epicspongee [they/them or he/him]

No, we left Reddit because of what Spez did to it.

And why did he do that?

Where am I brigading other instances???

they highly value gender inclusivity.

It’s pretty much exactly what the right wing does.

I’m sorry WHAT

Please tell me this is a shitpost

LMAOOO WHAT?? I’m just using the term they use for themselves.

I ran into a group of Trotskyists once and it turned out they were absurdly boring and wanted me to grab coffee with them for weeks on end before they’d tell me anything, and they apparently read a metric fuckton of theory. So now I know the word Trotskyist. But I guess that makes me a tankie 🤷

Yes, I understand that Marx and Engels did not have realistic political ideals

Have you read any of Marx? I’m not an ML but if you even glance at Capital you can tell that Marx’s whole schtick was using science to come up with realistic political ideals.

Can you define direct action for me? What do you think it is?

I’ve participated in dozens of protests. Protests with political organization can lead to change. Protests without political organization are just yelling at a wall.

Protests !== organizing. Organizing achieves political change. Protest does not. Leftists know how to organize, liberals do not.

What’s the difference between a fascist and an “anarchist” who does everything they can to kneecap the only viable left leaning political party in the US?

Sorry which party is this? Dems are not even a remotely left-leaning party. Joe Biden literally criminalized the rail workers using their legal right to strike.

This is also like a children’s picture book-level of understanding of fascism. As if the Dems’ policy of 4 more years of the status quo could prevent fascism at all. That has literally never worked as a way to combat fascism.

BUT neither really believe in good faith discussion, it’s mostly trolling and “dunking”.

I do not like tankies but I have absolutely never experienced this, all tankies typically want to do is discuss theory and history to the point that it’s exhausting. Have you talked to any Trotskyists??

It’s way more present since Hexbear federated in, every first impression is that it’s an alt-right troll farm.

I literally never got this impression, it’s like extraordinarily clear that Hexbear is a leftist instance. From the pronouns in names to the leftist jokes lol.

However, being bombarded with it 24/7 is a great way to make people numb to politics and stop caring.

I have literally never experienced this.

What does this mean lmfao, leftists discuss shit ad nauseum, have you even met a leftist

Where do they do this? Do you have links? So far what I’ve seen is they comment on posts that go viral on their instances, as they’re allowed to do. I can’t say I’ve had any problems with Hexbear users.

It’s insane because the dev has only been working on this for three weeks. And it’s the best progressive web app I’ve ever seen. Almost feels native on my iPhone other than the lack of haptic feedback.

Nah this is not how moderation works on the fediverse. If you defederate from Nazi instances, Nazis have an incentive to go to those instances instead of yours - namely because they can’t interact with Nazi content. They can still harass your users of course, but they can’t build a platform and get banned quickly. So on the Fediverse you end up with a lot of Nazis on only a few servers, and everyone just bans those servers. Same goes for pedos, TERFs, etc.

This makes it a LOT easier as an instance admin to moderate content and keep users safe. As a Masto admin, I only get about 10 reports a week because I block about 200-300 servers. It also incentivizes me and my other fellow admins to block that kind of content, because if we don’t, Nazis will come to our servers and we risk being defederated from.

Evergreen meme:

It’s the deciding which ones are worthless that gets dangerous

Not making a decision is in and of itself a decision. Saying ‘Nazis deserve a voice because everyone deserves a voice’ removes the voice of minorities because Nazis murder and oppress minorities. There is a decision that has to be made somewhere. Saying ‘everyone deserves a voice and Nazis deserve a platform!’ is limiting the voice of minorities.

Idk, gonna be a very hot take, but I like my beliefs challenged and believe that everyone deserves a voice

Nazis had a voice once, and folks listened to them. And we ended up with the Holocaust.

Might be controversial but I don’t believe that people who want to murder minorities deserve a voice. I feel like that’s a pretty reasonable bar to set lol.

Blocking instances actually makes the lives of instance admins a lot easier. It not only reduces a whole chunk of problematic content for you to moderate, but it also encourages Nazis to go to the servers you block instead of yours. Nazis can’t subscribe to the subs they want to on your server, and they get banned if they say Nazi shit, so they just leave and go to a Nazi server instead. It’s like fly paper for Nazis lol.

As a Mastodon admin with a few thousand users, I rarely see Nazi content that I have to moderate. And that’s because when I started I spent an enormous amount of time sifting through every server we federated with and blocking all of the Nazis and all the pedos and all the TERFs. And because I did that at the start, I only get maybe 10 reports a week, none of them are content that would traumatize me (almost always spam), and I also helped the servers that now use my list to do the same.

Blocking instances not only makes it easier for me to do my job, it encourages other admins to not tolerate these kinds of behaviors as well. Because if they don’t moderate well, that attracts Nazis, and then we have to limit or ban them because we’re volunteers. So everyone just ends up blocking the shittiest servers and moderates their user base well. It’s a win/win for everyone.

Nazis are not entitled to access to minorities on my server. TERFs are not entitled to access to trans users on my server. Assholes are not entitled to have access to an audience on my server. There are tons of white supremacists or TERFs or other assholes hosting plenty of other servers where they can go and do that. But I don’t want that on servers I host and my users don’t want that on servers I host. If you truly believe free speech is such a big fucking deal, then you are welcome to leave and join one of those rotting servers as well. See how fun that is for you and how long it takes for you to come crawling back.

It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle.

Folks have been saying this about Mastodon for years and it’s only grown. Facebook’s now looking at investing in ActivityPub. It’s a W3C standard for federation on the internet and the amount of apps supporting it is only growing.

I think probably the most bleak thing that could happen is that maybe Lemmy has a smaller user base and only a small amount of people convert over from Reddit. But even then I’m kinda happy with that. I like what I’m doing on here and I like the community so far. And I could deal with a smaller set of communities that are ad-free, have a pretty great experience, etc. etc.

I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501©(3) status).

Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we’ve gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.

Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I’m sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don’t need advertisements or to profit.