OpenStars

(Translation: Klingon/pIqaD: Qapla'!)

I would actually prefer to be exposed to multiple POVs wherever possible, if it were delivered in a respectful manner. Likewise I enjoy learning more about various religions, and cultures, and all manner of things. However, I must draw the line against trolling behaviors. So for me, it is not just that they contain "content that I may not agree with", but that they outright encourage behaviors that have driven me and so many others away.

I got my start on Kbin.social, before it repeatedly kept going down for a week at a stretch, multiple times, and they had already defederated from those places, so fortunately I got to be exposed to the friendlier side of the Fediverse first, so I knew what was possible. But then after switching to try a couple of Lemmy instances, I gave serious thought to leaving the Fediverse entirely. There is so much else that I could do with my time, you know!? Read books, watch videos (like Hank & John Greene's Crash Course series on YouTube), go outside and touch grass - I don't need to be arguing with the emotional equivalent of toddlers online, acting as the recipient for their emo-venting aka vomiting all over me rather than having true conversations aka "communication".

That said, I might understand what you mean about the memes - if they violate the community rules then they are being disrespectful to the recipients who would have to spend time reading them, rather than enjoyable content. And if there is enough spamming of such, it inches closer to "trolling" behaviors, as in the same kind even if not quite degree. Though oftentimes people from that server also engage in actual trolling as well, in the form of responses that do not care about how the recipient would like to receive.

Anyway, I left Reddit over that shit, and I would leave the Fediverse too if it came down to it, though fortunately it works to just block those 2-3 places and the rest becomes a MUCH better place to play around in!:-)

Thank you - I do try to make shorter replies but when there is much to be said, I don't want to shirk from it either! And those videos are PACKED with info, so hopefully a peek at the content first helps tantalize learning the full depth of what they offer:-).

For many people - in the USA most conservatives seem to be adopting this mindset, see e.g. Elon Musk's vision for "X" - such forms of argumentation is not a negative, it is the point.

Just like talking with toddlers (b/c it relates to both a capacity, and in a sense also their past choices as to how they want to live their lives, and yet at some point those choices become instantiated into their day-to-day activities to the point where the choice no longer presents itself, much like an addiction where you once chose it, but now it chooses you), your only choice is to put up with it or leave. You cannot have a "human" conversation with people who are not humane (either b/c they cannot or will not be thus, the difference arguably becomes moot when there is no functional distinction b/t them).

How much of that is due to it being one of the larger servers though? As well as one of the oldest. I don't know that much about it - there's the origin story but unlike searching for info about e.g. lemmy.world, I cannot readily find things about lemmy.ml like where it is located geographically. The closest description I've seen is here that only says "Server looks to be located in France". But who knows if that is true?

Anyway, you get to know the servers on Lemmy after awhile - like I've rarely if ever had an issue with anyone at all from mander.xyz, but then lemmy.world is a mixed bag (that one b/c it's so big), and lemmy.ml is decidedly lopsided. But it is not the only place that has trolls. Perhaps I will block it one day, but I did not want to take that extreme step without giving them as much of a chance as I could.

Which I did for both lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net as well - and ultimately decided that it was better for the sake of my sanity to block them than to leave Lemmy altogether (fortunately v.0.19 came out just then and made it possible and easy:-).

So now I want to tell people that they can DRAMATICALLY improve their experience on the Fediverse, just by blocking those 2-3 servers, in case it helps salvage their experience of it as well.

Open source software may be a good model to look at. People contribute bc they want to, regardless of any monetary remuneration.

But it's hard, and a for-profit corporation can often move forward more quickly to develop an objectively better project. Except even though they *could", they (usually) don't, and really they have zero reason to, bc their goal is to make a profit, not a product. Reddit vs. Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/etc. is one such example.

But it gets complicated bc of all the counterexamples, like at one time Google really was awesome, and free, so most of the open source projects did not push hard to replace it, bc it worked so well for so many. Similar to Lemmy I suppose - before the Rexit it had existed for many years, but it wasn't until that shakeup that it was propelled forward extremely quickly by the influx of developers, e.g. who made the front end apps. Before that, the Reddit experience was fairly good even if not great, so not as many people bothered.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Jon Stewart ironically fits that bill:-). Which brings up one reason why that tends not to happen: most people upon any brush with politics immediately want to get as far away from it as is humanly possible. Just running into Ted Cruz in the hallway may all be itself trigger that kind of flight response:-P.

So what "needs" to happen is not the same as what "will" happen. Always remember the implied second half of that type of sentence: "in order to survive, needs to happen". But not everyone gets what they need to survive, and the same holds true for nations.

Though the above two paragraphs may seem unlikely to be able to reconcile with what you said, there are ways - like a local project could be done by an NGO or even a non-/not-for-profit corporation, bypassing government entirely. Unfortunately, that power can be used to evil ends as well too:-(. But when it works - like Jon Stewart, and John Oliver - it can be extremely powerful!:-D

I doubt you can simply listen to someone online - maybe, but there's no accountability here and that seems like a hindrance. So maybe try to find an actual irl counselor? If you are part of any clubs like a religion then that often offers streamlined access.

