comfy
@comfy@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 1 week ago:
When one takes a step back, it’s obvious that our own societies have their own ingrained systemic biases. All our journalists and other writers will have biases that they and us might not even notice are biases, since we believe they’re just fact.
AI datasets have run into this problem plenty of times, for example when government regulation has told insurance companies not to use factors like ethnicity or races in certain calculations, but it turns out that some ended up indirectly doing it anyway since postal codes approximated race in many regions. There are layers to systemic biases.
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 1 week ago:
Btw this is not an argument against Wikipedia in any way.
I think it’s perfectly valid to criticize it for accepting blatantly false but “verifiable” edits. I’m aware that the world is complex and perfection is idealistic, especially when it comes to topics where sources are inherently strongly biased, but publishing false information on a site with the format, style and reputation of Wikipedia is a real problem at a scale with far-reaching impact. To shift the onus of fact-checking onto the user is extremely inefficient and negligible.
I’m not even saying that there is a better solution, but it’s certainly an argument criticizing Wikipedia.
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 1 week ago:
Just as an anecdotal side note, just this year I found a typo (92 instead of 82) contradicted by a quote attached to the cite reference later in the paragraph, and very easily noticed if one checks.
I only use VPNs so I can’t fix it.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Not sure if you’ve already checked, but here’s how your post looks to us on Lemmy:
- Comment on Does Lemmy need a fork or a rewrite due to its maintainers views? 2 weeks ago:
You can’t just say “The USSR was bad because of communism, end of story”, for example. It was never communist, and I would argue it eas never trying to get there.
On one hand, I know you’re right that socialist rhetoric is abused. It’s vitally important to be alert to it, and fascists have a proven history of trying to exploit socialist sentiment, given their rise in response to a string of 1920s socialist uprisings in Europe.
On the other, I can’t look at the decades-worth of writings and actions of the RSDLP and Bolsheviks and conclude they weren’t honestly trying to build a vanguard party with the aim of building a communist society. I’m open to critique of whether or not Leninist theory has been shown to be right or wrong, but I struggle to see how Lenin could have been pretending to be a communist full-time for 20 years at extended self-sacrifice. An opportunist wouldn’t have chosen a path with such little opportunity. The Bolsheviks were evidently a vanguardist party trying to eventually achieve communism - a ‘communist party’.
You’re using all these fraught terms like “socialism” and “liberalism” incorrectly
I’m using them in a way consistent with political dictionaries.
Fascism is, openly, anti-liberal. This is not a contested fact, they say it openly. It’s one of the few consistent parts of fascism, along with being anti-socialist (‘socialist’, in this context, being social ownership of the means of production - a very standard and common definition in English dictionaries and encyclopedias alike).
*Summary of nine dictionaries all with similar primary definitions of 'socialism'*
You accuse me of using those terms incorrectly, so what would you consider a correct usage?
The Nazis rose out of National Bolshevism, after all.
No, they didn’t.
A cursory look at the Nazi Party’s history clearly shows their utter disdain and scapegoating of Bolshevism as a grave evil. The Nazi Party founder (Anton Drexler) was an anti-Marxist. Drexler emphasised the only thing ‘socialist’ about the party was social welfare for those deemed Aryan. The Nazi Party considered nazbols to be a strand of Bolshevism and therefore part of a Jewish conspiracy.
- Comment on Does Lemmy need a fork or a rewrite due to its maintainers views? 2 weeks ago:
No, fascism and communism aren’t “opposites”
I don’t believe politics is simple enough to allow opposites, but if there were such a thing, those two ideologies would be pretty close. Fascists are ideologically anti-communist and communists are always among the first they mass murder. Communists (along with anarchists) are consistently the foundation of anti-fascist action.
while communism is a highly ideological philosophy that’s never existed
“Yes, and,”
This is where terminology plays tricks:
- A communist society is the ultimate goal of the ideology called ‘communism’.
- You’re absolutely correct that no country has a communist society; in fact, it’s a contradiction, since a communist society is stateless by definition.
- The countries that are labelled ‘communist’ (by themselves and others) are states with a communist government in power. This strategy of vanguardism is strongly debated among communists: many would agree with you that it’s a contradiction, while others consider it a necessary transitional phase in order to defend from capitalist counter-attack. If we assume that the vanguard government is not corrupt (and we shouldn’t assume that without evidence!), then it’s a government that aims to create the material conditions that would cause itself to wither away, piece by piece. Obviously none has succeeded in that goal, but it’s not wrong to call those governments ‘communist’, in the same way a person who supports socialism is called a ‘socialist’ - it’s about a school of thought, about ideology, rather than describing the current situation they govern over. And to characterize authoritarian communists as fascist is ignorant about how fascist systems develop - fascism works to kill socialism and liberalism with the backing of the owning-class. No matter how many similar characteristics one may try and find on the surface, the two concepts are foundationally incompatible and opposed, and will act very differently. It’s fine to hate them both, but they are not related.
