OpenStars

The Democrats are just as bought and paid for too, but still those two groups are NOT EQUAL, i.e. difference in degree even if not in kind. At least, as it pertains to being "bought out", though in other matters such as obstructionism, Republicans are of a whole other kind.

It is what it is. The original founding developer is a tankie, and offered everything he did entirely for free. Meanwhile after Reddit began to collapse there were several projects - like squabbles and discuit - who offered to let people come onto their instance but refused to offer their code as open source, presumably with the intention of using the standard approach to first disrupt the market and then later make a bunch of money (also used to lure in fish, set out the bait and then reel it in).

The closest one to Lemmy was Kbin, but that has its own whole entire set of drama, being open source but not sharing the development process with anyone else and then the singular founding developer being extremely slow to add new features or take things further or even maintain the existing instance in the meantime (there is the Mbin fork, but if Lemmy is early beta or late alpha stage software, Kbin/Mbin is still early alpha, plus Kbin repeatedly goes down for days to a week at a time).

Meanwhile, most people who just enjoy being "taken care of" by daddy spez remained on Reddit, which from a technical perspective (of like server uptime and whatnot) does objectively offer a better experience. At least until old-reddit is killed off, though in the meantime they seem to allow it due to their increasingly dire need for content creators.

So anyway I am saying that politics is very much entertwined with the entire existence of this place. People chasing profits have other Reddit alternatives that they turned to, so we are the odd ones who enjoy "sharing" (i.e. in the socialist sense) and are willing to put up with the significantly higher technical barrier to entry and greater share of problems, in order to preserve our freedoms and help set something up that has a hope of lasting in the future, as corporations enshittify themselves all around us.

But yeah, I want to ditch the toxicity side of it as well:-). Except I cannot change others, only myself, hence why I just block those and move on with my life, and let them do the same.

It is not about being anonymous. We all are that way here, and we value that.

It is about them weaponizing this totally normal thing, abusing it to cause problems irl. i.e. one person making multiple accounts to act as if something is more popular than it really is.

I wonder if somebody shot the guy?

McCarthyism was a real thing that happened in the past. It went away for awhile, but it is back. It was only held at bay by people who were prepared to expend effort to push it back. Whereas now...

'cept it comes instead of a home, ability to afford supporting a family, food (at least the kind with proper nutritional support), medical care, and capability to work at merely one job to make ends meet. So... yeah, easy except for that.

Instead, Huffman will eat it from the inside out like a parasite devouring its prey.

And people will praise him for being such a "success" (at business), and will be outright shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED that the Reddit experience does not improve as he promised it would.

But hopefully some of us at least will choose to learn from the clusterfuck that was Rexit.

Fwiw, my own experience changed dramatically after I blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net. Some people also block lemmy.ml but I like the memes so I do not go that far - yet when people do come back with the most inane shit replies, it is >90% from there.

The Fediverse does require curation to be halfway usable, but the fact that nice places exist here at all makes it very different from Reddit imho. That takes effort to maintain, and while mods may not always be perfect, consider the kind of person that would remain as a mod on Reddit after the protests... overworked, entirely unappreciated, and having to deal with the most childish people. When old-reddit gets further shut down (as it seems to have started to people say, e.g. when accessed via a VPN) it will degrade even further. The scabs will run the show, even more so than now. Just like happened with X.

Ofc, do as you please, but I hope this perspective helps:-).

He is the best!:-)

Big Money is involved - here is an interesting description, enjoy!:-)

It is one of the larger servers for one. Some people after blocking lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net also block lemmy.ml too. Not me bc I like the memes:-). Anyway it is how they want to be, I guess.