I will offer one piece of direct advice though, not from myself as a good source but from someone who I have come to trust: maybe pause the dating scene. So many people try to rush into that, but if you haven't gotten yourself put together, then how are you going to offer to share your life with someone else? Depending on the circumstances ofc, like if someone was super awesome then they could help you, but it's a lot to put onto someone else, and isn't that a bit unfair to them? It seems kinder to both yourself to narrow your focus to getting your own life put together, and to others as well. If you are currently dating someone, note that I am not saying that you should immediately break up with them, it's just something to consider and make your own determination about what to do.

I have looked on Android Firefox, Mac OSX Firefox, Android Chrome, Mac OSX Chrome, and flipped from portrait to landscape, I checked multiple instances, and thereby multiple themes (my account normally uses darkly-compact). In several of these scenarios the image is resized to be "tiny" as in <1/20th of the screen width, and from there it ranges up to 1/3rd, or at the absolute widest ~3/4ths of the screen (someone else also replied to the person you replied to showing this screenshot demonstrating that width for them too).

Throughout all of this, the person you replied to has only managed to conjure up 3 facts, one being an extremely generic term "web browser", 1 seemingly objectively false ("giant"), and the other 1 at best seems unreproducible by anyone here ("full screen width").

In short, the person you replied to seems to be acting in a trolling manner, as in like a canonical Karen, which frankly does seem surprising given how clearly articulated the original message of theirs was. We would be happy to help them diagnose further but at this point they just seem to be venting - granted though, not so much in the message you replied to on its own.

Sadly true. Liberals are hampered by needing to remain correct, whereas conservatives can be moar free to do whatever is most effective (that is from a quote by my hero Jon Stewart btw - this is an homage not me claiming it as my own here:-D).

Though on both sides there are people who try to work within the system - e.g. AOC & Bernie Sanders - vs. those who attempt to go outside of it, like MTG & Matt Gaetz.

Jon Stewart spent most of his entire career railing against the Fox News, as he called it, "bullshit mountain", and there is very much evidence that its founder came from Russia with the express intention of making it that way. Or if not, then like Tucker Carlson, at least did not turn away free money when it was offered to him to act in a certain particular manner.

Though what I will point you to instead, b/c you seem like you will REALLY enjoy it, is the video series from Innuendo Studios called "The Alt-Right Playbook", which contains essentially the material from a college-level course in this exact subject matter, yet expressed in extremely accessible language by anyone willing to put in the effort to think it through. You should LOVE it!:-P It's entirely free too, though hopefully people donate to help him make more of such fantastic material.

Anyway, imagine if you will: a bird does not "know" how to build a nest, they just do it. If asked, a bird cannot explain the matters of structural integrity, materials resiliency, and so on, even if it somehow could speak (or like if you could read its thoughts). Even so, it manages to accomplish the task b/c of the instincts built into it - i.e., as Daniel Dennett explains (famous atheist apologetics philosopher, here I refer to his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, though the following is my paraphrase not direct quote), "Nobody is arguing that design work was not done, the question lies rather in who did that design work - a God or the blind natural forces of millions of years of evolution."

In short: conservatives can be quite effective, even without having the slightest clue of what precisely they are doing or why, as in they (or imagine another hypothetical example of a con-man or -woman) may not know the details of the underlying processes by which it works, yet they still recognize what works vs. does not, and act to exploit what they see. Those January 6th protesters, despite being traitors who tried to perform literally treasonous and fully murderous acts within Congress and the White House, at the same time also thought of themselves as "patriots" who were there to "defend the Constitution" - despite most never having read the actual primary document, or how incongruous those two thoughts would seem to anyone who gives the matter even 10 seconds of rational thought, yet despite that they literally believe both at the same time, and others who were not there choose to believe that it was "peaceful". The Alt-Right Playbook series explains how this can be accomplished, but even from what I have said so far, you can see that it works.

Another quick peek into it is that few people believe all the crazy stuff, nor is the goal (of those putting it out in the first place, e.g. many of the material has been directly traced to Russian interference e.g. anti-vax memes) even to get someone to truly believe even a single one of them. Rather, the goal is to foment distrust in the overall systems. Which let us be frank: the government truly is corrupt - the conservatives do not have to lie about that much at least - and so then that creates an opening with which they can further widen the divide, maybe even getting them to do something more drastic like secretly tamper with COVID vaccine stocks even in the midst of the pandemic. And then in the meantime, they vote Republican, which has the effect of halting aid to Ukraine, which furthers the Russian agenda - so despite the fact that whatever happens to us here in the USA may even be mostly irrelevant, still we (the general populace) have been used to further an agenda that is not our own. Yet, as time marches on, it might become so, and we may one day form an alliance together with Russia, rather than act to repel it, if Trump gets elected again. Russia is using a quite brilliant strategic maneuver there - what boggles my mind is that it is working. But, we (Americans) are weak as we have faced no true aggressors in most of our lifetimes - even Boomers grew up after WWII, and Korea and Vietnam were somewhat far-off affairs, as too was the Gulf War. We could not imagine a nation (Russia) wanting to literally eat us alive. So we seem to have not truly feared its influence over us anywhere close to the degree that we should have.