- Comment on Does Lemmy need a fork or a rewrite due to its maintainers views? 2 weeks ago:
I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers
For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.
Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!
As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.
- Comment on Do not recommend. 4 weeks ago:
Bombs not Food
- Comment on Do not recommend. 4 weeks ago:
Sulfur and charcoal, delightful!
- Comment on I am fucking tired of this shitty behavior. 1 month ago:
Yep, there’s at least two different people who are playing this sockpuppet game already. One went by, among other names, lucky8 and would only post think-tank political articles across dozens of communities - an actual propaganda account. Another appears to just repost reddit content onto Lemmy, they had a name similar to darnelle until they started picking other names.
These accounts stand out a lot more whenever you take a look at a specific-purpose instance like a country or subculture instance, rather than a large general-purpose instance like yours or mine. A lot of people complain because these sockpuppets flood an instance with propaganda or just off-topic junk.
- Comment on Coordinated Pro-Russian Propaganda Network Targeting ActivityPub and ATProto Services 2 months ago:
Hey, actually reading the article is cheating!
- Comment on Is the amount of Lemmy activity declining? 4 months ago:
So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.
At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.
- Comment on Uptick in inflammatory posts 5 months ago:
Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully.
I wonder if it’s still early enough to give people taps on the shoulder - “don’t feed the trolls, friend”.
- Comment on Uptick in inflammatory posts 5 months ago:
I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.
On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like “No politics. No insults. No drama.” Toxicity isn’t inevitable, there’s nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don’t bother with.
- Comment on Uptick in inflammatory posts 5 months ago:
But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.
I still check mine, but occasionally I’ll know I’ve said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I’ve asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))
- Comment on Uptick in inflammatory posts 5 months ago:
That’s one of the benefits of having a forum small enough to have a community. Troublemakers stick out like a sore thumb.
- Comment on Uptick in inflammatory posts 5 months ago:
It’s not only about many people here being technical, of course you’re right that it plays a big part, and it’s also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there’s a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 5 months ago:
Enough folks drank the coolaid,
You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said “please censor me”.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 5 months ago:
with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet
I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.
Tor is slow
It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation
and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers
This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets.
- Comment on Owned (stocks) 7 months ago:
It’s a common and well-understood word, you’re correct, and really any word is a valid word, although it’s pretty clear the teacher was trying to teach formal English habits (which unfortunately can be useful to know) and it ain’t that.
- Comment on Little miracles 7 months ago:
The key word in that comment was “symbols”. The Nazi SS aren’t esoteric knowledge.
- Comment on Little miracles 7 months ago:
The post Man Wearing Nazi T-Shirt Gets a Beatdown from Fans at Punk Rock Bowling Fest appeared first on Consequence.
consequence.net/…/punk-rock-bowling-nazi-t-shirt/
and direct Instagram link to the video on that page: www.instagram.com/p/DKJE7UpxXYX/
- Comment on There were probably some people who just really liked "Never gonna give you up" and really enjoyed getting rick rolled 7 months ago:
I knew people still under 30 who put it on a playlist because they liked it and didn’t know it was a meme.
- Comment on Who needs it? 7 months ago:
My ISP doesn’t even know I’m downloading communism 🏴☠️
Only one of those entities could realistically deduce I’m making this post, and there’s no reason for them to care. Not that I’m particularly relevant to Western governments anyway. ¡Hola!
- Comment on We gonna fight 7 months ago:
Heh, don’t let that fool you, they still infight like crazy despite that. Examples include the hilarious collapse of the NJP, the assassination of Rockwell (leader of the American Nazi Party) and labeling every existing neo-Nazi group “feds” because they’re inevitably embarrassing and scandal-filled.
- Comment on How I view others in social media 7 months ago:
The video title is probably “Punchline”
- Comment on YSK if you have a library card or are a student, there's a free streaming service called Kanopy 8 months ago:
Highly recc Anna’s Archive.
- Comment on How can you tell 23 subgenres of equally shitty growls and screams apart, but not see the most Metal basics? 8 months ago:
- Comment on My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama | Kev Quirk 8 months ago:
I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.
One example of a community I became a moderator for was one which often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted.
So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.
- Comment on My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama | Kev Quirk 8 months ago:
It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community’s values – their community won’t have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn’t pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.
Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called “janitors” on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It’s a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.
