I really want to exclusively switch to Lemmy, but as it stands I'll probably end up starting to use Reddit again as soon as the the vast majority of the blackout ends (I'm not gonna give in easily, but once it's mostly over, there's no point in me continuing).

The problem for me is that on Reddit even extremely niche communities had a substantial amount of members and activity, whereas Lemmy is smaller than Reddit, so everything scales down proportionally, meaning that suddenly communities that were niche on Reddit are infinitesimally tiny or even just absent on Lemmy. Like, there's no malazan community, elitedangerous and wheeloftime are dead, amiga is dead, and so on.

I actually got a ton of extremely high quality, positive interaction on the subreddits I was on, because I almost entirely stayed away from the really popular subreddits, and I'm losing all that moving to here, where the popular communities have higher quality interaction but the smaller communities have way worse interaction. Also, Reddit is a massive treasure-trove of useful niche information for me.

Are you considering making and moderating and equivalent community here on Lemmy? A lot of people here want to start communities or at least for those communities to exist but don't have the time or experience or mental health to moderate them ourselves, so moderators directly moving here from Reddit could make a massive impact!

Key info:

Only 41% of Republicans say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable, according to Gallup. That is a 15% drop from 2022, the largest single-year change since Gallup began asking the question. Democratic approval also fell from 85% to 79%.

I've always said that ultimately the only people we can rely on are ourselves, the queer community.

I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.

When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there's a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally "neutral" lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.

You might argue that this doesn't affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that's going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.

So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that's where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.

However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.

I don’t know. I’ve just always felt like it was weird to come up with a term for “normal” people. I don’t understand why it was necessary

Would you be fine with a straight person saying "I'm not straight, I'm normal" then?

Or would you realize that by choosing one aspect of the human experience to label as normal, instead of actually having a name for it, you are automatically labeling the others as abnormal — which means they're not just a naturally-occuring human thing, but something that's disordered or wrong or unnatural? If you decide to label being trans, but just call cis people "normal," then that's the implication.

Moreover, "cis" is a label for understanding a way of identifying regarding your assigned gender at birth, same "trans." I really don't see how it makes sense for it to be okay to have a word for one option — trans — but not the other. If it's okay to have a label for one option so we can accurately communicate about it, why isn't it okay to have a label for the other one, just because it's more common? That doesn't make sense. We have labels for all sorts of common things. Moreover, having a word that designates someone as not-trans is extremely useful for linguistic clarity: now instead of saying "normal" and having to infer from context in what respect the person is "normal", since that could refer to a million things, cis gives us a way of actually saying what we mean. Scientists label both common and uncommon options for things all the time.

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m getting old, but I don’t understand the obsession with labeling everyone and putting them in a well defined box... Can't we all just be ourselves without the labels?

This talking point always hurts me deeply. Taking away the words and concepts we use to understand ourselves and communicate with others about that, find common ground and community and understanding, is the perfect way to erase us. That's why conservatives and TERFs so often say the same thing.

Unlike for conservatives, labels for the LGBTQ community aren't about putting everyone inside a well-defined box at all. Unlike conservatives with their traditional gender roles and expectations, our labels are actually not rigidly defined like that, they're fuzzy, socially constructed, often with multiple shades and versions of meaning and ways they can be understood. Neither are they supposed to be normative — if you associated with a label once, that doesn't mean you have to always do so (or have to have always done so), and if you don't perfectly fit a label, that's totally fine, you don't have to "live up to it."

(Except, I guess, in terminally-online Tumblr "discourse.")

And the fact that labels, at least how the queer community uses them, are not "boxes to put people in" is a function of how we use them: they're crucial tools to be able to communicate aspects of the incohate mess that is our experiences to others, and therein find community and solidarity with others, to know you're not alone because there are others that share those experiences, who can comfort you and even guide you, and so you can use those words that helped you make people able to finally understand you as a rallying point.

We need the words to describe ourselves.

Taking away our language, the language we need to explain some important part of who we are or the lives we life, is fucking horrible.

Do you know how painful it was to grow up without labels like trans and cis so I could understand what was happening to me and why I was different from others? The first moment I found a word that seemed to describe what I was feeling, even though it was a wrong one (crossdresser), I clung onto it desperately. And then, when I finally found the word to describe what I actually was, it was a watershed moment.

