I’m sorry it played out that way for you, but even so, what you’re advocating for hurts people too. Even if that’s not your intention, it still does, and I think that’s something that should be part of your consideration when approaching this topic.

I’m sorry it hurt you, but I’m not going to ignore stuff that hurts my community

The first half of your post is you talking about trauma you’ve received from other people, telling you that you’re wrong/evil/broken/perverted etc.

The second half of your post is explaining how you think it’s ok for you to do the same thing to others, because you do it “for the right reasons”

When you confront a bigot with transphobia pushed to the extreme, what you do is add to the trauma that every trans person already has to deal with daily. You don’t magically convert someone from bigotry. Bigots aren’t bigots because they reasons their way in to bigotry, and so you can’t stop them from being bigots by reasoning them out of it.

Folks like you and the hundred other people also “just asking questions” or playing devils advocate" and expecting trans people to engage in a debate as to whether or not we actually deserve equal rights is exactly why this shit never works.

It’s interesting to you because it’s purely intellectual. To the person having to endlessly argue that they do in fact deserve equal rights, it’s a shit fucking experience that we actively seek to disengage from when possible, because it’s all around us, all the time.

You see, I’m an anarchist. I trust in the power of people to self-organize, self-regulate, and self-police. I am philosophically opposed to whole instances making the call to defederate from another no matter how Nazi or capitalist that instance is.

That’s great, but it’s not for everyone. What you’re saying here is that when bigots appear, every member of the minorities they target needs to individually block the troll, which they can only do after they’ve been exposed to the bigotry, and which doesn’t help them at all in the future when the troll moves to a new throw away account.

Counter intuitively, what you’re asking for is exactly how you create spaces that actively discourage diversity.

Yep!

Gotosocial has a setting in development that is designed to baffle bots that don’t respect robots.txt. FediDB didn’t know about that feature and thought gotosocial was trying to inflate their stats.

In the arguments that went back and forth between the devs of the apps involved, it turns out that FediDB was ignoring robots.txt. ie, it was badly behaved

Big uptick for us at bhzon recently, but a degree of magnitude less than this

I see plenty of content from people I don’t follow because people I do follow have boosted it

Interesting. I feel like that might be less of an issue for the microblog fediverse though? It doesn’t have the same problem with content generation

A nazi sympathising president was voted in, because the overton window has shifted sufficiently to the right to allow that to happen.

The US has a nazi sympathising president, backed by a billionaire who gives nazi salutes in public. So I don’t agree that saying the US is to the right of most of the world is incorrect.

Add me to the list. Not helped by the fact that “-ik” is a common russian suffix.

I’m not saying that if you don’t want to destroy capitalism that you’re not left. I’m saying that the perspective that reddit itself was “definitely left of center” is not a widely shared perspective, and if you believe that reddit of all places was left of center, then lemmy, which actually is left of center, is going to feel very left of center.

That’s an interesting idea. I was wondering how it would scale, but as the network grows, even if it just grabbed some random stuff from remote instances, it would still help it grow by giving the local instance plenty of content to seed from

Reddit was only ever left of center for Americans. To many/most non Americans, America consists of a far right party and a center to center right party.

What you’re seeing is the result of a platform that wasn’t first created by and for American audiences, and whose initial takeup wasn’t dominated by American perspectives.

It’s really hard with small, starting instances.

Basically, the only content that gets federated to you is content produced by someone that a person on your instance follows. And once it federates to you, it becomes searchable and viewable to other members on your instance. Which means that the more people you have, the more content gets federated too you, and the easier it is for your users to find new content.

And new users that no one on your instance follows at all won’t appear to any of your users in searches etc, which is where “boosting” a post comes in. If I post a photo, and no one on your instance follows me, none of your users will see it. But if someone that they do follow, follows me and likes my photo, they “boost” it, and then it appears in the timelines of people that follow them. And then once a single person on your instance starts following me, my future content will start federating to you.

Which means that as an admin, the best thing you can do is start up a seed account, and just follow lots and lots of people. Follow random people. Follow anyone and everyone, just so you get a critical mass of content sliding to your instance.

This is a problem that all fediverse platforms suffer from. The initial hump to get good visibility of federated content is a challenge. Once you cross it, you’re fine, but to cross it, you either need to be patient and give it time, or you need to artificially kickstart it

There are upsides and downsides to such an approach.

We admin several instances for example, because we are trying to create safe spaces for queer folk and want to foster those communities. We pay out of our own pockets to do so.

I’ve got no interest in running a generic piece of network infrastructure that can be used by bigots just as readily as the people that they harass.

The people that do want to run that are “free” speech types, which is how you end up with nostr

Which instance/picture issue?

June 4, 2023: First mention of “threadiverse” I can find on Lemmy

Yep, there had been zero discussions about it until that point that I had seen, which is why I posted that thread asking the question!

This is such a strange take to me.

I was on the broader fediverse for a year or so before lemmy took off, and I got used to the very strong left leaning environment I found there, where compassion for your impact on the people around you was built in to the norms of many of the communities. I wasn’t used to it, but I was so glad to have found it.

And then lemmy happened. And unlike the rest of the fediverse, which was largely populated by people escaping twitter because it had been taken over by a fascist, the lemmy population was largely people escaping reddit because they could no longer use 3rd party apps. And the difference in ideology between those two groups is night and day.

To me, the broader fediverse feels left wing and comfortable. Lemmy feels centrist, where half of my time as an admin is banning trolls and bigots spreading hate.

tl;dr - Your definition of leftist is not my definition of leftist.