Elon Musk runs the whole of Twitter like the jealous, power-drunk moderator of a small 5,000-member Discord server.

TO THE MOON

You don't have to qualify your opinion that Threads should be defederated by bringing up the lolicon instance. They are two completely separate instances and the questions to defederate from either are completely separate.

Burggit, Exploding-Heads, and Threads each have their own reasons for defederation (lolicon, nazism, corporate influence) and it doesn't make any sense to bring up one when discussing the other.

It's literally mind-numbing how the assumption is that sending weapons into Ukraine is a definite moral good and the only question is what sort of weapons to send. Liberalism is a mental disorder.

The war is going to end in a Russian victory. The only question is how many people have to die - on both sides - before a peace is negotiated.

I agree with the other commenters who say that the issue is primarily that the Lemmyverse is too small for the grifters to bother influencing, but I also think federation (and the non-profit nature) plays into this.

A site like Reddit generally does not ban members just for being Conservative and expressing relatively mainstream right-wing beliefs. They have to present at least a veneer of "free speech" except in the case of hate speech and violence. In addition, they don't want to drive away Conservative users, because that's where their money comes from.

To a small Lemmy instance, these motives don't come into play. More users actually costs the admins more money. And while they generally don't ban users willy-nilly, they feel they have a right to ban people just for being right-wing dicks.

Ultimately right-wing ideology cannot survive in a space like this except in explicitly right-leaning instances; which will be subject to the "Nazi Bar" effect until those instances are defederated from the rest of the Lemmyverse.

While it's good to believe in Free Speech generally, a blanket approach is how Reddit alternatives end up like Voat. Even normal people were suggesting it as a popular Reddit alternative, but then it became clear that their slavish devotion to the idea of "free speech" included not kicking out fascists and bigots.

Average sh.itjust.works user

I MAKE A PENNY, BOSS MAKES A BUCK

SO I CRANK MY HOG IN THE COMPANY TRUCK

It's a general-purpose instance that leans Libertarian.

Take a look at their community list. Besides the sorts of general-purpose communities that every instance has: Gaming, NonCredibleDefense (started as a shitposting spinoff of CredibleDefense, a subreddit about military discussion. Nowadays the community is basically a NATO circlejerk), AI shit, and "MeanwhileOnGrad", the community dedicated to posting our w's to get mad at.

(And after checking, it turns out the guy in the screenshot is the sole moderator of /c/MeanwhileOnGrad who makes basically all of their posts lol. Talk about living rent free)

The owner of sh.itjust.works is also a weird free-speech-absolutist Libertarian guy. He made a big stink about the community forcing him to defederate from exploding-heads, the Nazi instance, because he believed in "free speech". Users pointed out that sh.itjust.works had been defederated from Lemmygrad since it was created, and the admin confessed that that was because of "personal opinions" (that apparently did not apply to literal Nazis).

Things like North Korean parents feeding their children mud, or Kim Jong-un personally executing an orchestra conductor in front of a crowd.

North Korea is not a complete black box. Americans are banned from the country, but most Europeans can visit on guided tours.

Millions of North Koreans work abroad in China. If anyone actually wanted to know what life was like in North Korea, you could just ask them. But no-one with the money to hire a translator and head to Beijing is really interested in the very boring truth; that North Korea is a poor, imperfect country where the vast majority of people live normal lives.

The documentary "Loyal Citizens of Pyeongyang in Seoul" has a few interviews with North Korean citizens who went to the South for better economic opportunities before having their passports seized and prevented from going home to the North.

It's an instance for Communists, specifically Communists who support AES (actually existing socialism). In short, we think that the USSR and PRC (among others), while not perfect, were legitimate attempts at building Socialism and better than Capitalism as it exists in the West.

Other people don't like that because, to them, Stalin was just Red Hitler and Xi Jinping is literally committing a genocide right now. Neither are true.

While world peace is obviously desirable, I think it's important to recognize that the absence of conflict does not imply the presence of justice. World peace should not be pursued until we first achieve universal justice, because pursuing universal justice will require war.

Stopping wars while we live in an unjust international order does nothing but solidify that order and demonize opposition to it as "warmongering". Some wars are just. The Allies could have avoided a lot of bloodshed had they invaded Germany to immediately depose Hitler, rather than allowing him to solidify his power, grow Germany's military, and invade Poland and Czechoslovakia.

