imaqtpie

I don't think anybody is expecting women to do administrative work on behalf of men's rights. It's more that women tend to react with outright hostility when men advocate for other men.

It's actually the feminists who frequently argue that men need to be fighting for women's issues. I haven't seen the reverse from male advocates, partially because it's quite obvious that such a request would be summarily denied. Men generally just want:

• funding for men's shelters

• sympathy & aid for male victims of domestic violence and sexual assault

• solutions for the growing educational achievement gap

• a discussion about various legal discrepancies when it comes to conscription, marriage, and parental rights and responsibilities.

None of this requires women to assist or flex their institutional power. But when men are systematically denied access and funding for various forms of governmental aid, it seems like certain women are flexing some of their institutional power to prevent men from having access to the same kind of social safety net that women enjoy.

It’s emergency airplane crash logic. Put your own supply of air on before you help the person next to you.

This is a faulty analogy, because men's issues are women's issues and vice versa. It's impossible for women to actually solve their own problems without also solving men's problems. How are women ever going to keep their oxygen masks on if they are surrounded by men who are suffocating and trying to rip the mask from their face? In order to help anyone, you need to help everyone.

To be fair, the men's rights movement is absolutely characterized as alt-right by the mainstream media. People tend to assume all sorts of things about you when you bring up any kind of men's issue. Most people (including other men) have difficulty empathizing with grown men, and thus they subconsciously expect that men's advocates are motivated by something else, such as misogyny. It's hard to move past our biological and cultural tendencies and view men as vulnerable and in need of support.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Uhh, I just explained why. People can argue whatever they want, but the actual behavior and performance of the candidate supercedes their biological age as a barometer for electability.

Also I never said it wouldn't matter, in fact I specifically acknowledged that it would be a talking point, then explained why that wasn't the most important factor at play.

Trump, Biden, and Bernie are all too old. They could all die at any time, and thus it's not an effective political argument for either side.

The reason why Biden is being attacked from that angle more effectively is because he is showing signs of dementia. That's a whole other issue aside from the likelihood of death.

You do realize that age is not a perfect proxy for mental competence? A good number of people remain mentally sharp well into their 90s, while others experience rapid dementia as early as their 60s.

I'm not saying his age wouldn't be a talking point, but I'm damn sure Bernie could express his platform with more clarity and vitality than Biden at this point. Unfortunately I dont think it's a real possibility, but it's stupid to act like the the actual birth date matters. It's the signs of cognitive decline that are problematic.

What a time to be alive

I'm pretty sure it actually is significantly more dangerous. The front end of traditional pickups will still crumple and absorb a great deal of force. If the cybertruck is more rigid and the sharp edges have a potential to gash pedestrians on impact, that's two factors that don't apply to current pickups.

Primitive metallurgy was used to create weapons for millennia before it became commonly used for cookware. Technology has always been primarily used as vector for human beings to control and dominate one another, rather than to assist/improve society.

This website is very helpful for finding communities and instances

Might as well take this opportunity to point out that beehaw is still defederated from sh.itjust.works. I thought it was a bizarre decision at the time and the fact that it hasn't been reassessed after all this time is even more baffling. Beehaw and SJW are two of the best moderated instances on Lemmy, and yet we aren't federated with each other.

You can view the original announcement from beehaw here and the reaction from SJW here. You'll also note that beehaw has since refederated with lemmy.world.

Nearly a year later, it's obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole. The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.

The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it's federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn't like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers. But because beehaw doesn't allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW), you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

I don't mean this to be an attack on the beehaw admins, because I think they have done a number of great things for Lemmy and the fediverse and I believe that our objectives are generally aligned. But I feel that I must express these frustrations, because as I have just explained, the actions of the beehaw admins also have direct consequences on fediverse users from other servers.

I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase. This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.

Anytime I see a trash post that’s where it comes from 9/10.

It's 40% of the whole Lemmy userbase and activity. They've got their fair share of trolls but come on, the worst? Have you forgotten about redditors?

It's hard to be the biggest, and I think their admins are doing a pretty good job.

Nobody said the US doesn't have a class system? Also the person you're responding to appears to be a kiwi, not an American.

