It can be bought by a billionaire. I think we need to be careful thinking this risk doesn’t exist.
“We can just make another instance” - this won’t happen like people think it will. If all the content is on Lemmy.world and it gets bought, then people are going to be hesitant to move somewhere else, just like people are hesitant to leave Reddit now.
Even if people running instances are saints, a lot of money can not only buy, but bully them into submission. Bullshit lawsuits is one way to do so before they are financially crippled. We are safeguarded only by our irrelevance.
“We are safeguarded only by our irrelevance” it’s not just Lemmy. I’m thinking about the trans movement that progressed quietly without fanfare and the moment it was no longer “irrelevant “ for the majority it started getting massive pushback. Shocking how little it took to go from irrelevant to a danger to society.
everybody keeps advocating for linux; but i'm not a big fan of it. I'm worried that it will bring a ton of bullshit to the linux platform, and i don't like that.
Why won't it? I think user accounts need federation as well, but switching hosts isn't hard. Lemmy.ca went down a little while ago due to a power supply breaking. The admin has been great about it, moving away from the provider that took a day to fix the issue. But during the downtime I was able to use an account I has already set up on a different instance.
When reddit is down, it was really down. When a lemmy instance is down you can just use another. Don't get tied into just one host.
It’s easy to say “don’t get tied down”, but people do. People like their online personas, their handles, their comment and post history. It’s a mixture of sunk-cost fallacy and FOMO. Reddit knows this, it’s why they still have 2000x as many monthly users as Lemmy.
This will be the same here: if a billionaire buys the biggest instance, yeah cool everyone can defederate, but then all the historical content is gone, most of the users are gone unless they move to you or an instance still federated to you, and you essentially alienate yourself.
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations. There is also a 30 day cooldown period in which you cannot migrate again, so be very careful before using this option!
It's not that easy to implement. Any feature that lets you import posts would just be a bypass for any kind of spam protection or rate limit. You could just "import" thousands of spam posts at a time, without the server being able to prevent it, because it seems totally legitimate.
Instances can be bought by billionaires. The software can't. And I don't think many billionaires would buy a website running a software that they cant control tbh
The software can, but the price is likely too high. In the end money can pressure anyone to do virtually anything. Having 100 lifetimes of productive work pressuring you to do something cannot just be ignored.
people are going to be hesitant to move somewhere else
It is however much easier to move between fediverse instances than it is to move from commercial social media to the fediverse. Once you're on the fediverse, moving is easier.
Be careful with letting someone else guide you in this way. Everyone has individual tastes.
I'm on dbzer0, which is an instance for pirates and anarchists. But I found it by having an account on a random instance and browsing lemmy for a long time before choosing to move here.
Just don't get too attached to where your account is, feel out the fediverse, and then you can decide.
I'll try to keep that in my mind. So far it feels like the "local" and "all" selections in Boost, which I guess come from world, are not very varied. Reddits' r/all is just everything, which is great. It gives you a very varied, unfiltered (seemingly) feed
Local will just show content from the instance you're logged into. In your case it's lemmy.world. All means content from world and instances federated with world. All is everything, but all of lemmy is still tiny compared to reddit so it just doesn't move that fast. I usually sort by active and that keeps things fresh. "Active last x hours" also works nicely.
y'all don't have to boycot every american, just their economy, so if a based person hosts a lemmy server that helps the open free internet and should not be boycotted
My oldest Reddit account was just one year shy of being able to vote (just rolled over to 17) and it stung a little to hit that delete button yesterday. Lemmy very much reminds me of the days when I joined. However, users here frequently point out not having any niche subs on Lemmy - that was exactly what we had to contend with on Reddit. Except making a sub became competitive and you had a lot of speculative sub creation etc. It was exciting because it was new, but that isn’t the case now. The attitude I see missing on Lemmy then is this desire to create communities, and instead lament they don’t exist. Be the change you want to see everyone.
No, I meant the layer on top that lets me interface between the two platforms. On Mastodon it's done through mentions, which isn't well documented and is a bit cumbersome to use. I made a post of an article I found that explains it.
Lemmy has admins in the way that email providers do.
Another example: my instance blocks porn. Those who agree with this policy may enjoy this instance, but it doesn’t impose its rules on anyone using other instances who can access that content freely.
