Here’s one perspective: https://runyourown.social/

Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car’s gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.

About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord “server.” Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren’t doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.

Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn’t afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.

You need a tenant union. There may be tenant unions active in your area which you can contact for advice, or even support. Beware of retaliation though. This is something which needs to be thought about carefully and approached strategically. In this regard, it is no different from unionizing a workplace.

If the corporation is renting 500+ units, that means they are ripping off 500+ working class families / individuals. If those 500+ tenants organize to the degree where they can collectively withhold their rent, they’ve got the landlords by the balls. Individual action can only go so far.

I’ll start off by saying, I am going to quote-reply a bunch of things from your comment. Don’t take it like I’m trying to be a debate bro and own you online. I actually think your comment is quite constructive.

Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.

Six million Jews. This figure excludes the Roma, LGBT, Neurodivergant, Communists, Anarchists, partisans, and prisoners of war. The total figure lands somewhere around 10-11 million, at least according to the US Holocaust Museum.

But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures.

In abstract, I completely agree with this, but we live in a world where the reactionaries have more money than God to churn out this sort of self-serving analysis, and debate subjects which ought to be settled. We live in a world where government and think tank employees get paid to spend eight hours a day revising history on Wikipedia while volunteers and academics have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. We live in a world where we’re still debating the right to abortion in the year 2023.

As such, I am much more interested learning the lessons of the triumphs and shortcomings of the masses of people who fought against this evil than I am about debating whether it was really even evil to begin with.

To repeat myself, I have never heard about this take from Chomsky, and I’d be interested to learn about it in detail. I assume it is actually benign because there are a significant amount of people who criticize Chomsky from the left and I have never heard them mention this.

So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?

In general, I think the Western audience knows absolutely nothing about this history. This is not limited to the layman Redditor, but large swaths of academia and the fourth estate as well. It would be fascinating to see what answers you’d get if you asked a random Washington Post or Wall Street Journal reporter to explain what happened in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution with no notes. This is the standard I choose to hold the developers against. I am pretty sure Dessalines has the history pinned down much more accurately than the average American propagandist.

break

In general, I agree. The parameters of discussion on the big social networks are very heavily controlled. The largest communities on Reddit, like r/Politics, r/WorldNews etc. are extremely single-minded. Some places like r/AskHistorians tend to be a bit better.

wumao

My point exactly. Nobody can possibly disagree with US State Department line unless they are getting paid. Typical Reddit conspiracy thinking.

The lack of “Lemmy etiquette” is basically the whole point of the project. There is no general rule. There are places for shitposting, there are places for serious discussion. The civility fetishists get their corner, the people who enjoy replying to bigots with pigpoopballs.jpg get their corner. There is a niche for everybody - and if there isn’t - you can start one without being completely isolated from the rest of the network (at least, initially).

The situation on Reddit was absurd. The “Reddiquette” rules were generally okay, but very open to subjective enforcement. I spent many years on Reddit. I browsed a lot of different communities on there. But if one person on a community I browse makes a post saying “look what this asshole is saying” on another community I browse, and I go there an make an insightful comment, I am now “brigading.” If somebody wants to politely debate whether trans people have a right to exist, or whether or not we should send the homeless to concentration camps, and I tell them to fuck themselves, I am being “uncivil.”

Communities need mods and admins who have their back, not mods who become cops for the admins who become cops for the board of directors who only care about increasing KPIs and profit. The coolest thing that can happen on the Fediverse is landing in a place where the admins will eat a block or two to defend the integrity of their communities. This is something which is simply impossible on Reddit.

Noam Chomsky is generally pretty smart, but he has some blinders. I am actually shocked to hear he would entertain this, as a Jew who was in his teenage years during the Holocaust. Was he doing the bone-headed ACLU “Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing? If this is his position, I actually disagree with him.

The thing about the Holocaust is that there is a rigorous consensus that it took place, and that it was the worst atrocity in modern history. This is supported by anthropological evidence (the physical sites and artifacts where the exterminations took place), meticulous records recorded both by the perpetrators and the victims, the oral history of its survivors and their offspring. There are many well known people alive today who can name relatives who perished in the Shoah (Bernie Sanders and Norman Finkelstein, off the top of my head). My father met Eli Wiesel personally when he was in the hospital receiving medical treatment.

This is a very different case from the kind of academically discredited lies we see originating from the “Black Book of Communism,” which starts out by counting all the Axis KIA as victims of Communist brutality, and which ignores the now-available information revealed by the opening of the Soviet archives 30 years ago. If you apply the logic these people use for the Chinese Revolution to the US Civil War, you would come away with the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln murdered one million Americans and that the abolition of slavery was one of the greatest mistakes in history.

Marxism is supposed to be the eminent critique of all which exists, but the typical dork from Reddit who knows nothing at all about Chinese history except for Tank Man and thinks 1.4 billion people are just brainwashed subservient lemmings who need a white savior to come fix their country isn’t the person I care to talk to about it.

Generally positive, with caveats. Lemmy’s early adopters were driven by an understanding that Reddit was not a viable platform for self organization, free discussion and association. We knew this day would eventually come.

The current wave of bans and hostile takeovers occurring on Reddit is nothing new for the radicals. We watched them suppress the Blue Leaks, we watched them shut down r/CTH in the middle of the George Floyd uprising, we watched them coup r/PresidentialRaceMemes, we watched them purge r/GenZhou, a community focused specifically on revolutionary theory.

