also don’t buy the liberal notion of “free speech”, and think that even if there was such a thing, liberal countries and spaces don’t actually practice it. Much like all liberal countries have a long history of banning anti-capitalist / anti-imperialist speech, organizing, and communist political parties, the instance you’re on also doesn’t adhere to “free and open speech”: they’ve blocked the most popular leftist instances in the fediverse (hexbear and lemmygrad), to shield their userbase from those views.

    I don’t understand why we need this division, and though you decry it in your comment, through actions or inactions, communities and moderators on your instance are allowed to amplify this division.

    We have a be respectful rule here, and we do enforce it with temp bans, however it is unavoidable that some people (especially when venturing outside of lemmy.ml), encounter extremely bigoted and pro-genocide takes, and that makes them understandably angry. Still, if you see people from our instance breaking that rule, then report it, and we’ll get to it when we can.

    How come you seem to allow communities who are moderated by a single user who repeatedly bans people just because they don’t like what someone says in an instant?

    To be instant banned for a few paragraphs. Then being name called by that mod, in a community without any rules, and then being banned with the reason ‘Zionist’ while I am just about 180º the opposite is not the way to persuade people like me.

    I don’t know the circumstances, so you’d have to be more specific, linking examples. We made the modlog public, and its possible to link to every modded item to see what happened.

    I listed the challenges, how hard it was to communicate, how I was past the point of all hope to see it ever improving. Then the person said to me: “Good. So what are you going to do about it?”

    Despite ideological differences, and some loud users on other servers demanding more defederations, we actually have good relations with most other fediverse server admins and runners. We don’t make demands on each other, each server has full autonomy to take mod actions on both local and federated users, and that autonomy is respected.



  • is people making assumptions about other’s beliefs based soley on their instance of choice. It’s not helpful, it’s not generative, and it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

    Spot on. Taking countries as an analogy for fediverse instances, we shouldn’t make all the citizens of those countries into an ideological monolith: there’s always a diversity of views, even if some views are more predominant than others because they’re encouraged from the top.

    And above all we should not be alienating and unecessarily divisive to those who, with a little education and prodding in the right direction, will side with the majority of the world’s workers. Our job is to make allies, educate, and create more caring people.







  • Highly recommend reading Domenico Losurdo - Class struggle for more on this.

    It gets into how there’s not just a single class struggle, i.e. working class versus bourgeoisie, but many different and related class struggles. Both Marx and Engels held this multivariate view of class struggle too, and it was only later that chauvinists, anti-feminists, and imperialists restricted its meaning to the workplace only.









  • Some things that help me at least:

    • Only use bed for sleeping.
    • Don’t use screens at least an hour before bed.
    • Keep phone out of arms reach when in bed. Ideally in another room (these devices weigh heavy on our psychology, and the further they are from us, the less distracting they are).
    • Leave blinds open at night so you wake up with the sun. Try to sync your body / circadian rhythm with your environment if possible.
    • Get lots of walks and outside time during the day. If you have a lot of energy, work out more during the day.
    • No coffee / intoxicants in the evening.
    • Drink lots of water.
    • Don’t try to fix your sleep problems at night. Most of your remedies should be getting on the right foot the next day, and making habits of those.



  • Any negative speech: especially harsh, slanderous or divisive, that provokes equally charged emotional responses.

    One other thing I’d like to add: It’s not just that rage-inducing content is out there, that’s always been there. It’s that it gets rewarded by big tech, by making sure that highly responded content, gets pushed to the top.

    Capitalist tech companies have an incentive to platform this content because it increases the on-site time, and their own popularity, to the detriment of their users mental health. It also helps them push pro-capitalist narratives that atomize and isolate people who should be united by a shared humanity and class status.

    tbh we’re somewhat guilty of this in lemmy also, with the Active sort allowing new comments to bump posts to the top of feeds.

    The only real way to fight it, is to keep an eye out for these toxic / combative threads and posters, and remove them if necessary. Since we don’t capitalist incentives to keep people on site or serve ads, it serves no benefit to keep rage-bait posters around.