It’s kind of like email. They are all connected, but the rules are set by your provider and those who are willing to communicate with you. There is no one person who can set the rules for everyone.
It's pretty close to Reddit, but it's like a whole bunch of smaller Reddits that share posts between each other. The individual Reddits (instances) are generally grouped by hobby, political affiliation, or geographical location, but not always.
You can tell what instance something or someone is from by looking at their name or title. E.g. I'm from lemmy.zip, you can see it after my user name.
The reason that it can't be bought by a billionaire is that even if one instance is bought out, compromised etc, it can just be removed from the group at large, and it continues like nothing happened. I'm simplifying a bit but I hope you get the general idea.
Instead of 1 big website like reddit, there's a bunch of smaller websites like reddit. These sites are united in a way as users from one site can view, comment on, etc on other sites.
Something similar is Email. Even if you made your email address with Google to have @gmail.com at the end of your email address you can still send and receive emails from anyone.
Is the Sync app no longer being updated/maintained/developed? I am having problems with it. Upvotes/downvotes are no longer being showed. Shame because it is my fav Lemmy app.
I had a sync sub but since it got abandoned I just cancelled it. Most images or videos wouldn't load, as well as some comments or some random shit. Using voyager now and won't look back. It's much better since the first time I tried it
I don't know if you used to use Sync for Reddit but it was pretty normal for him to go away for a while and then come back with a big update. I'm just assuming that's what is happening at the moment.
It’s not that confusing. The simplest way to explain it, I think. Is that instances are like email servers. Defederating is like a spam blocker. If you don’t like your “email server’s” “spam blockers” you can chose another.
So it wasn't Reddit bots after all.
There is plenty of manufactured consent without it.
Same horrible views -Trump.
Europe can continue going down the drain with the US.
Deserved.
If you don't enjoy the left environment Lemmy has to offer, there are plenty of right wing echo chambers wating for you. I prefer it over the pure hate I read on those, even if I agree to a certain degree about manufactured consent. Maybe jfs just the nature of the Internet these days.
You clearly don't get my comment.
I said Lemmy is equally right except there are no Trump fanboys.
If that's why you feel the need to call it 'left' is laughable.
Possibly from american standards and view, who haven't got a clue what 'left' is and think their Bernie or even their right wing Dem party is 'left'.
Despite there being less horrible bots and banning or whatever, it looks like most views correspond to american ones.
Since Europe in in their sphere of influence and colors our news.
Somehow I was hoping it was only the MSM but when I see all the comments and views here it looks like the population has also shifted further to the right and think what they are told to think.
Many incapable of discussion, parroting MSM narrative and when asked for sources they start name-calling bcs they can't back it up.
Only difference with Reddit is I (mostly) don't get banned if I then return the favor.
You clearly haven't been around here much. There are loads of very far left communities and servers including dbzero, hexbear, lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and so on. Sure there are right wing and libertarian parts as well on different servers. In fact this place largely attracts radicals and extremists of multiple flavors.
I regularly get canned for not being far left enough actually. Despite being further left than easily 95% of people.
I know of most them, even if I'm indeed new here but was talking about general subs not particularly political.
The views are mostly center at best.
I regularly get canned for not being far left enough actually. Despite being further left than easily 95% of people.
There's the crux of the problem.
Who defines 'left'?
I know for certain in US (who are mostly politically illiterate and use wrong terminology) the slightly less right wing Dem party for a great deal sees themselves as left or progressive.
Which they certainly aren't .
You have the same phenomenon in EU where in many countries you have a socialist party, that is in no way socialist.
As an example the worst being the Labour party.
They follow the same center right route as most 'acceptable' parties. usually Liberal/Conservative that keep the status quo of more and more austerity, chipping away at social policy.
The "socialists" up tp a certain part get away with it by now and then throwing a bone to the public and shamelessly put on a show on the 1 may and scream the internationale.
Where they do what politicians do, lie and pretend to be the party for the people.
When things get worse, and there is nothing more to squeeze the commoners get angry and want to be heard.
Unfortunately mostly by voting extreme right.
Others to what is called 'extreme left' the actual real socialists (evil commies, tankies!) who the status quo parties demonise even more than extreme right.
