As for the title question:
Do we need more users ?
We don’t need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don’t need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”. I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.
I’m not a soulist like the user you replied to, but for another perspective, mine is that rights are imaginary constructs which mean nothing if unenforceable.
People have some rights to not be murdered; that’s not an opinion if we have a compatible definition of ‘rights’, it’s written in law, it’s ingrained into mainstream liberalist social norms and ethics. So the right exists as a social idea which sometimes manifests in real consequences. However:
Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.
Yep. Finding the small scattered imageboards which ban or reject politics and combat spam is difficult, but rewarding. And they tend to be special-interest focused sites, like erischan or lainchan, so they’re not all going to be interesting to everyone. trashch /comfy/ is a possible counter-example.
Add to it that there are more and more professionals making content for profit, a decade before AI reached this stage. Memes and viral videos became marketing opportunities.
To oversimplify a complex multifaceted question: money went online. Pre-2000s and early 2000s was dominated by self-hosted community sites, like forums. It was often a personal sacrifice to host them, rather than a business like with modern social media platforms like reddit, YouTube, etc.
I’ve often preferred to stick away from the middle of the internet, the smaller community sites are so much better than for-profit grifter-filled addiction machines. When I see a few people (less of them now) saying “Lemmy is too slow/dead”, I think about the sites I love that get 10 posts a week. One particular board occasionally has some new kiddo arriving to a thread and asking a question to (or getting annoyed at) a post made over 10 years ago. And since these aren’t sites dedicated to sharing things that other people make, they develop their own cultures. Anyone there to advertise and make money will leave dimeless, anyone there to insert political propaganda will be ignored or laughed at and banned.
Lemmy has some shared traits, and some of the benefits are glaringly apparent when we compare to reddit, but it’s still largely a content sharing site more than a creative community.
The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?
I think the point is that the sea lion is feigning civility while harassing someone over a casual opinion.
My response would be that if we extend the metaphor, like you did, and substitute the absurd ‘sea lions’ for a race, then harassing the racist doesn’t bother me. Bigots don’t deserve peace. It’s absolutely harassment to stalk and interrogate someone who doesn’t want to talk, I just wouldn’t care that they’re being harassed for airing such bigotry.
(On the other hand, if we assume the original opinion is not a metaphor and replace it with a similarly absurd statement, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, then the sea lion would be acting unreasonably. If someone followed you around online and kept bringing up how you prefer pizza to be prepared, demanding a calm discussion and insisting on peer-reviewed proof that pizza tastes better a certain way, while you ask them to stop, that harassment would obviously be uncalled for. For what it’s worth, the author made a comment that it wasn’t meant to be “analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics.” - but I say it’s a though-provoking interpretation to explore regardless)
into that communist architecture feeling
I’m guessing you’re talking about the post-WWII low-cost housing Khrushchevka (“commieblocks”), Soviet modernism, or the related Brutalist concrete architecture? (Because in context I assume it’s not constructivist, socialist classicism, or non-Soviet styles from around the world)
I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.
I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.
Blame culture isn’t a way forward, both the con and the conned hold partial responsibility. Power doesn’t come from thin air, and those who voted for this regime helped empower it.
If you don’t and just enjoy the thought of killing people you disagree with then you should be out celebrating alongside MAGA over the murder of Renee Good.
This is a bizarre comparison.
UnitedHealth, and therefore its leadership, are collectively responsible for the systemic social murder of many thousands. They (like the rest of the industry) are so ingrained into bipartisan government though lobbying and other forms of soft power that we have consistently seen no legal justice, and have no reason to expect it.
Renee Good, on the other hand, was not responsible for mass death and not an ongoing threat to millions of innocent citizens.
private as possible
What are you trying to hide, and who are you hiding it from?
I dislike that some privacy forums, like reddit and therefore here by proxy, have a cultural habit of talking about privacy or security as an abstract value in itself. But when we start getting into more detailed questions, it’s all vague and vibes until we make it clear who we’re trying to hide from and what we’re hiding.
For example, most of the time I’m not hiding from my own government. Sure, I incidentally do make it a bit harder for them to track me, but I’m more focused on hiding from Meta/Alphabet/Amazon/etc. (plus from a small group of deranged online stalkers obsessed with some of my friends) so there are plenty of online services and stores I can buy from without taking inconvenient measures. It’s fine for me if some services can guess my name and know where I live and one of my phone numbers. It’s not fine if they learn some other details.
It’s important to get out of the habit of saying “more private”, “less private”, “most secure”, and talk about what you’re specifically concerned with and how tactics and tools specifically address that. What information will Google gain from knowing your investments? Is that a threat to you? Are there acceptable ways to mitigate that threat?
Using google to create an account would mean giving them my real data
I’ve been surprised how easy it was for me to make a fake Google account with no links to my real identity. I only use it for age-restricted YouTube videos, I wouldn’t trust it with money like investments, because the way I set it up is inherently suspicious and I wouldn’t be able to verify identity if challenged.
Yes. Although I also believe there are also good reasons to continue to change norms. Plenty of normal things of the past are now understood as offensive or insensitive today, language included. So I understand why people try and ‘correct’ language, but when it’s done tactlessly or unnecessarily, it’s just annoying and rude.
In the past 5 years I’ve only ever had minor issues*, like a power button light not being on. But as a developer, I’m aware my hardware choices are more likely to be popular with other developers who would have already noticed and fixed issues.
* excluding on niche distros, like Puppy ones.
What are some things you preferred in KDE over Cinnamon? I haven’t explored KDE much.
deus_vult.mp4
[reference to the person who took a sword to counter-attack a BLM event and got beaten until their limbs almost resembled a swastika : CW blood]
Watermarking is great when there is a strong enough community to make original content. I’m sure there are communities like that, but I’m not in many of the hobby communities here.
Not sure if you’ve already checked, but here’s how your post looks to us on Lemmy:
I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend there’s a contradiction in the definition. I’m already sick of explaining to libs that a state governed by a vanguard party isn’t claiming to have established a socialist MoP the day after the revolution.
I budget my donations so I make an effort to see who I think need it the most. For example, I use Tor daily, but they have huge institutional funding. My to-do list app doesn’t.
There are also some worthy candidates who simply reject donations, like Handbrake.
A few I haven’t seen mentioned:
yt-dlp devs
Agreed. While I haven’t seen many accusations of it, all the ones I’ve seen have been false. And like you said, Lemmy has sufficient moderation that I’ve never seen it happen here.