Non-Americans making fools out of themselves while trying to casually denigrate the US is one of my favorite internet traditions. It's especially entertaining because there are plenty of valid criticisms, but people often seem to go for the most lazy, inaccurate generalizations and reveal their ignorance.

Agreed. It just seems more absurd now because of the contrast between our advanced technology and our primitive sociopolitical structures.

I saw a fellow mod outright nazi-ing about ( not “saying things I disagree with” but actual nazi fanboy-ing)

A claim like this typically requires evidence.

NYC is a bad example because it's an extreme outlier in terms of size and density. But the metropolitan area is actually much larger than the urban area; here's a map of all the counties within the NYC metropolitan area.

It covers 8,200 square miles, just slightly less than the area of New Jersey.

Metropolitan areas are quite large and typically include the core city along with the entire surrounding area that is economically and culturally heavily linked with the core city.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

Here is a map of all the metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. Micropolitan areas are essentially defined the same way, except the core urban area of a micropolitan area is <50,000 population, while a metropolitan area has a core city of >50,000 population.

You can see that metropolitan areas include vast areas that are not even remotely urban. Beyond that, there is also a category called the Combined Statistical Area, which often combine multiple metropolitan areas.

Here is a map of LA where the red areas are urban areas, the beige counties are part of the Metropolitan Area, and the yellow counties are part of the CSA.

Greater LA

The CSA for LA is a whopping 34,000 square miles, or slightly larger than the island of Ireland or the state of South Carolina. However, it only contains about 2,300 square miles of urban area. Estimating the urban area is even more of an imperfect science than the metropolitan area, so I'm not sure how they calculated that number.

When people say Greater Boston or Greater Toronto, they are usually referring to the MSA, but might also be referring to the CSA. So the short answer to OP's question is that "Greater" and "Metropolitan" are roughly synonymous. FWIW, I think that metropolitan areas used to be significantly smaller and more urbanized, but they had to modify the definition over time due to trends of suburbanization and decentralization in American city development.

You could also try the Scaled algorithm, which was recently added with the new update. It's supposed to adjust for the size of the community so that the posts from large communities don't overwhelm your feed

I've spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities. Most people who have been using Lemmy for a while understand that it's way less of an issue than it sounds like, because there has to be a major reason for a defederation between servers and it doesn't usually happen out of nowhere.

But in the case of Beehaw, it actually did happen quite abruptly, and it involved 3 of the largest servers at the time. We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it's impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it's safe to say that the number wasn't zero.

The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.

The removal of downvotes is not something that I have any particular problem with, although I wouldn't choose it for myself. I'm just pointing out that in this specific situation of wanting to mitigate tankie posts, the downvote is self-evidently an effective tool.

I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.

Can't it be both? If certain moderation tools existed then you could use them to solve the problem. But they don't exist, so other instances are currently using the strategies that I have mentioned in order to deal with the problem as best they can.

Sh.itjust.works does have open signups.

I totally understand and respect your perspective as a beehaw user, even as I obviously have a completely different perspective as someone who has never been a part of the beehaw community but instead has been observing from a distance.

Thanks for the response. I didn't realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that's good to hear. I'm familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.

I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don't mean to say you're responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it's helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.

For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don't have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.

However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.

If you have any Lain/Lain-adjacent content feel free to post it over at !lain@sh.itjust.works

You just have to choose the right instance. Federation does address those problems.

Right now our options remain limited because its still early days and the platform isn’t large enough yet. But in the long run, whichever servers do a good job of limiting extremism without being overly authoritarian in moderation will continue to thrive and grow, and servers where the admins are petty and/or politically biased will slowly die.

It's not your fault at all, I am also confused what exactly caused them to adopt such a hostile tone.

I have noticed that many Lemmings have a strong preference for explanations which emphasize the dysfunction of capitalism as the ultimate source of all worldly suffering. Your suggestion that even in the absence of capitalist incentives, running a modern healthcare system is still an incredibly expensive endeavor that must be funded somehow, disrupts that worldview. Thus, the hostility.

I think Lemmy is going through some growing pains right now. Many of the integral members of the platform, the developers and admins, are overwhelmed with work, because the platform is still in an early stage of development and it's not as functional as it could be.

