It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

I do appreciate when a worker in a restaurant has a legitimate conversation and is social, if they can see when it’s appropriate and welcomed. And to add context, I’m not talking about the waiter hovering like you’re describing, I’m talking about something I’ve only ever seen from immigrant family restaurants where they’ve come from a culture where eating is still a social community activity, or possibly when a chef takes pleasure in knowing you’re enjoying their experience. The always transactional nature of eating in society has started to annoy me. But it’s very different to when someone is being paid to try and make your experience good, that’s inevitably plastic and coerced.

Back in the day, there was an instance called GTIO where 80% of the posts were from two instances that had later defederated from each other (lemmy.ml and Wolfballs). That one was a pain, you just had to make an alt to really use it.

I want to say pirate culture has a strong history is deplatforming, so it’s almost instinct to have a migration fallback plan. But I know they used to have a fallback on raddle.me (anarchist reddit clone) when reddit started forcing them not to host or supply links to content. They had good reason to be prepared and it paid off.

Mander gets my seal of approval. Since the start, it’s been what a federated community should be. It has a clear scope and is open for basically everyone to use, not trying to be a redundant general-purpose instance creating the tenth community named ‘196’ and banning half the instances from using it.

I haven’t checked it out since before the reddit API influx so things may be different now, but from memory they were explicitly centred around being super friendly and pleasant, to the point where normal disagreements by people on other instances were banworthy there. So they were very quick to defederate from many other instances, especially anything liberal (as in, libre; freedoms) or political.

I made this account a long time ago, the landscape was different. The three biggest (federated) instances were this, lemmygrad.ml and Wolfballs (alt-right, run by a right-libertarian but dominated by shameless racists and neo-nazis, most instances defederated from them).

Since Lemmygrad was often preemptively defederated from other instances, I wanted a stable well-connected instance that wouldn’t die after a few months (learned that lesson the hard way on PeerTube) and am a socialist tech-expert. So the choice was simple. No regrets, and I wouldn’t change it now.

I did have an alt on the former GTIO instance (civil debate only, no political-oriented bans) because I did want to see the garbage being posted by Wolfballs losers on there and practice deconstructing the flaws and refuting. I also had an alt on an instance that wasn’t federated at the time. They were all appropriate choices given the landscape then and now, and I’ve had the foresight and fortune to almost never have an instance I use block one I wish to interact with. But unfortunately many so-called general instances have made dubious defederation choices which do make me worry that I may need to start making alts just to continue interacting with some communities in the future.

Basically any opinion of the modern Internet I give.

I’m a certified computer expert, but I sound like a Luddite when it comes to anything mainstream.

They’re not sealioning, they’re responding to a bunch of strong, reasonably insulting allegations. Maybe not responding gracefully, but they’re not sealioning.

In fact, I don’t even think it’s possible for one reply to be sealioning, the whole point is that it’s repetitive harassment (as stated in the wiki link you posted). That’s why the original comic strip that defined it has so many panels.

It’s fine to be offended that they called you propagandised, but that doesn’t make it less offensive to immediately say the same thing back to them. You are both insulting each other, it’s not helping the Lemmygrad situation.

Oooh, I didn’t know about the map enthusiasts one :)

The Fediverse. There’s nothing inherently special about Lemmy or kbin or lotide being link aggregators. We get regular posters from Friendica and I’ve gotten replies from Mastodon accounts before.

The Fediverse is ALL of us. We should be interacting with PeerTube and Misskey and all the rest!

The first rule of moretankie196 is you do not talk about the first rule.

The second rule of moretankie196 is you DO NOT talk about the second rule.

If we just talk about the last few years:

• 0 A.D has been very fun, although I play offline because I’m casual af :) Has all the things I liked about Age of Empires and more, and I’ve been building from source so it gets improvements every week.
• Xonotic has had an excellent community whenever I’ve gone online, so can recommend.
• Mindustry is a blast

There is a soft spot in my heart for SuperTuxKart too, despite the current project leadership.

Torvalds is the kind who doesn’t get into the religious wars, like FOSS vs proprietary and such. So I’m not at all surprised by their post.

1. Reddit is a private company founded in 2005, valued at $1.8 billion dollars and employing around 350 people. Lemmy was founded two years ago and is run with relatuvely little funding (I would say approximately two paid employees and a dozen or so volunteers, distributed around different instances). That’s not comparable. At all.

2. Most people aren’t banned from reddit. Your personal experience is rare. If someone isn’t banned from the biggest platform, they need a motivation to leave. Why would they leave? I know why YOU would leave, but why would THEY leave?

3. Most people coming here, not all but most, are doing it because they were banned from reddit. As a result, they just try to recreate reddit here, instead of making something better, a better culture or a higher quality of community. Lemmy is treated by the majority as a ‘free speech reddit’ and nothing more.

4. Strong political bias in the popular communities may be distasteful to the majority of people who would use a reddit-like site, who tend to be pro-capitalist liberals.