Schadrach

Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.

Mindjourney can make incredible images, but it can’t make art.

Mostly because you’re defining “art” in such a way that being produced by MidJourney disqualifies it automatically.

…and let’s be fair, it’s an ad so the corpo bullshit is mandatory.

It’ll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play… once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere… we’re locked in. We’re committed. We can’t escape. They’ve got us by the balls.

Sure you can escape, at least for any future purchases. There are other stores and you can take your business there, and the moment Steam does any serious enshittification under new management post-Gaben those other stores are going to be trying to pull customers from them hard. Likely to EGS or GOG (probably EGS unless GOG makes a big move at that point, like bringing back and expanding GOG Connect).

A couple of years down the road from there and Steam is known as that thing you only use to play older games and exclusives.

Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?

Any idea which subs are banning like that already?

and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading

I’d say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they’re OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.

I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption.

Why? They explicitly haven’t baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don’t have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.

The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.

You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?

Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org.

Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.

Communities work the same way - so for example politics@lemmy.ml, politics@beehaw.org and politics@lemmy.world are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).

This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.

One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).

I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have whatever@otherserver.net instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.

It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.

At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.

Really no different than Reddit in that regard. At least we don’t have people automatically banning you for having ever interacted with specific other communities yet, at least I don’t think we do yet.

EDIT: Shit, somehow I forgot the don’t. Teach me not to proofread.

H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn’t find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.

I actually had someone whose family member died of Covid tell me that his brother-in-law didn’t really die of Covid, he died of something else, because it’s all overblown and the hospitals are doing a similar scam to this myth (i.e. making it out as a bigger deal than it needs to be.)

That sort of thing goes around here a lot too, usually framed in terms of “He didn’t die of COVID, but if you die from any cause whatsoever while you also have COVID they’ll count it as dying of COVID to make the COVID numbers bigger.” It usually falls apart when you ask why they want the COVID numbers to be bigger than they really are.

We always have been, it’s just that the begging started out looking like math and has gradually gotten more abstract over time. We’ve just reached the point where we’ve explained to it in mathematical terms how to let us beg in natural language in certain narrow contexts.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. I’m totally fine with about half of the directions given, and the rest are baking in right wing talking points.

It must be confusing to be told to be unbiased, but also to adopt specific biases like that. Also, I find it amusing to tell it not to repeat any part of the prompt under any circumstances but also to tell it specifically what to say under certain circumstances, which would require repeating that part of the prompt.

More like temporarily inconvenienced kiwi farms. It’s still a thing and still accessible.

Meh, I’ve been able to do all of those in modded Minecraft for years.

Not that I agree with the morality of what Nintendo is doing but their claim is that the emulator can’t be used for anything meaningful besides piracy

Homebrew, game modding, etc…

Specifically that you have gone out of your way to defend feminism and express disdain for anyone that isn’t all on board with feminism or sees feminists as often being obstacles to dealing with men’s issues and then use the CCMF shelter as your first example of the services available. CCMF (and their parent org CAFE) who have been criticized, challenged, etc at basically every step until fairly recently and that nearly exclusively by those doing so under the banner of feminism.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/controversial-mens-help-centre-opens-in-toronto-183022931.html https://globalnews.ca/news/1676642/controversial-centre-for-men-opens-in-toronto-amid-criticism/

Those are regarding their men’s help center that predates the shelter.

There’s a feminist blogger they quote in that second article with lines like: “I think they work really hard to discredit the feminist movement and to kind of take back a lot of the gains that women have made” and “They’re basically an anti-feminist organization and they’re kind of masquerading this as ‘oh well, it’s just for disenfranchised men’ when they kind of have an ulterior agenda.” Do those statements sound similar to things that have been said in this thread? Including I believe by you?

Going further back their parent organization CAFE got it’s first taste of both trying to touch on men’s issues and also being protested by feminists when they tried to do a series of talks on men’s issues in 2012 at University of Toronto. Here’s a video of the first such talk, so you can see the kind of thing they were protesting (warning: this is the entire talk so it’s two and a half hours long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6w1S8yrFz4

I think the trick here is you’re using “men’s shelter” to mean “homeless shelter that accepts men” (which Men’s Shelter Hamilton is) while they are talking about shelters for abused men - there’s a significant difference in what sort of services the two groups need. Same reason why no one argues that homeless shelters that accept women remove the need for domestic violence services for women, they aren’t the same thing and don’t need the same services. You can count the number of shelters for male victims of DV in North America on one hand with fingers left over, or at least you could last time I checked which was ~2020 (at the time it was two in the US and one in Canada, the CCMF shelter had just opened).

Your CCMF link isn’t to find the nearest shelter to you (which would be helpful if there were several options), but to talk about and start the intake process for the CCMF shelter. That the page title is “Family Shelter Registration Form” and they talk about “the” shelter should be your first hints. Here’s the poster for the facility: https://menandfamilies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Poster-FamilyShelterCCMF.pdf

8chan was where everyone went during gamergate because they thought Moot was a feminist/ anti freedom of speech.

…they thought this because Moot banned the topic from 4chan. Which…isn’t a thing that happens often.

A lot of feminists in the US supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made women eligible for the draft. The fact that women would’ve been eligible for the draft was used by anti-feminist groups as a fake feminist argument against the ERA.

Most MRAs would LOVE to see the ERA passed, so long as it was passed without that rider that basically enshrined any kind of traditional benefits for women. And by that I mean that were the ERA to pass groups like NCFM would be launching entire fleets of lawsuits nationwide.

But then, there are all kinds of laws I’m amazed manage to stand without being tossed on equal protection grounds, even without the ERA.

For example, all the laws that exist to punish men who fail to register for Selective Service (because charging them with failure to register is so unpopular it hasn’t been enforced since the 80s), by requiring you provide proof of registration in order to get access to various benefits or jobs if male. Meaning (for example) male applicants literally have one more requirement to get state jobs or be admitted to state colleges in my state.

Or the Affordable Care Act, since the contraception coverage mandate applies to all categories (but not all brands within each category) of women’s contraception, including barrier methods but do not apply at all to any form of men’s contraception (even noting there are currently only two approved by the FDA at all - condoms and vasectomy).

I’ve also heard plenty of feminists complain about “men’s” and “women’s” sanitation products, including men for whom women’s razors work better and women for whom men’s razors work better.

They were talking about sanitation jobs, not sanitation products. Feminists routinely fight for equality in high-status cushy office jobs, but not so much in things like sanitation workers which are also heavily male dominated. It’s just another example where equality is great so long as being more equal benefits women, and if it doesn’t then we should just ignore it or even fight against it (see shared custody laws).