overview for comfy

Argentine President Milei fires foreign minister after vote to lift embargo against Cuba in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes. They should have voted the dictator puppet out. That's how we got rid of Hitler and Mussolini, and besides, their close neighbors are all democracies who would never interfere in any other country's elections. Fruit companies aren't that important, you know.

X Is a White-Supremacist Site in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.

Argentine President Milei fires foreign minister after vote to lift embargo against Cuba in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Free market trade! Except Cuba, they don't get to trade.

X Is a White-Supremacist Site in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn't very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.

I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.

Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.

Hardly - they're doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It's purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.

What is your favorite Fediverse platform? in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

The easiest way would be to quickly look up the ones you don't know yet. Many have Wikipedia pages and the others usually have good home pages explaining what they do. But as you can see, there's a wide range for hosting different kinds of media and discussions.

Mindustry: an extremely high quality (and difficulty) FOSS tower defense game in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Seconding, Mindustry is much more visually pleasing to me than Factorio. From the screenshots I'm looking at, Factorio's graphics just don't have consistent composition, so elements in the same image look out of place. Shadows aren't even going in the same direction or logical lengths, and only sometimes they're pure black giving weirdly high contrast in certain objects and not others. Many environments are various shades of puke colors. The perspective looks weird to me, as if we could turn the map 90 degrees and then all the buildings would look like the leaning tower of Piza.

I would compare and contrast between the original Fallout, perhaps, or as Captain Aggravated here else said, "Factorio does look like Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit.".

Now, whether these are problems or style is a matter of opinion, and furthermore whether it should have an appealing style (as Cpt. Agg also said, pollution is a theme in the game) but some of those points are objectively straying from conventionally appealing elements.

X Is a White-Supremacist Site in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (4 children)

'ex-4chan users' isn't really an important criteria, especially if you're including the people posting there before 2016. In fact, some hobby boards like /co/, /mu/ and /lit/ were notoriously left-wing. "Ex-" usually means the ones who were smart enough to leave.

But furthermore, calling Mastodon a white supremacist site is just funny. Might as well be saying that about Lemmy.

X Is a White-Supremacist Site in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

America, the state, is white-supremacist and has been since birth. Absolutely. Although that's not good logic for explaining how. I doubt most voters for Trump did so because of his or their racist views, there were plenty of other policies (sorry, ideas and themes) Trump platformed on that appealed to them.

The amount of Democrat supporters again surprised at how non-whites can possibly vote for Trump on a non-trivial scale is a testament to why it's important to understand voting patterns beyond race ideology, beyond "Trump is a disgusting racist, only a white supremacist would vote for them.", especially if you're on the ground trying to organize your community to create the positive changes neither candidate can offer.

Mindustry: an extremely high quality (and difficulty) FOSS tower defense game in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I wouldn't call the game 'extremely high difficulty', it even has some easier levels early on (at least when I played it a couple of years ago). I'm not a regular tower-defense or sim game player and I was able to complete Serpulo. It can be a challenging puzzle at times, but it's not a game I'd feel a need to warn people about difficulty-wise.

Disclaimer: this game may be addictive for some individuals.

Seconding (although I have a tendency to marathon the campaign of any game I think is excellent). No need for predatory tricks like loots, this is just a damn fun game.

It’s very weird for a FOSS enthusiast not to advertise one of the best open-source games of all time so here I am trying to make it spoken about again.

IIRC I found it in a 'top 100 FOSS games' list because it was one of the first which wasn't an open-sourced cloning of an existing game. No disrespect for clones and adaptations at all, but it's extra special to see original softwares so good that even people who don't care about FOSSness would use them.

Mindustry: an extremely high quality (and difficulty) FOSS tower defense game in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I love a good FPS and I loved Mindustry.

9, 8, 7, 6, 5... in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

I would take the job just to make sure we can sabotage it. And I'm not even affected by their adblocker detection; I just yt-dlp and NewPipe the videos.

What are the taboo subjects? in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Classical liberalism (just to give a concrete political term for those old school liberals) is admirable. I broadly agree with its values and I support all those points you mentioned. The progressive and conservative variants we often see in US politics are blatantly hypocritical and broken.

Unfortunately, liberalism's core issue is that it's an ideology based on an abstract concept rather than our physical conditions - it starts with the abstract, fair idea of freedom and attempts to apply it onto material reality. For example, the liberal approach to free speech, which theoretically creates a marketplace of ideas where the best prevail, just turns into a propaganda echo chamber when huge media organisation are owned by business tycoons with political agendas, and when social media companies are financially punished by their advertisers for allowing controversial expression. The utopian marketplace of ideas never really manifests at scale when that marketplace is collectively dominated by the like-minded owning class.

