No - they're blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse through threads.

They're entirely welcome to access the fediverse through any of the countless instances that are not owned by grotesquely destructive megacorporations.

Funny thing - the last time I saw a promising forum destroyed, the beginning of the end was when people got all in a panic about some purported external threat and started demanding a "united front" to combat it. Then they started calling for retribution against anyone who didn't join them. Then they just kept fanning the flames of hostility against anyone on the forum that they decided wasn't sufficiently devoted to their cause, and the forum ended up tearing itself apart from within.

Because it's never let me down.

I started using it pretty much from the beginning and have never had a reason to stop. When Chrome came along, I thought the whole idea of using a browser made by Google was obviously awful, so I just kept using Firefox. And I'm still using it.

I agree, mostly.

My parents owned a kennel and bred and boarded and trained dogs, so we had at least a dozen or so full-time residents and generally another dozen or so being boarded and/or trained. I literally grew up surrounded by dogs and I've always loved them.

BUT, dog owners, at this point, are fucking awful, and that's led to a whole lot of awful dogs, exactly as you so colorfully and accurately say.

That's not uncommon in trades - plumbing, construction, auto mechanics and the like.

There are tricks and techniques that one can learn over time to make things easier or more efficient, but they're often complex enough or require enough skill and experience that if you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to unnecessarily screw things up trying. So new people are taught the standard, safe, dependable way of doing things, even if that's not the way the old hands do it.

Edit to add: in a moral context rather than a practical one, I don't think it ever is appropriate. IMO, the first requirement for any moral stance is that one abide by it oneself, and unless and until one has managed to accomplish that most basic of tasks, one has no standing by which to even meaningfully comment on other people's behavior.

To borrow the new age term, an old soul.

There are just people who possess a sort of cynically detached understanding of the world and people. They aren't fired by largely pointless passion or desire, they're intelligent and perceptive enough to generally understand things and emotionally mature enough to generally accept them and they have a way of just sort of gliding through life, maintaining a relatively even keel instead of getting distracted and disconcerted by irrelevancies.

Every single person I've ever known who was like that has been or is special to me.

I sure as hell hope not.

To me, that's like looking around a great little cafe with terrific food and saying, "Do you think this could ever become McDonalds?"

Why would I want that?

A link on Reddit.

It was immediately after spez's fatuous AMA. I wasn't specifically planning to leave Reddit, but I had never really been satisfied there, so I was open to the idea. And I ran across a link to join-lemmy.org, so I followed it, just to see what it was about. I had no idea then that following that link would end up being the last thing I did on Reddit, but that's the way it worked out.

Statelessness is held to be necessary because, in the simplest terms, power corrupts.

If we institutionalize authority - if we create a structure in which authority is vested and positions within that structure that are held by specific individuals - then sooner or later (and history has shown that with communism it's generally sooner) self-serving fuckwads will capture those positions, then bend them to serve their own interests and the interests of their cronies and patrons, to the detriment of everyone else.

And yes - there are practical problems with not having institutionalized authority.

But the thinking of those who advocate for statelessness is that those problems can be, and would be, solved if people had the opportunity. But first we have to get the self-serving fuckwads out of the way, and the only way to do that is to not have institutionalized authority in the first place.

It's funny, because I've often wondered just how it was that Germany came to be dominated by the Nazis, because it just seems too insane to even be possible.

And now I'm watching the same basic thing play out in the US, and I still don't understand how it's happening, and it still seems too insane to even be possible.

Yeah.

You know - I've been thinking the same thing about water. There must be a team of people all working together to push the idea that it's wet. Why else would so many different people all say the same thing?

I sincerely believe that if any aliens are observing us, they've concluded that we actually value and reward insanity and loathe and punish sanity.

And they wouldn't be entirely wrong...

Tremors. It's just pretty much flawless.

I don't bother with the right-wing propaganda networks so I don't know, but I can't imagine how they might spin this to blame Biden when his administration hasn't even been involved in the process.

The whole thing hinges on a purely internal conflict not just within Congress, but in the House specifically. How does that even colorably come to be blamed on an entirely separate branch?

I don't doubt that the propaganda outlets and the grifters will simply lie, and conjure up some entirely different account of things that won't match up at all with the plain objective reality of the whole thing stalling because a group of hard right House members are demanding concessions and refusing to vote in favor of a budget that doesn't include them, but I can't even imagine what it will be, since it will have to be essentially completely false, from start to finish.

Unfortunately, I also don't doubt that some significant part of the Republican base will believe whatever it is, since they've been so thoroughly indoctrinated and made so subject to their emotions that they literally can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Still though, even with as confused and misled and blinded by emotion as much of the Republican base is, and as brazenly dishonest as the propagandists and grifters that are profiting off of them are, I can't imagine how it might be the case that Biden will get the blame for this. It's not just that it's not narrowly true, but that there isn't even a colorable basis, as far as I can see, to even pretend that it is.

It doesn't matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.

You say that you're "well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy," but apparently you really haven't thought it through.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed "we" can do anything.

The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.

Invisibility is the defining characteristic of Generation X.

When Douglas Coupland popularized the term in his novel of the same name, that was an awful lot of the point. Generation X was the generation that just sort of fell through the cracks, lost in the shadow of the baby boomers.

Over the years, we've just adapted to it, and really, at this point, it's sort of nice to be forgotten. We can just sit on the sidelines, munching on popcorn, offering up a bit of snidely cynical commentary and reminiscing about great music, great times and great hair.

I don't even understand this headlong rush for an app. And especially being so desperate for an app that you'd use one that embeds ads unless you pay to remove them.

It just seems completely backwards to me.

With Reddit, it made sense - it was awful in a mobile browser, the official app was complete garbage, and either way it was buried in ads So you could (and I did) use a third party app and get a cleaner and more useful interface and no ads.

But Lemmy's already fine in a browser and it's ad-free. So what's the point?

I could maybe see, somewhere down the road when the apps are complete and established, it might be interesting to experiment with some and maybe find one that's got just the features I like most. But that's not what I'm seeing. What I'm seeing are people desperately clamoring for an app - any app - it doesn't matter how primitive and janky it is - they just desperately need to have an app right now, today, this instant. As if lemmy is completely unusable without one.

And it's just... not that way at all. Sure, it could be better, but it's fine.

So I just don't get it.

We're dumb animals, not much different from other dumb animals.

If squirrels had news media, they could have a story that says, "Thousands of squirrels are lining up to try to cross busy streets in front of cars."

And some number of squirrels would read that and think, "What the hell is wrong with them?"

Two favorites that come to mind:

Contact

Baby Driver

The instant that Google announced that they were making a browser, it was absolutely guaranteed that it was going to become what it has become. It was only a matter of how long they were going to spend dangling bait before they sprang the trap.