I miss some of the more casual subreddits, and somehow Lemmy is even more of an echo chamber than Reddit is, but otherwise yeah, Lemmy is fine. Especially with the Photon frontend.

The sooner the Islamic Regime in Tehran falls the better. The Iranian people deserve freedom.

I'm glad about this. There's clearly major issues with traffic in that area, but why on earth would the solution be to build a huge tunnel so close to one of our most ancient and iconic heritage sites? Think of all the archaeological relics this might have destroyed.

Just build a new road further away from Stonehenge!

I just do not understand how you can simultaneously claim to be a British patriot and openly support the ideology of Nazi Germany.

Defeating the Nazis was Britain's finest hour and something we should all be enormously proud of.

Do these 'patriotic' neo-Nazis wish that Britain had lost?

There’s a lot of simmering anger, resentment and frustration in many communities in this country. It’s been building for years. The stabbing of those poor girls at their dance class by the son of Rwandan immigrants seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

This isn’t just the EDL (an organisation which disbanded more than a decade ago), this is thousands of English people who are furious. We can try and understand the sources of that fury, and then begin the work to resolve it, or we’ll keep getting these sorts of horrid outbreaks of ugly violence.

Appalling but antisemitism is becoming increasingly mainstream in Europe unfortunately

Interestingly, the European Union has been doing exactly this for about a year now on an experimental basis.

https://commission.europa.eu/get-involved/engage-eu-policymaking/social-media-connect-european-commission_en

https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/140088/eu-joins-mastodon-social-network-sets-up-its-own-server

https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2024/edps-decentralised-social-media-pilot-end-successful-story_en

Good, for months now he's openly expressed his support and encouragement for a proscribed terrorist organisation, i.e. Hamas. He's not ambiguous about this: he thinks October 7th was great and that Hamas should do it again. He literally travelled to Iran and posted photos next to IRGC rockets and missiles with the caption "Long live the resistance".

He's not a journalist. He's a vicious antisemite who takes pleasure in attacking Jews and is a proud and unrepentant promoter and supporter of terrorism.

Throw away the key. I don't know why he's allowed into the country at all.

They just need a hug

The way that Musk is riling up and egging on these rioters on the world's biggest social media platform is really frightening and dangerous. The guy's in total control of the algorithms that control people's feeds - including the sorts of thugs and bigots turning out on these race riots.

I think we really are going to need a much more grown up national conversation about regulation of social media companies and the damage they're doing to our democracy.

There are also clearly some very profound community tensions which we're going to have to address on some fundamental level in the long-run through processes of deradicalisation, integration, education and community cohesion strategies. But that still seems like a discussion that's necessary to have but maybe after we've locked up these Neo-Nazis.

Aside from the points made so far:

Expect it to be overwhelmingly very left-wing and radically progressive on social values.

You will get downvoted for expressing opposing or even skeptical opinions, often brutally. It doesn't really matter, Lemmy's 'Karma' system doesn't work like Reddit's does, but just expect that.

My account is like 12 hours old but I was trying out Lemmy on other servers well over a year ago. Nothing about that has changed.

You might feel similarly to the majority and therefore you'll have no problem.

If you don't, eh, well. There we both are.

Also, yeah, post links and create subreddits about stuff you care about. These sorts of alternatives only live if people engage with them.

Neither Mastodon or Bluesky ever really clicked with me, although I’ve tried and will continue to use both, but I enjoy using Threads because there’s so much cool non-political content there. My feed is archaeologists or astronomists, historians writers and photographers. It being able to connect up to the Fediverse is cool too.

Plenty of people are scared of the two assasinations of MPs by right wing lunatics.

One of them was a far-right lunatic, but the man who assassinated David Amess was a London-born radicalised Muslim affiliated with ISIL

Yay. Photon is by far the best imo

Also strongly recommend Photon users change the theme to Catppuccin, it's such a lovely colour scheme

One obvious reason the author doesn't explore is that neither Wales nor Scotland has ever experienced mass immigration nor profound demographic changes in their population.

Scotland remains 92.87% white (2022), Wales 94.2% (2021), compared to England at 81% (2021).

In Scotland, 2.2% identity as Muslim, 0.4% as Hindu, 0.1% as Jewish.

In England, 6.7% identify as Muslim, 1.8% as Hindu, 0.5% as Jewish.

Scotland and Wales are therefore much more homogenous as populations. They're whiter, less religious, and from similar backgrounds. They're not as diverse as England is and therefore don't have the challenges of community cohesion and social solidarity that England does.

It therefore doesn’t have the levels of intra- and inter-communal diversity which can provoke the kinds of tensions we've seen playing out in the streets of England over recent years, whether in Hindutva-Muslim ethnoreligious violence in Leicester or these anti-Islam and racist riots in recent weeks.

Scotland's sense of its national identity has also not been challenged to the same extent as in England. Nor has a patriotic attitude towards Scottishness been derided as hateful, bigoted or xenophobic, as it has in England. (This sometimes leads to highly funny events, though, like when ScotNats try to claim they were victims of the British Empire.)

IIRC, since privatisation the total amount of water company debt is roughly equivalent to the total amount paid out in shareholder dividends in the same timeframe

Well, bit of good news for you there – included in Labour's Kings Speech was a bill to make CEOs of water companies individually criminally liable in egregious cases of sewage pollution etc.

I mean, they're pretty much about to go under - do they even have the £104m to pay?

Yeah probably. Most ‘big’ accounts aren’t on Mastodon anyway though, they’re on Threads.

I think bundling the two together obscures more than it illuminates. I don’t think it’s any less serious (in fact in some regards it’s more dangerous), just that it doesn’t fit with normal far-right characteristics. To take one important difference, the far-right are ultra-nationalists, while Islamic fundamentalists are strictly anti-nationalist – they don’t recognise the legitimacy of nation-states to exist at all. They also tend to be pretty unconcerned with race or ethnicity in themselves, whereas that’s obviously a major thing for Neo-Nazis and other Fascists. And it makes it harder to identify and address the problem, because the sources and drivers of far-right extremism are separate and often unrelated to the sources of Islamic fundamentalism and radicalisation.