And that video series explains in large part why: b/c of the onion-layer effect whereby people get sucked in by the more inoffensive material, even while being groomed to be brought deeper in to the more insidious stuff later on, but only when they are ready do they finally start to realize that all their "joking" previously (like: "it's the fault of the Jews!:-P", which they did not truly believe... at the time) has, at first, a grain of truth inside of it, and then later, that it was never a joke to begin with at all. However, if they were to have been presented with the full Nazi/fascist agenda all at once, they would have turned it away, yet like a frog in a cooked pot (a false analogy btw - frogs are smart enough to jump out, it is people who are that dumb as to not!!) they continue to be changed by marinating in the shallower stuff, until as they get deeper and deeper over time, one day they finally are ready to accept the whole reality. Or not, but even so, them remaining in the shallower regions still helps further the agenda overall - e.g. in voting, and in being able to use those people like a magic story's mage or a necromancer uses a "meat shield": to deflect attention away from those who truly do believe.

Getting back to what you said: does Musk, or Trump, truly believe in what they are saying and doing? I would rather rephrase the question to be instead: does the authenticity of their belief systems even matter, when they are acting effectively in the services of the facists either way? At what point do they need to cross over to become a "true believer", when all along their actions were operationally indistinguishable from one anyway? Then, as you say there are people such as Greene, who regardless of their "true beliefs", are nonetheless useful to the cause.

I applaud your asking these questions - so few people do it seems. True answers are difficult to come by, requiring many hours (and days/weeks/months, maybe years?) of thought, though fortunately there are resources that can help speed that along, and yet how does one even find such things in this era of enshittification where you cannot trust ~~half~~ 90% of what you see & hear - but even so, I maintain that some things like that video series have the "ring of truth" about them, and that once you see the logic behind it, you can never go back to not knowing ever again. Enjoy it!:-)

A picture is worth a thousand words. The AP article in the OP, right after the title, has a picture of Bernie Sanders, to help jog recognition and enhance immersion and feeling of reality, then has the wall of pure text after that - appropriate use of pictures enhances rather than detracts from the experience.

I too was put off by the constant use of pictures on Reddit, so I researched it a bit and found that millennials and beyond use pictures, especially the same memes over and over, to convey an entirely different experience than mere text. The memes speak to emotion and a shared set of experiences in this topsy turvy world. It being possible means that it works, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to appreciate it.

There is a second meaning to it: on hexbear voting is disabled and so they extremely often use pictures in replies to convey their thoughts instead of voting - but while on the hexbear server they are represented as tiny icons, like emojis basically, everywhere else all across Lemmy they are giant. After blocking the hexbear instance I have not seen much of those though - you might prefer that to having to block each person individually, see your Settings (not Profile), second tab, scroll WAAAAY down, to block an entire instance.

Regular pictures though, on the Lemmy webpages, likewise also do not have a way (that I know of?) to control the size. So they are all-or-nothing, have it or don't (afaik). Having them makes this place more welcoming, especially to a younger crowd, and enhancing participation helps the Fediverse to encourage a more steady stream of content and help ensure that it does not turn into a circle jerk niche set of tiny interconnected communities.

So, while a "giant" image was not intentional, an image was. Also, I only just when getting to this very paragraph in this reply noticed how significantly different the height of the image is when I have my Android keyboard open in my Firefox browser vs. when I close that, as would be done by someone scrolling. As I composed it, and chose preview to make sure that it worked, it was shown at maybe half the width and two thirds the height, but then hiding the keyboard it suddenly jumps up to full width and height. So that fact too likely contributes to people not realizing the full extent of what the picture is going to look like to others later on. It also may look different in the place it came from too, further leading to the discontinuity between what was intended vs. received.

Anyway I do try to use pictures, especially memes that are easily recognizable, whenever possible bc they seem to work better in the communication process (that is a 2-way procedure between both sending and receiving partners) than a mere wall of words. So you may want to block me, although I will preemptively say that I will miss your perspective across the Fediverse in replies such as this one, though ofc I understand that if it is driving you crazy then you may want to take steps to improve your experience.

Hopefully Lemmy or your preferred app (or some other one that you could switch to) will implement a solution that doesn't require massive effort and maintenance on your part to be constantly walling yourself off from what will end up being an increasingly larger share of the Fediverse as it grows and brings in newer and younger people, but for now the code is somewhat primitive in terms of such technical details.

In any case, I hope that this explanation helps.:-). Also, oh wow, could you imagine trying to have a conversation like this on Reddit!? :-P The technology here being far behind there does not begin to make up for the Fediverse being worthwhile, whereas Reddit is useless - as in even if I was not here, I still would not be there:-D.