Have you stopped for a moment to listen to the queer people who will tell you that finding out there was a word to describe what they were going through was one of tbe most powerful moments in their lives? Remember, without words for things, its difficult to have concepts for things, and that means its almost impossible to think them.

This article is also really good: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-racing-discover-how-gender-transitions-alter-athletic-performance-including

It goes into detail on a real world athletics study (instead of studies on individual factors like muscle mass or grip strength that may not be representative at all of sport performance) in running that shows that after transitioning, trans women perform the same relative to their cis women peers as they did to their cis male peers prior to transitioning — i.e., same place in the distribution curve.

People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button

As a trans woman it's really fun getting to be the minority that it's totally okay to just openly hate and dehumanize, the right's newest whipping girl ;-;

🫂

I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.

With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.

I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.

Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!

Just because they said they weren't? They just dismissed the claim without linking to any real counter evidence by claiming it's just a random Mastodon user or whatever

Exactly this. A long term blackout, especially a user blackout, is not feasible without a replacement place to go to.

This was an absolutely wonderful read, thank you so much for sharing

I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock

Also, to be fair, there's much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don't have an overall karma score, so there's not really any incentive to karma farm.

Here are some mod logs from lemmy.ml (which is an instance run by the Lemmy devs) from a few years ago: https://raddle.me/f/TankiesGonnaTank/89852/the-lemmy-ml-admin-is-banning-anyone-that-mentions-stalin-or

Here's one of the Lemmy devs (you can tell it's them from their profile activity) denying genocide: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted_by_user/iq954mu/

Insisting that fascists are good, actually not fascists at all, as long as their nationalism makes them oppose the US (because the enemy of my enemy is a totally good guy!): https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/vgg2x3/thoughts_on_slavoj_zizek/id2cxb8/

There's more here: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

I wish this would and bring replaceable phone batteries back to the US as well, since it would theoretically be easier for brands just have a single model for all countries so if they are forced to have replaceable batteries in Europe then they'd end up having them in the US too, but unfortunately I highly doubt that we'll be the case, as demonstrated by Apple taking extra effort to put geolocation code in their phones that unlocks "sideloading" when you are in Europe but then locks it again when you're outside of your Europe. As it turns out the extra effort it takes to create an exception to your hardware and software for Europe is far outweighed by the extra profit of being able to keep giving a more locked down products to everyone else.

Yup, that's honestly the history of the world — people giving their autonomy and independence and concern for what's really going on in the world away to authorities for ease, comfort, convenience and just out of habit, then being surprised when those authorities turn around and begin taking advantage of them. It's the eternal struggle against apathy.

im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters?

It matterd because the servers those devs run with their heavy pro authoritarian red fascist moderation and cultural bias were the two largest instances, the flagships, both by virtue of their size and their official nature. That size means they influence users' overall experience of the lemmy network's culture and atmosphere via posts and comments and votes, so yeah, you can sign up for a different instance and that local community won't have that atmosphere and those moderation problems but you're still connected in the network to the tankies and the tankies have the largest and most dominant instances so they have the most effect on the content of the network, and you can't completely avoid them except by deferating and basically hamstringing yourself by separating from the two largest instances.

Thanks to Beehaw and especially lemmy.world though, I think this is rapidly changing and won't be a significant problem for much longer, although there is the remaining concern that the developers' biases will show through in how they develop the underlying lemmy server software. For instance, unlike Mastodon, right now there is no way for you as an individual to block an entire instance, and I foresee it possibly being difficult to convince the lemmy developers to allow that, since one of the hallmarks of Marxist-Leninist ideology is a focus on mass movement building where everyone is forced to interact and join this one giant movement, even with people they don't like or can't get a long with, which could make them hostile to allowing more freedom of association in the fediverse. I'm already seeing tankies from lemmygrad accusing instances that defederate from them of sectarianism and endangering the "movement", in fact.

It isn't high effort. It's a bunch of canned "gender critical" arguments that we've all seen a thousand times before combined with arbitrarily dismissing all of the evidence in favor of gender affirming care for kids using specious reasoning and then citing long debunked studies like the "80% desistance rate" one.