After all they are the real enemy, while fascism is simply ultracapitalism and is less of a problem and when necessary even will be embraced by the traditional parties.
Also has barely any community, is leaning deep into praising authoritarian countries, is gloryfying violence and has huge moderation issues. You can make everything sound good, but lemmy will never be a true alternative. It will grab a wave of people, lose it till the next controversy pops up and the cycle will repeat. Till there is an actual alternative that becomes available. Same as with Mastodon and Bluesky
leaning deep into praising authoritarian countries,
Like... more than Reddit? Do you have some examples so we can see which countries you think are authoritarian? Some... groups... believe Canada is authoritarian.
I've never seen anyone praising Russia here. I've seen critical support for the CCP and USSR but that is not the same thing. Critical being the operative word implying that people are recognizing the merits of those governments without offering them full support. Shades of Gray my friend.
Then you haven't been paying attention, plain and simple. Full on Russia praise, full on China praise, with both countries unable to do wrong. Revieionist history. Gaslighting. Plenty of it around.
My friend did you just pick a random link and hope people wouldn't click it?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/17026803, the link you posted, does nothing you've suggested, and even if it did both of the comments highlighted under that link are controversial, neither having a significant weighting in either directions for community support.
Also, no Spez
Fuck u/spez
It can be bought by a billionaire. I think we need to be careful thinking this risk doesn’t exist.
“We can just make another instance” - this won’t happen like people think it will. If all the content is on Lemmy.world and it gets bought, then people are going to be hesitant to move somewhere else, just like people are hesitant to leave Reddit now.
Another reason to spread the content across instances
Decentralization is key
Even if people running instances are saints, a lot of money can not only buy, but bully them into submission. Bullshit lawsuits is one way to do so before they are financially crippled. We are safeguarded only by our irrelevance.
“We are safeguarded only by our irrelevance” it’s not just Lemmy. I’m thinking about the trans movement that progressed quietly without fanfare and the moment it was no longer “irrelevant “ for the majority it started getting massive pushback. Shocking how little it took to go from irrelevant to a danger to society.
same is for Linux.
everybody keeps advocating for linux; but i'm not a big fan of it. I'm worried that it will bring a ton of bullshit to the linux platform, and i don't like that.
Why won't it? I think user accounts need federation as well, but switching hosts isn't hard. Lemmy.ca went down a little while ago due to a power supply breaking. The admin has been great about it, moving away from the provider that took a day to fix the issue. But during the downtime I was able to use an account I has already set up on a different instance.
When reddit is down, it was really down. When a lemmy instance is down you can just use another. Don't get tied into just one host.
It’s easy to say “don’t get tied down”, but people do. People like their online personas, their handles, their comment and post history. It’s a mixture of sunk-cost fallacy and FOMO. Reddit knows this, it’s why they still have 2000x as many monthly users as Lemmy.
This will be the same here: if a billionaire buys the biggest instance, yeah cool everyone can defederate, but then all the historical content is gone, most of the users are gone unless they move to you or an instance still federated to you, and you essentially alienate yourself.
That's why mastodon pushed for account migration features. They made a bunch of them.
There is also bluesky that made their own protocol to handle identities diffretly than ActivityPub.
There is just not enough devs to code that stuff in Lemmy.
Mastodon still doesn't allow account import
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export
It's not that easy to implement. Any feature that lets you import posts would just be a bypass for any kind of spam protection or rate limit. You could just "import" thousands of spam posts at a time, without the server being able to prevent it, because it seems totally legitimate.
should def strive for it for lemmy aswell.
can’t find much info on the subject on github for it unfortunate
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/account-migration/3058
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
Instances can be bought by billionaires. The software can't. And I don't think many billionaires would buy a website running a software that they cant control tbh
The software can, but the price is likely too high. In the end money can pressure anyone to do virtually anything. Having 100 lifetimes of productive work pressuring you to do something cannot just be ignored.
The software is open source. Everyone owns it, and you can't buy something that's owned by everyone
It is however much easier to move between fediverse instances than it is to move from commercial social media to the fediverse. Once you're on the fediverse, moving is easier.