The end of war will naturally follow the end of inequality and injustice.

When you rotate an image in your phone or on your computer (by right-clicking or going into the image options and selecting "Rotate Right" or w/e), the device is not editing the image to rotate it 90 degrees. It's just adding a little metadata tag that tells devices loading the image "display this, but rotate it 90 degrees".

Lemmy scrapes off metadata as a privacy concern, since this also holds personal and location data. There have been a few medium-profile events of internet stalkers getting location data off of women's selfies and going straight to their homes.

I'm not sure if there's a simpler solution, but opening the image in an image editor and saving it again should remove the metadata tag and save it as an actual, upright image. However, this is a problem that the devs should fix - platforms like Discord also shave off metadata, but know enough to leave the orientation data intact.

Basically the upper management was getting mad that Paper Mario was taking on too much of its own identity compared to the broader Mario brand. It's why Origami King is mostly just Toads all over the place.

I was really involved in it a couple years ago because I ran a West Marches DnD server that primarily recruited from Hexbear (I'm not really involved anymore but it's still going, DM or reply and I'll shoot you an invite). So I know a lot of the posters relatively well personally (though none of the administrators ever joined). Drama is an understatement and I think it ultimately derives from the administrators feeling like they need to personally intervene in every little issue, inevitably blowing it up into massive proportions.

The one moment that has stuck with me is when a user (who was a common player in our DnD server, we'll call her Tammy) made a post mildly criticizing another poster who was making overly saccharine "You are all so valid ❤" posts literally every single day. Basically saying "Hey I get you mean to be nice but this is just annoying". The other user made a big, long "THIS IS WHY I'M LEAVING HEXBEAR!!!" post and Tammy ends up being not only banned (with a snarky ban message) but accused of being a TERF. TAMMY WAS A TRANS WOMAN. She was eventually unbanned and the conversation got turned into "Making allowances for our Neurodivergent members" which is basically saying "You were in the wrong but it's okay because you're a r*tard."

Half of the people in our DnD server who were active in Hexbear would eventually be banned; most (myself included) just stopped using it at some point.

For what it's worth, as long as we get to keep our downvotes and I don't have to NSFW-tag my meatposting, I don't really mind, if anything it'll be fun to laugh at them when they come in here and complain.

I really think you're onto something - just the headline (and, remember, the vast majority of people only read the headlines of articles - so the headline is where the company gets the information they want to convey to as many eyes as possible) calls the company:

• Dying
• Fraudulent
• Anti-Privacy
• Anti-American

Just to give a potential shareholder as many reasons as possible to decide "I no longer wish to support this company/I want to get out before this company fails".

Maybe TEMU is a bad company with a bad product, but it's worthless arguing about whether or not this is the case when the article itself cares very little about making concrete points and has an ulterior motive in publishing the article.

I work in the meat department and you cannot imagine how often I get someone from a different part of the store bringing me something (like a pet bringing me a present) like "Oh yeah I found this 10 lb. pork butt behind the cheezits" or "This tenderloin fell behind the register and we only noticed it because it started to smell" (real stories)

There are far easier, more secure ways for people sharing, say, child porn to do so than hosting a Lemmy instance. The only real benefit of a Lemmy instance would be the ease of use.

A Lemmy instance is just a website, possibly running on someone's basement server rack. There's no way for any authority to stop them from hosting child porn on that server, unless that authority is (1). Their ISP or (2). The police.

Lemmy (or, rather, ActivityPub) is just an internet protocol, like Email. You can't stop someone from hosting child porn on a Lemmy instance just like you can't stop someone from sending child porn over email. This is not a reason that Lemmy should not exist in the same way it's not a reason for secure, encrypted email to not exist. Enforcement falls to traditional, (supposedly) accountable authorities, which is much better than it falling to administrators of a private company.

One of the best parts of this - especially if the trend continues - is that it makes the "Extinguish" part of a possible "Embrace, Expand, Extinguish" attack by Meta's Threads more difficult.

Cutting off access to a bunch of tiny self-hosted private instances won't even ping on their radar. But cutting off federation with official government platforms? That's different.

Turned the screen upside down with the keyboard shortcut (whatever it is)

A friend of mine just opened up the Spanish teacher's tower while she was out of the room and stole her RAM. He was in IT and was the student assigned to try and fix it too, which was hilarious.