Without adding restrictions (a contradiction of liberty), the huge wealth of some people turns their freedoms into their political power. If the rich owning class can control the economy through a monopoly or similar, they have the freedom to control what news you can find, what products you can buy (if you can't DIY it, like a computer) and their quality and how safe they are, what jobs they will give you, and so much more.

There are also plenty of other contradictions which we see play out, such as:

How can we balance freedom of religion with giving people rights that a religion rejects? (e.g. abortion, homosexuality)
How can we balance someone's individual rights with someone else's right to private property? (e.g. trespassing, restriction of the commons)
How can we balance someone's individual rights with community safety needs and expectations? (e.g. weapon rights, industrial and environmental restrictions, speech laws)
Should liberalism be allowed to defend itself against a democratically-approved transition to dictatorship, or does this contradict political freedom?

In these situations, we have to resolve them somehow, so we end up with liberalism variants like conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism, straying further from the pure old-school liberalism they necessarily contradict. Even without corruption, liberalism decays, distancing itself from its ideals, and ultimately turns into a playground for the powerful who have far far far far far more ability to realize liberty than almost everyone else.

0

An exploration of the Lemmys, for discussion (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink

What is this post?

A quick and dirty look into Lemmy instances, their size and interactions, and some insights.

Disclaimers

I AM NOT AN EXPERT OR WITNESS: I only started using Lemmy in March 2022. Lemmy was around for around 3 years before that. I am not a developer or instance owner.
I DID NOT GO AND TALK TO PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND THIS STUFF: This is just me exploring for fun and starting a conversation. This is not a proper study. Consider telling any one who links you to this page as if it's an expert historical account that I called them an idiot.
This is limited by my experience and my searching, it's not comprehensive. If someone made a dark instance, I probably won't find it. If there's some deep lore, I probably don't know it.

Thanks to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for many of these stats.

Alright,

Now for the casual rambling.

Organic posting started on lemmy.ml from April 2019 so I will consider that the start of Lemmy as a service (my understanding is that lemmy.ml is the oldest non-dev instance)

As of now (May 2022) AFAIK, the Lemmy-based sites with the most total user comments are:

hexbear.net (2.5M)
lemmy.ml (114K)
lemmygrad.ml (105K)
bakchodi.org (42K)
wolfballs.com (15K)
szmer.info (15K)
feddit.de (3K)
[dev instances ignored]
sopuli.xyz (1504)
lemmy.eus (1262)
lemmy.ca (974)

The count of users active in the last month is similar:

hexbear.net (unlisted, approx. 1.3K in the last 14 days)
lemmygrad.ml (508)
lemmy.ml (474)
bakchodi.org (286)
szmer.info (65)
feddit.it (51)
sopuli.xyz (31)
wolfballs.com (29)
feddit.de (29)
lemmy.ca (17)

My guess is that the difference at the bottom of the list is due to highly federated instances spreading their user comments over many instances with more activity, and also due to some instances peaking a few months ago and then declining. For those new to user statistics, you'll notice that popularity usually tends to be exponential: more popular things get more popular.

What was that first one? Hexbear?

Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy. In that sense it reminds me of Gab, another huge island fork, but only due to size and isolation. While I can't find an admin statement, various Hexbear Gitea issues from 2020 and this comment from December 2021 "We’re working on bringing Lemmy up to speed with some of the features our “fork” (it’s more of a rewrite) has. When that’s ready we’ll switch to that which will already have federation ready for us." and this from Feb 2022 "The only issue is that [Hexbear] doesn’t support federation for semi-technical reasons (happy to explain), but that’s going to be fixed (later this year maybe)?" indicate Hexbear is open to the idea but unready (this 2020 comment even states they chose Lemmy precisely because of its federation goal), and Bakchodi appear to have just not set any up (the admin states "Federation is not functional as of now." in a post and nothing more). Contrast both against Gab who cited abuse/security issues and lack of local federation users for their voluntary removal of existing federation.

Another point regarding Hexbear and Bakchodi is that they are continuations of existing popular communities: I believe that Hexbear is a continuation of reddit's banned subreddit /r/ChapoTrapHouse, and Bakchodi is a continuation of the banned /r/chodi (which I believe was banned around the same time as /r/GenZedong's quarantining caused a mass exodus to https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzedong ). To the best of my knowledge, lemmy.ml, most of lemmygrad, wolfballs and szmer are new original sites rather than an existing active community migrating as a mass.