Also the communities are run by people who actually give a shit about FOSS and decentralization
I have blocked content from lemmy.world altogether and have so much fun. Go try it, leave the bubble.
I'm on lemmy.world through Boost, but have lots of communities from fediverse and other Lemmy's and whatnot (still learning how it all works).
What is wrong with lemmy.world and what do you recommend?
Be careful with letting someone else guide you in this way. Everyone has individual tastes.
I'm on dbzer0, which is an instance for pirates and anarchists. But I found it by having an account on a random instance and browsing lemmy for a long time before choosing to move here.
Just don't get too attached to where your account is, feel out the fediverse, and then you can decide.
I'll try to keep that in my mind. So far it feels like the "local" and "all" selections in Boost, which I guess come from world, are not very varied. Reddits' r/all is just everything, which is great. It gives you a very varied, unfiltered (seemingly) feed
Local will just show content from the instance you're logged into. In your case it's lemmy.world. All means content from world and instances federated with world. All is everything, but all of lemmy is still tiny compared to reddit so it just doesn't move that fast. I usually sort by active and that keeps things fresh. "Active last x hours" also works nicely.
I think that's what I need to remember, Reddit is absolutely humongous compared to Lemmy.
Honestly the only thing wrong with world is it blocks db0's piracy community. Beyond that it's pretty inoffensive to the general fediverse.
Also blocks Tor and tried to push a Zionist "fact check" bot
Similar rules to Reddit. You can get busted for saying “eat the rich” because it’s supposedly a call for violence.
Shame it doesn't remove Russian trolls, though.
I'm not aware of any big instance that blocks .ml
Thats because i was wrong
You cannot protect yourself from that without making substantial sacrifices.
y'all don't have to boycot every american, just their economy, so if a based person hosts a lemmy server that helps the open free internet and should not be boycotted
Lemmy reminds me of Reddit when I first joined more than a decade ago. I just hope it doesn't go to shit like Reddit has the last few years.
My oldest Reddit account was just one year shy of being able to vote (just rolled over to 17) and it stung a little to hit that delete button yesterday. Lemmy very much reminds me of the days when I joined. However, users here frequently point out not having any niche subs on Lemmy - that was exactly what we had to contend with on Reddit. Except making a sub became competitive and you had a lot of speculative sub creation etc. It was exciting because it was new, but that isn’t the case now. The attitude I see missing on Lemmy then is this desire to create communities, and instead lament they don’t exist. Be the change you want to see everyone.
Shouldn't this be posted on other socials instead of Lemmy?
Feel free to, but also be ready to see your post removed anc your account banned
Already got banned for pro Luigi posting.
Sorry to hear
Me, too. You have my sympathies.
I have decided that nothing of value was lost
Please report back
Aaaaand it's gone.
I haven't had any issues posting this kind of content to BlueSky and Mastodon.
US billionaires aren’t even all American. All billionaires are bad.
It also works with Mbin and Piefed 💪
And mastodon to certain extents
Anyone know if the integration documented somewhere?
You're looking for ActivityPub
No, I meant the layer on top that lets me interface between the two platforms. On Mastodon it's done through mentions, which isn't well documented and is a bit cumbersome to use. I made a post of an article I found that explains it.
stupid question, but anyway: does it have admins? so is Lemmy less censored than Reddit?
Every instance has an admin. They are listed at the bottom of the sidebar of the instance.
The good thing is that every team of admins can manage their instance and the communities hosted as they want.
So if an admin wants to censor a certain topic on their instance, people will just move the community to another instance that would accept it.
A good example if [email protected], which cannot be accessed from lemmy.world.
how cool, i like lemmy more and more. thx
Happy to help, feel free if you have any more question
And can be accessed from Fedia.io. I don't know where the nazis fucked off to, good riddance, sez I.
The piracy is specifically why I moved to db0. I'm not even a pirate anymore but the information should be visible and easily accessible.
Lemmy has admins in the way that email providers do.
Another example: my instance blocks porn. Those who agree with this policy may enjoy this instance, but it doesn’t impose its rules on anyone using other instances who can access that content freely.
It’s kind of like email. They are all connected, but the rules are set by your provider and those who are willing to communicate with you. There is no one person who can set the rules for everyone.
Is somebody gonna post this over on reddit?
