I’ll repeat a few things I’ve been saying about this. To keep it short: less verbose:

What people call “toxicity” online relies heavily on irrationality, from the aggressor and/or the target. And politics raises the stakes of everything, so irrationality + political engagement is specially prone to generate catty behaviour, name calling, uncalled combativeness, and all that crap.

Now look at social media. You’ll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.

Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.

Aga Te Eme Eli [Brazilian Portuguese]

“Agá Tê Eme Ele”. The last letter is “e”, and the diacritics are kind of a big deal.

Note the spelling is the same in the European standard, so that “Brazilian” can be safely removed.

The thing with campism is, that it’s a trap: you’re walking through a path you need to, doing steps towards what you believe to be the right direction, then you step on the trap. And when you notice “fuck, I’m trapped!”, it’s already too late - you’re inside.

For some Marxists, I think it’s multiple levels of mistaking the means for the end, and making the means the new end:

1. We need freedom, peace and human dignity…
2. so we need the fruits or our labour…
3. so we need a stateless society…
4. so we need a transitory state to reach communism…
5. so we need to defend that transitory state, as well as associated ideologies…
6a. so we need to fight against NATO…
7a. so we need to ally ourselves to NATO’s enemies…
8a. so we need to defend our allies against threats…
9a. so we need to shield our allies against criticism.\

Each of that steps, when taken in isolation, is rational. However if you follow all of them, you end in campism - defending things like Czar Putler’s Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, even if Putin himself is shitting on human dignity, freedom and peace (and that’s literally our goal!). I see things like this all the time while lurking in Hexbear, and specially from Hexbear members outside their instance. Some might say “no, I’m just doing critical support!”, but, well… we know it’s already way past critical support.

Interesting to note the same ones doing this sort of campism see no problem with something like this:

5. (same as above) so we need to defend that transitory state, as well as associated ideologies…
6b. so we need to remain united…
7b. so we need to denounce any group breaking off the unity.

That’s the part they start shitting on you anarchists, or us Trotskyists.

A divide like this happened among anarchists in the first world war too.

The ghost of that second international will still haunt us for a long time…

Although (even here I cannot allow myself to rush to judgement in order to say that!? 😜) perhaps that is an oversimplification since we all can fall prey to biases in our thinking at some point along our chain of thinking. It is just that some people actually seem to care about that while others not so much; read that as in: not at all.

Exactly. Some details will be always missing; but a good person is supposed at least looks for them, instead of actively trying to shove them under the rug so they reach some dichotomic “us vs. them” view of the world.

[.ml vs. .world admin teams]

I do agree .ml is way worse when it comes to transparency; for example, they see no problem on labelling criticism against the Russian government as “bigotry”. It’s still far from ideal in .world’s case; for example, when the topic is Palestine.

And people might say “well, those are local mods, not the admin team”, but IMO the admin team should be partially responsible for what mods do.

As for leftist, I no longer feel comfortable discussing […]

No worries - I get it. I didn’t tell you my whole political instance either, for the same reason - if I were to say everything I think about politics in Lemmy, I’d get the federal cops giving me a visit.

I’d say the first one is lefter than the second, but you can still go further left: instead of having commensurate accountability for powerful people, have no powerful people at all.

Yup, and I do think the community’s existence is a godsend. The problem is not that comm, it’s me, you know?

Even without English doing something similar, as the video mentions, this is a lot like Indo-European languages insistently marking subject attributes in the verb:

• person - “I go” vs. “he goes” (English)
• number - “parla” vs. “parlano” (Italian; he says vs. they say)
• gender - “mówił” vs. “mówiła” (Polish; he spoke vs. she spoke)

Like, it looks like the inverse phenomenon, but it’s actually the same thing - you’re plopping info from one part of speech into another, because they’re supposed to go together anyway.

Remember that Alt Right Playbook video about the Ship of Theseus? That’s the sort of oversimplification you see both in witch hunts and in purity testing: A is almost identical to B, B to C, […], X to Y, Y to Z, so people oversimplify it as “A is equal to Z”. So if A is bad, Z is equally bad: not worse, not better, there’s only “bad” and “good”.

And as the video shows, it’s in almost every social media platform. Plus in Reddit; I think people simply brought this into a more politicised platform, but it’s the same irrationality. It is a Reddit (and Twitter, Tumblr, FB, and now Lemmy) problem.

Then you get the .ml admin team* nurturing a politicised platform; that’s great but it* never nurtured the rationality necessary to employ that politicisation well. Perhaps on purpose, or perhaps because they didn’t notice the need, dunno.

So, they let that Reddit problem in, and much like an invasive species, it’s hard to get rid of it after some time goes by. And I do blame the .ml admin team for the situation, like you do, but for a different reason.

Additionally, I also blame the .world admin team*; unlike the .ml it chased growth instead of politicisation, but still no rationality.

*note I’m assigning the blame to the entities. It’s messier to blame the individuals, as we never know their full history. Plus humans gotta be flawed.