Connections

Most instances are connected into the Fediverse. Hexbear and Bakchodi appears to be the only active non-trivial instances that don't federate.

Due to the political environment of the internet today and the content currently on Lemmy, I personally think it makes sense to classify the current federation networks of Lemmy instances into four loose groups:

socialist 'left': Primarily value socialism and/or anarchism, and related topics. Generally explicit about their instance's political alignment. The largest group. Examples are lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, midwest.social, and would include hexbear.net if it were connected.
liberalist 'right': Primarily value freedom of speech and other liberty. While none yet are e~~xplicitly politically-biased through administration~~[correction], they do overwhelmingly have users with views typical of the American 'right-wing' as an inevitable result of where they are promoted, the ideas only they tolerate and the existing posts. Examples are wolfballs.com and exploding-heads.com.
general open: Overall mainstream OR diverse political views, will generally tolerate political instances on both sides of the above divide. Often national instances or 'general-purpose'. mander.xyz is an overt example, gtio.io is also an example. lotide.fbxl.net would be an example, but it's a lotide instance rather than Lemmy.
anti-intolerant: Primarily value friendliness and inclusivity, and so will readily block instances that tolerate intolerance, such as those in the liberalist 'right' category and potentially those further in the socialist 'left' category. An example might be sopuli.xyz.

These are all politically determined, as unlike Mastodon and Pleroma there don't tend to be any instances based around controversial single topics or around graphic content that causes instances to defederate. I thought there were more instances that blocked both sides of the 'left'/'right' divide, but they don't seem to exist yet (which is a good sign) beyond lemmy.rollenspiel.monster. It is also worth mentioning that lemmy.ml has blocked some instances due to abuse rather than any cultural disagreement.

The first two of the four categories are by far the most popular, even if not the most numerous in instances, probably due to them picking up users being kicked out of reddit and reddit alternatives as they block more and more political subreddits or become unsavory. The earlier kicking of many 'harassment' subreddits from reddit around 2015 lead to many 'right-wing' users to populate Voat and then later bannings lead to communities.win becoming popular, which I believe explains why Lemmy doesn't yet have a strong influx of users who align politically with those banned subreddits and more-so with recently-banned communist subreddits (the core developers' political views and lemmy.ml's reputation may have impacted people moving to instances named after Lemmy or considering hosting new instances, but I suspect it wouldn't affect people who were invited to a place called Wolfballs).

Interestingly, there is already a mirror instance that reposts from reddit: goldandblack.us.to

Growth

fediverse.observer has some stats. Ignoring the huge outliers in the middle, there has been a jump in growth in the past two months which I would mostly attribute to the influx to lemmygrad.ml wow look at that second graph and the launch of unfederated-but-included bakchodi. Apart from that, there has been a remarkably consistent growth in all the active instances. That's a good sign that this group of communities could last a while.

Some concluding thoughts, with regards to reddit

As someone who hasn't really used reddit in many years, I like to promote the view of us being independent, growing our own culture, our own norms and not merely aiming to mirror the same shallow emptiness. The bottom line is, we grow a lot when reddit shuts a place down, and as you can see in some of those stats, growth creates more potential for growth. I think it's important to think about what habits we see now both here and there that we want to encourage, and which habits we don't. Think about what should each community tolerate and reject and enforce (and make no mistake, that answer differs depending on purpose and audience!) and how do we redirect people in the wrong places or teach those who are mistaken? (protip: typing these things out each time is very dumb! That's why we invented FAQ pages!) What struggles did Mastodon face as they started to grow more and more?

Parts of reddit and similar groups will continue to arrive. Look at this list of communities that used to be allowed: it started off with the very blatant controversies like sexualizing minors, moved on to open blatant racism-focused places that conducted raids, and now they're at banning subreddits about a US (former) president and pro-China memes. Now that Lemmy has established itself as the home of some of the most recently banned communities, I personally think it's only a matter of time before reddit pops off a few more communities as they face pressure from media flak, investors or other major influences, and we should prepare for how to handle this: make potentially targeted communities aware that we exist before an incident, and make sure communities have a clear set of rules and guidelines written for the people that come in expecting this to be reddit again. I think this is an opportunity to fix the things we don't want repeated.