Additionally, the original servers are clashing with the new servers as they attempt to find common ground. A month or two ago, things were much more chill because people were just starting to explore. But now people have strong feelings about other instances and those feelings need to be hashed out. I am confident that we have enough reasonable people on all sides to reach a pragmatic compromise.

I feel the vast majority of interactions I've had with people on Lemmy have been positive. I hope that Lemmy can be a space that transcends the toxicity of the discourse on other social media platforms. But it will probably take some time to achieve that goal.

If you ran afoul of a moderator, sure, you could create another subreddit with a name like r/xyz_2 or r/xyzAnarchy. But it would only ever be an alternative, it could never replace the original community, partially because the name was already reserved.

More importantly, if you ran afoul if an admin, there was nowhere to go. The reddit admins exercise absolute control over the content that is allowed on that site. On Lemmy, people will just leave the server if the admins pull a spez.

My experiences with beehaw users have also been largely positive, but I don't really use my alt that much, so I don't have many encounters.

I see. Thanks for the explanation

I wouldn't be surprised if they were found eating kaviar off each others nibbles.

I did not ask for this mental image today

Thank you. I don't necessarily think beehaw is going to die and I agree that it doesn't need to get bigger.

But this was just my perspective as a sh.itjust.works user and admin that I've been wanting to get off my chest. SJW got cut off from beehaw users and communities soon after I joined Lemmy and it's been bothering me ever since and this seemed like a good opportunity to communicate my perspective.

Why not provide it to everyone else?

Lemm.ee is actually bigger in terms of userbase now. And SJW is about the same size. But .ml still hosts a lot more communities so I guess that also counts for something

Yeah for sure, we have a lot of growing ahead of us before Lemmy truly establishes its own culture.

I would say that my personal experience has been that there is a significantly higher proportion of non-American Lemmings, as opposed to redditors. Like if reddit is 50% American, my feeling is that Lemmy is closer to 30% American. You can even tell when the Europeans wake up and are active, because they comprise such a large portion of the userbase.

It's hard for me to assess if that is reflected in the political content, because I always mostly ignored communities of that type, both on reddit and here.

What car was he supposed to be?

I'm partial to Nano as the most practical currency implementation. Feeless, instant, decentralized. But only in theory, I'm not actually invested or anything. Monero seems relatively cool too.

Yeah the privacy aspect of Monero is definitely superior.

I think the fungibility of Nano is actually great, I believe the coins can be divided to 12 decimal places or something. Unless I'm misunderstanding what fungibility means.

The Nano use case is similar to cash, it's easy and fast, but I agree that it's not really useful for major financial transactions. More like buying a cup of coffee for someone across the world with no fees and instant transaction time.

Bitcoin always promised something like that, but in reality there are massive fees and transactions take forever to complete, so it's just not fit for purpose.

You make some good points.

I still wear one, but I don’t judge people who choose not to.

I don't wear one and I judge myself for not doing so 🤷

Complicated issue.

I'm not insulting anybody. I'm simply stating the fact that it's smart to wear a helmet, because if you hit your head on the ground, you could die. That's all.

Walking down the stairs is less dangerous than biking and you know it.

I see your point, but I would argue that in a world with nuclear weapons, climate change, and all sorts of shit that seems to be an existential risk, plus the media barrage, people today aren't exactly feeling safe or comfortable. Hence the desperate hoarding of resources and brutal competition.

Not really. Lemmy is filled with skeptics, rebels, and independent thinkers, and there are only like 50,000 monthly active users.

You know what's a much better target for propaganda? Reddit or any corporate social media site. The users are simpleminded and easily manipulated and you don't even have to worry about moderators, you can just pay to run ads.

Could be even lower if they wore helmets though. I don't even wear a helmet myself, but it's objectively smart to do so.

My friend got something caught in his front wheel and went over the handlebars at 20mph. Could have been turned into a vegetable if he wasn't wearing a helmet.

Why can't you blame the technology as well? It's quite literally designed to be a trivial but addicting experience. Good parents can obviously circumvent the issue, but on a societal level it's inevitable that millions of kids end up glued to electronic devices at a critical time when they should be developing other skills.