Thankfully Rimu seems to be well aware of the problem, based on the sidebar of PieFed’s main instance.

one point: I know you are a leftist, and at one point I thought I was too, but compared to the likes of hexbear and lemmygrad.ml and even lemmy.ml we are flaming right-wingers, I believe? if you [checks notes] “have a bank account”, then you aren’t leftist enough for them

I’m not sure, but I think they consider me worse than a right-winger: in their minds I’m probably a weird mix of Trotskyist with anarchist, two groups they dislike because neither plays well with their “left unity” campist trap. If that’s correct it’s hilarious, because it’s pretty much accurate!

“I’m doing the no poop challenge until Luigi is free!”

Jokes aside… it depends on how you define left/right. Political behaviour and ideology aren’t just a simple axis, not even two; they’re multidimensional. And, for me, if I’m forced to analyse it 1D, it’s all about how you distribute power: the left wants to spread it as much as reasonably possible, the right wants to concentrate it.

So, for me, the most left-wing thing someone could say is simply “nobody should have more power over another than the other has over them”. Or something like this. Note how this encompasses rather well both anarchism and Marxism.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’m worried the next wave might make Lemmy even worse than Reddit in this aspect.

Lemmy encourages politicisation. It’s generally a good thing, but politics raise the stakes of everything, so being political and irrational is way worse than being unengaged and irrational.

What would happen if you get an influx of people from a platform that actively encourages irrationality, landing into one where a huge amount of people are politicised? A: newcomers who were “eating crayons” in Reddit are given a box with 48 huge crayons, and competing to see which one eats them the fastest.

I genuinely hate karma, I think it encourages mindlessly posting common denominator stuff, but I wouldn’t be opposed to that if handled like Slashdot handles it - it doesn’t give you a karma number, it only tells you your karma is “good” or “bad”.

Lemmy was only ever going to work as a tiny forum board - it simply refuses to grow.

I feel like part of that is scope: Lemmy as a software is trying too hard to be “federated Reddit”, filling the exact same niche as Reddit, to the point advertising Lemmy means “to make it appealing for Reddit users”. And, in the process, losing access to potential new userbases.

Think on it this way: most of what we do here is to discuss things. Like in Reddit and in forums, but also in comment sections of random sites. Why isn’t Lemmy trying to capitalise on that, and eat a chunk of Disqus’ pie too? Fuck, we could have Lemmy built into the discussion sections for random wikis out there. (And if not Lemmy, at least some ActivityPub software that integrates really well with Lemmy.) It would be an amazing way to bring in new fresh blood without it being necessarily from that shithole, or social media platforms in general.

Brace yourself: it is about to get worse. r/RedditAlternatives has some interesting posts saying how Reddit is about to ditch their modmail in exchange for their “chat” function (that has never worked correctly… ever).

*rolls eyes* “Great”.

I might be wrong, but I think this whole issue boils down to four vices brought from Reddit: assumptions, decontextualisation, genetic fallacy, oversimplification. Those four on their own already make social media hostile, but if you couple them with political engagement (otherwise a great thing), you’ll get people who genuinely see no difference between “they euthanised a 11yo dog with cancer” and “they kill puppies”.

Or between “free Luigi” and “$CEO_name needs a Luigi in their life”. Both show support to the same cause, but only the later can be reasonably understood as a call to violence (to the point it’d bring the admin troubles.)

It sounds like a good idea, if you have the time+skill+money to do it.

Odds are that your instance won’t be big. But at the same time, you’d have an easier time moderating it, specially if you only federate it with “cleaner” instances. (With “cleaner” meaning “that don’t post content you’d remove”).

Good-looking dark elves >> homunculi 100% of the time. Plus Takuto got some great early game bonus, research tends to be a big deal in this sort of game.

Those flatearth weirdos would rather admit that the Earth is hollow than that it’s a normal (albeit flawed) full sphere.

“What’s your favourite magical girl?” “Frieren, of course.”

The link doesn’t load for me, it shows an error page. Thankfully the archive has the text in question.

Interesting run-down of the history of the expansion of the language. I must admit that I know practically nothing about Africa’s linguistic landscape (specially not for modern languages!), so for me it was highly informative.

But in the mid-19th century, as demand for ivory and enslaved people expanded, local trade routes in central Africa became incorporated into a global network centred around the Indian Ocean.

This reminds me Nahuatl and Tupi in the Americas - due to colonisation they also expanded a bit, over other local languages. But unlike Swahili their expansion was short-lived (eventually the Iberian crowns enforced Spanish and Portuguese).

I also recommend people who are interested in the language to give the Swahili grammar Wikipedia page a check, IMO it’s fascinating.

That’s a great summary. It covers practically all sources of inconsistency (sound changes, internal variation, etymological and fake etymological pressures, cosmetic-O).

Additionally there’s a small less-known rule that content words typically have 3+ letters, so sometimes you see “spurious” letters being added in. The link exemplifies it with ebb, add, egg, inn, bee, awe, buy, owe.

Julie and their son are démodé - Juma shows us the future! Glory! Fashion! Grass in the butt!

EDIT: what am I saying, mon Dieu? I didn’t realise Julie was going for a retro look!

Such acclaimed design deserves to be celebrated for more than just a fade!

Cute duo is cute. And they clearly feel safe with each other, enough to play fight.

Gotta be honest with you: I’m partially at fault of this, too.

It’s simply too easy to hop into [email protected] and criticise the decisions others take. I do this all the time, but I almost never take into account their burdens.