It’s interesting, because wanting to grow to supersede the corporations can become just like the corporations wanting to grow for profit. The ends don’t justify the means here.

The idea would be that as people here and see about it more, more people would join, but there’s a lot of assumptions baked into that, including that these people are actually people you want on the platform. Like you mention at the end, racists are going to find a “corporate, government free” space to be their own paradise. And we can’t let that happen.

I wonder if this would be possible: content from Facebook is not shown on Lemmy, but content from Lemmy can be shown on Facebook. Facebook users can join Lemmy, but there’s an application process for them so we can vet them.

I’m fine with however things end up, but I do want us to keep in mind that we risk becoming too insular and developing a groupthink. I don’t think it would be a danger to society like conservative ones tend to become, but I don’t want to think Jill Stein has huge support because Lemmy castigates anyone else, for instance.

I don’t think we’re in that position right now, but it’s one to be wary of.

I’m of two minds about this. I have no love for Facebook and Zuk can go fuck himself. I want Lemmy to be free of the same fucks that ruined Reddit and formally corporatized it.

At the same time, I want Lemmy to grow. I don’t want this to be our little corner of the Internet that’s tucked away. I don’t want an information bubble. I want to see user-managed spaces like this grow and overtake the corporate ones.

So I choose to stay neutral. The two philosophies I described are at odds with each other here. I’ll go with what the majority decides – that’s the whole point of it being user-managed after all. I’ll just say that I think we should give ourselves options to reverse and monitor any changes as time goes on. We need to see how things progress, regardless of what decision we make, so we can course correct if necessary.

Heh. Ironic.

Agreed.

That’s a weird description to give it in the mod log.

Anyway it’s fairly obvious to anyone who isn’t a tankie that their leadership bans dissent and wrongthink. Imagine if places banned you for calling someone a lib like .ml folks love to.

I could always be less charitable if you’d like and say it’s someone who dislikes dissent against authoritarian leaders and simps for dictators.

I find it incredibly annoying. As you implicitly point out, calling everyone to the left a tankie is a great way to dilute the meaning of the word.

Someone who defends Russia for their actions in the Ukraine War and says the US/West or Ukraine is to blame deserves to be relentlessly derided. But communism in itself is hardly focused on something like that. It’s just a subset of individuals who we should all be calling out.

Hang on what. Could you expand on this?

Let me get this straight. You defend the moderation by suggesting that most of the removed comments were offensive or rude. But when someone provides a counterexample to that, you tell them to just go somewhere else if they don’t like the moderation?

Yeah it’s pretty fucking obvious you’re not acting in good faith here. You don’t see anything wrong with what their mod team does, even if it’s to ban dissenting opinions.

Someone who’s so anti America, whether justified or not, that they make the mistake of thinking anything the US likes is bad and anything it dislikes is good. Hence, its rivals can do no wrong.

Here, let’s do a litmus test. Who is to blame for the Ukraine War? Would you decry the US if they falsely claimed to own most of the Gulf of Mexico and threatened civilian ships? If so, would you also decry China for claiming most of the South China Sea, including waters which are literally closer to other countries than to them?

Every communist is not a tankie. A tankie is someone who defends actions by Russia and China, despite decrying the same actions if the US takes it. I really don’t see it as an economic thing at all, although that’s certainly where the origin of the word comes from. I see it as someone who thinks everything that the US does is bad, and anything US adversaries do is good. It’s a lot more geopolitical in my eyes.

Think of it this way, it’s the polar opposite of a nationalist far right conservative when it comes to foreign affairs. Tankies are just one cut away from being the same.

That’s mostly because pseudo intellectual “leftist” tankies are almost exclusively found online. There’s no real presence irl

I’m a progressive who thought I was moderate for the longest time because tankie rhetoric on the left. I fully recognize now though that the tankies are a laughable minority. They’re just a bunch of loud people on the Internet.

They don’t seem to understand that genocide, as a term, does not exclusively mean a violent purge nor Holocaust. The erasure of a group of people can happen with minimal violence too.

It’s hardly surprising though, considering the USSR regularly practiced genocide with “Russification”. This wasn’t so much the violent kind, but more trying to erase a people’s culture and make them assimilate into Russia’s.

To tankies, that’s not genocide, even though it is erasing a culture to impose your own.

He got into power through the Bolsheviks however. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. There was similar with the Nazis in Germany, but I see that more as left wing infighting making them blind to a far right threat.

They have a critical logic mistake they always make:

US bad = not_US good

They’re effectively obsessed with America in a negative way, where they have to hate anything the US likes and like anything the US hates. They find themselves defending oppressive regimes and, instead of having a realization, dig in further. All the news about NK being bad is just propaganda, and China isn’t doing anything bad to the Uighurs even though they have official government statements on it.

It’s just like nationalist patriotism in a way, just the negative of it. One’s obsessed with what the US likes, the other is obsessed with what the US dislikes. The US can do no wrong to one, and everything it does is bad to the other. It’s an incredibly childish logic.

See this is what I like about Lemmy. People actually seem open to dialogue. I appreciate your response.

Yes exactly!

And I see what you mean, and it is a good point. I don’t see it as an important distinction in my field, so long as people label their units. But I can imagine in just common communication worldwide, it must be a pain point.

If the US were going to change, I think we’d have to first accept that it’s going to be a long process. We’d need a generation or two to be fluent in both, and we make it a norm for everyone to provide both units in communication. That’ll get us enough people where for everyday use at least, we can just do metric. Industry would be more challenging to change, especially since so much equipment is designed for imperial.

Edit: Oh and I just wanted to say, I really appreciate your open mind and politeness when it comes to discussing difference of opinion.

I think the metric argument can be a logical discussion, but it can also devolve into a cultural argument, which is what I think has happened here. I’m obviously biased towards the imperial system since I grew up with it, but not so much to call it superior by any means. I think there’s places where it adds value is all.

I guess I could’ve said something about still liking the metric system and thinking it was perfect for science, but it honestly didn’t cross my mind to be that explicit. Since Lemmy is generally more intellectual and not as simplistic, I didn’t think I needed to be.

Perhaps my real mistake here wasn’t recognizing just how passionate some people get about this haha

I’ve only seen one thread which felt completely like Reddit. The community was for the alien comics, and the comics were taking a dig at imperial units vs metric units. Nothing wrong with that, it was all in good fun and jest.

The comments though were toxic frankly. If you said you liked both systems and provided reasons, you were buried in downvotes. If you discussed some upsides of the imperial system, you were ridiculed to be a child. Even if you were an engineer and you provided a lengthy explanation, it was met with derision. And then there were all the logically inconsistent arguments and the notion that Americans were simultaneously idiots but also apparently complete geniuses with how complex they made the imperial system out to be.

I’m thankful it was just the one thread. All of the politics threads I’ve viewed have been more civil and open to discussion (and I consume a fair bit of political news). Lemmy, until that thread, felt like a place where nuanced opinions and discussions were encouraged and upvoted. I hope it’s just a one off.

God I feel so bad for all the women who were in the “illegally small boobs” category. Therapist and psychiatrist visits must have skyrocketed.