To the account:
o7 f
I'm new to this app, how does it work
It's pretty close to Reddit, but it's like a whole bunch of smaller Reddits that share posts between each other. The individual Reddits (instances) are generally grouped by hobby, political affiliation, or geographical location, but not always.
You can tell what instance something or someone is from by looking at their name or title. E.g. I'm from lemmy.zip, you can see it after my user name.
The reason that it can't be bought by a billionaire is that even if one instance is bought out, compromised etc, it can just be removed from the group at large, and it continues like nothing happened. I'm simplifying a bit but I hope you get the general idea.
Instead of 1 big website like reddit, there's a bunch of smaller websites like reddit. These sites are united in a way as users from one site can view, comment on, etc on other sites.
Something similar is Email. Even if you made your email address with Google to have @gmail.com at the end of your email address you can still send and receive emails from anyone.
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
This actually got me pumped and Im American. Long live the resistance.
ヽ(°ω°)ノ
Can’t stop the signal.
Lemmy’s originally Canadian just saying 🇪🇺🤝🇨🇦
Apps like Voyager per the meme help it feel more Reddity for me and that has boosted my adoption
@goldenquetzal I wish the browser experience was as good as Voyager's. @Blaze
https://phtn.app/ ?
@Blaze Didn't know that one. Thanks!
Basically every instance except lemmy.world allows Tor
Is the Sync app no longer being updated/maintained/developed? I am having problems with it. Upvotes/downvotes are no longer being showed. Shame because it is my fav Lemmy app.
Honestly same, i feel like pressing the random buttons sometimes causes it to just not want to load, especially if what its loading is videos/gifs
I had a sync sub but since it got abandoned I just cancelled it. Most images or videos wouldn't load, as well as some comments or some random shit. Using voyager now and won't look back. It's much better since the first time I tried it
Yeah, the dev took our money and bailed.
I don't know if you used to use Sync for Reddit but it was pretty normal for him to go away for a while and then come back with a big update. I'm just assuming that's what is happening at the moment.
Hopefully, it'd be nice if pics, gifs and vids would actually load.
What, didn't even notice! Thought that I somehow disabled it myself.
Lemmy seems interesting. Though instances, federations etc, meta stuff is confusing.
It’s not that confusing. The simplest way to explain it, I think. Is that instances are like email servers. Defederating is like a spam blocker. If you don’t like your “email server’s” “spam blockers” you can chose another.
No need to worry about the inter-instance drama.
It really isn't once you get used to it, give it a little bit of time and feel free to ask stuff.
I highly recommend "boost for lemmy" don't know if boost is european but lemmy is so gopd enough for me.
My only problem is lower userbase but I guess that will get better
Boost finally breaking for good on Reddit is why I'm here. Boost is simply the best.
Boost was my favourite Reddit client, but I prefer Voyager for Lemmy. Boost just had way too many ads, Voyager has none.
Aaaand you've just sold me on Voyager
Ah yes, I will say that I didn't have to deal with ads on boost for Reddit.
I may check out Voyager.
Welcome to Lemmy, here are a few pointers to help you settle in
Same!
You've been on a roll with these lately. Keep em coming! :)
I don’t think he’s interested.
In a perfect world...
I’m new but I like it so far 💪
It's dead unfortunately. There is like 1000 active users.
50000 monthly active users
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=7
That's nothing.
So it wasn't Reddit bots after all.
There is plenty of manufactured consent without it.
Same horrible views -Trump.
Europe can continue going down the drain with the US.
Deserved.
If you don't enjoy the left environment Lemmy has to offer, there are plenty of right wing echo chambers wating for you. I prefer it over the pure hate I read on those, even if I agree to a certain degree about manufactured consent. Maybe jfs just the nature of the Internet these days.
I see hate here too. And hate is nothing that I personally endorse. But I understand where it is coming from, and whom it is directed to. On the right it's just directed towards the hate group of the day©, be it communists, migrants, refugees, gays or trans folk. It's just hate to have a enemy. At least here it's hate against a class that has systematically made 99 % of people suffer for their own gains.
You clearly don't get my comment.
I said Lemmy is equally right except there are no Trump fanboys.
If that's why you feel the need to call it 'left' is laughable.