Their bias is even more clearly demonstrated by the fact that the first study they cite isn't hosted on any legitimate source of medical science, but on "transgendertrend." That demonstrates that they didn't find their data via PubMed or Google Scholar or anything, they found it by looking for cherry picked medical studies from people with an anti-trans agenda.

It's transphobia and perpetuation of misinformation disguised as a polite conversation. It's the same level of "discourse" as "blacks make up 12% of the population and commit 50% of the crime."

Edit: not only is it arbitrary and awfully convenient for cherry-picking purposes to leave out longitudinal studies of mental health, since mental health is what's at stake here, and "objective" measures are susceptible to many confounding variables and often not relevant, and standardized tests of mental health are regularly used to ascertain the efficacy of many procedures related to psychology, there are also studies that use "objective" measures such as the ones he wanted, where applicable. Here's one that's somewhat infamous due to one of the young adults getting a fatal complication from a surgery, but such surgeries are not performed on minors, and are not particularly dangerous, so it's largely irrelevant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25201798/. Here's a list of 16 studies on this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/political-minds/202201/the-evidence-trans-youth-gender-affirming-medical-care.

Allowing instances to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist is actually a really bad idea. It makes the default not being federated with anything, which makes it far easier to create centralized isolated silos that it's hard to move off of while staying in contact with, and in general would just destroy the interconnected nature of the fediverse

I hope so! I'm definitely going to do my best to promote Lemmy on Reddit in those niche communities. I wish I had the time and personality to actually start the communities I want to see on Lemmy, but sadly I don't.

Yeah I really don't want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we've built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭

The thing is that there aren't significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that's working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.

Yup, that's kind of my plan

What in the god damn

Users should not be left to "fend for themselves" against abuse/hate/racism having a platform.

This is precisely the point I've been trying to make elsewhere in the thread. Maybe some people want total individual freedom/responsibility to block or not, but most of us want to find an instance community that will protect us and serve our interests by dealing with that for us, so we don't have to go through that mental health damage constantly.

Yeah when the blackout started I disabled my Reddit app and haven't been back there once since. We need more people doing this.

I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.

If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don't want to be connected to, so it's a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it's trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.

I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.

Concerns about cultural changes from an influx of ten times the users the entire Fediverse currently has from a platform that is known for having a particularly toxic, algorithm-poisoned userbase aren't specious or something you can ignore — even if the fears are "vague" in some sense they're very valid.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!

No, I was pointing out that it's dropped significantly for Democrats too, and the overall point is that we can't rely on society as a whole to do/believe what's right and protect us.

shortly before his writing style was brought into the political mainstream in the 2016 presidential election.

Omg lmao

Yeah they confuse criticizing China with racism against Chinese people. Additionally they claim that any source from and news agency or journalists in the US that says anything bad about the USSR or China is CIA propaganda and should be ignored but then exclusively site Chinese propaganda websites.

There's also a lot of other evidence: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

Allowing users to migrate as seamlessly as possible between instances is just an important part of making decentralization really effective too — it only really means something that it's possible to move to a different instance with a different culture and set of rules, norms, moderation style, etc, without losing access to the network as a whole if it's easy to do so, because only then does it become a real possibility for counterbalancing the power of any given instance.

Yeah, perfect, solve inhumane crimes with.... other inhumane crimes, to humans. Totally. Let's totally bring back eugenics for "undesirables."

<3

That's a really good idea! If there's anything I feel I'm good at, it's communication, and selling people on ideas!

By "ban" they mean defederate from. They're not banning an instance from the Fediverse, the instance that's defederating from the other one is just choosing not to interact with or have to see them anymore. So your rhetoric here is misapplied, because one instance defederating from another isn't silencing the latter for anyone else but the instance that made that choice. It's not analogous to restricting freedom of information or personal freedom at all, on fact it's precisely an exercise of personal freedom: freedom of association! It's more equivalent to just leaving a club and never coming back or hanging out around them anymore. Yes, it's done on the whole instance's behalf, so it effects more than just one person, but thats why random instance members can't defederate an instance they don't run from another instance, there's a decision procedure to make sure it represents the wishes of the instance as a whole.

Yeah I know, I don't think them being tankies is really a problem for Lemmy as a whole. I was just annoyed that all they had to say is "no we aren't tankies" and people just took them at their word lol