Possibly from american standards and view, who haven't got a clue what 'left' is and think their Bernie or even their right wing Dem party is 'left'.
Despite there being less horrible bots and banning or whatever, it looks like most views correspond to american ones.
Since Europe in in their sphere of influence and colors our news.
Somehow I was hoping it was only the MSM but when I see all the comments and views here it looks like the population has also shifted further to the right and think what they are told to think.
Many incapable of discussion, parroting MSM narrative and when asked for sources they start name-calling bcs they can't back it up.
Only difference with Reddit is I (mostly) don't get banned if I then return the favor.
You clearly haven't been around here much. There are loads of very far left communities and servers including dbzero, hexbear, lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, and so on. Sure there are right wing and libertarian parts as well on different servers. In fact this place largely attracts radicals and extremists of multiple flavors.
I regularly get canned for not being far left enough actually. Despite being further left than easily 95% of people.
I know of most them, even if I'm indeed new here but was talking about general subs not particularly political.
The views are mostly center at best.
I regularly get canned for not being far left enough actually. Despite being further left than easily 95% of people.
There's the crux of the problem.
Who defines 'left'?
I know for certain in US (who are mostly politically illiterate and use wrong terminology) the slightly less right wing Dem party for a great deal sees themselves as left or progressive.
Which they certainly aren't .
You have the same phenomenon in EU where in many countries you have a socialist party, that is in no way socialist.
As an example the worst being the Labour party.
They follow the same center right route as most 'acceptable' parties. usually Liberal/Conservative that keep the status quo of more and more austerity, chipping away at social policy.
The "socialists" up tp a certain part get away with it by now and then throwing a bone to the public and shamelessly put on a show on the 1 may and scream the internationale.
Where they do what politicians do, lie and pretend to be the party for the people.
When things get worse, and there is nothing more to squeeze the commoners get angry and want to be heard.
Unfortunately mostly by voting extreme right. Others to what is called 'extreme left' the actual real socialists (evil commies, tankies!) who the status quo parties demonise even more than extreme right.
After all they are the real enemy, while fascism is simply ultracapitalism and is less of a problem and when necessary even will be embraced by the traditional parties.
Also has barely any community, is leaning deep into praising authoritarian countries, is gloryfying violence and has huge moderation issues. You can make everything sound good, but lemmy will never be a true alternative. It will grab a wave of people, lose it till the next controversy pops up and the cycle will repeat. Till there is an actual alternative that becomes available. Same as with Mastodon and Bluesky
Like... more than Reddit? Do you have some examples so we can see which countries you think are authoritarian? Some... groups... believe Canada is authoritarian.
This user has always been very negative towards the platform, not sure why
I think this user might be unable to separate non black the white discussions on communism with "supporting Russia and China".
Praising Russia, praising China is a norm here. We don't need to point to people who go "no you"
I've never seen anyone praising Russia here. I've seen critical support for the CCP and USSR but that is not the same thing. Critical being the operative word implying that people are recognizing the merits of those governments without offering them full support. Shades of Gray my friend.
Then you haven't been paying attention, plain and simple. Full on Russia praise, full on China praise, with both countries unable to do wrong. Revieionist history. Gaslighting. Plenty of it around.
Can I have links to people saying these things? Just genuinely curious because ive not seen anything like this either
... Seriously? Links to shit that's happening everywhere? Just go to a random thread about Ukraine, Poland or similar. An example from a week ago:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/17026803
My friend did you just pick a random link and hope people wouldn't click it?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/17026803, the link you posted, does nothing you've suggested, and even if it did both of the comments highlighted under that link are controversial, neither having a significant weighting in either directions for community support.
I'm not sure what your point is with that one.
It's pretty much just saying that Russia is no longer communist.
Perhaps you think pointing out that communism isn't inherently bad is somehow supporting Russia?
Fair take there.
Heyy we’re Lemmy let’s be nice to each other please
You're saying that as if it means anything. There is no "better" userbase. Reddit had this weird superiority complex too.
Suppose I’m rejecting the appearance of defeatism there with that one. We got this! (if we try)
Ah ya
Well! Meant -
More than
e.g., meant “hey, WE are US” (regardless of who we are)
hehe :)