Reddit has demonstrated time and time again that it is happy to serve as an instrument of counterinsurgency. This comes as no surprise, with an Atlantic Council alum heading their content moderation policy.

As one of the most astroturfed social media platforms on the Internet, Redditors bring a lot of those problems here. They tend to behave like they are the smartest people in the room, just because there are a lot of them. They like calling other websites echo chambers, when they hail from the biggest echo chamber on the English speaking net. The conspiracies I’ve seen them spread about the Lemmy devs and contributors have been absolutely wild.

I think time will heal most of them.

It is an old programming trope that premature optimization is a waste of time. As Lemmy scales, several bottlenecks will be hit. Some might be predictable, but many will only become evident after crossing a specific threshold. There are a lot of guides for scaling Mastodon servers after hitting certain bottlenecks, but this is all uncharted territory for Lemmy and we’re going to find out the fun way.

I worry that you can take the users out of Reddit, but you can’t take the Reddit out of the users.

I didn’t quit Reddit. Reddit banned my favorite community because the shitposts were making their embedded national security goons too nervous. This was nearly 3 years ago.

I have messed around with FreeBSD, but only to flex on the overwhelming number of arch users on r/unixporn

The most recent stable release of Minix was published in 2014

Gentoo gang

Trying to balance all the libraries and programs I need for ham radio, astronomy, CAD/CAM, emulation (VMs and consoles), containers, gaming, flight simulation, and software development basically requires the granularity of fine tuning it provides.

There’s a difference between “not safe for work” (posts which may involve nudity, drug use, or violence, among other subjects) and outright pornography.

Yes. My first Mastodon account was on a server which no longer exists. Unless you are hosting a personal instance, it takes commitment to keep one going, or to at least give your users adequate warning that it is shutting down. Although you could just run a script on a VPS, forget about it for 5 years and let Jesus take the wheel, that’s not a nice thing to do.

Sometimes though, the candle which burns twice as bright, burns half as long.

Yeah, it’s a hydroponic gardening system. What’s missing is the reservoir (typical 5 gallon bucket), pump, and plants. I made this for my coworker, but I’d love to get into it myself. My current living situation in a small apartment makes it difficult. I’d have to do it indoors with fancy lights and shit. Also, the squirrels absolutely run the outdoors and they’d eat anything before I get the chance to pick it. And my friendly neighbors feed them so I don’t want to start waging war on them.

We’re out here

If the users create the content, it is social media

“Tankies” is basically a meaningless slur at this point, but I’ll try to answer your question.

There are two overarching branches of philosophical thought, Idealism and Materialism. Idealists believe the world is shaped by ideas. Materialists believe ideas are shaped by the world.

Liberalism is an example of an idealist philosophy. If enough people believe in civil rights and democracy, then they are sure to manifest. Liberals approach politics from the standpoint of evangelizing their beliefs. They believe with the correct rhetoric and the correct positions, they can win the day and bring about their version of a just society.

Marxism is an example of a materialist philosophy. Social currents, ideology, and history are driven by the material conditions. Marxists aim to apply an empirical analysis to historical events, to identify the underlying systems and processes which are at play. To figure out where the meager resources of the oppressed and downtrodden might be applied most effectively. From this style of historical analysis, many theses have been formed, creating a very deep theoretical canon.

We can all agree that democracy is good. We can all agree that civil liberties are good. At the same time, when the United States declares it is going to bring democracy to your country, you know are going to have a bad time. Or when the Untited States, jailhouse of the world, brings up complaints about civil liberties, you know there are ulterior motives at play. This is because the United States is a world-hegemonic imperialist empire, always seeking to expand its markets, its influence, and its profits. There are other countries which exhibit imperialist tendencies. Imperialism is the inevitable endgame of capitalism, but none compare to the US Empire.

The idealistic paradigm of categorizing states as democratic or authoritarian crumbles under the past century of cold war. A state like Cuba, living under siege, facing very real threats of espionage, sabotage and infiltration, is forced to take a warlike posture. It can never let its guard down. It will take measures which seem repressive in order to defend its sovereignty. This is unfortunate, but there is an underlying material reality which drives this state of affairs. The artificially imposed scarcity. The constant threat of a coup and the imposition of western finance and privatization. And still, you can make a very strong argument that the conditions in Cuba are far more Democratic than they are in the US. You can make the same argument for China. These places are far from perfect, but when you examine them in the context of the geopolitical reality we live in, there are reasons why they are the way they are (and a giant steaming pile of sensationalism and vile slander dumped on top).

Democracy is good, but you can’t just let the NED (a known CIA front) pour millions of dollars into reactionary media organs across your country and hold a direct election so every little victory the revolution has achieved can be sold off to gangsters. We got to see exactly what this looks like in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. We got to see exactly what this looks like when the US-backed coup in Chile overthrew Allende and installed the military dictator Pinochet. Shock doctrine, privatization, mass killings, neoliberalism. It looks like the parliament getting shelled by tanks, the former citizens of a socialist country getting sold into sex trafficking, and the dreams of millions turning into ashes while the capitalist gangsters take everything for themselves. It looks like the greatest decline in life expectancy and living standards in modern history.

Antiimperialism can seem perplexing at times, and nothing makes this clearer than the war in Ukraine. The invasion and the war are clearly abhorrent, but if that is where your analysis begins and ends, that Ukraine is a wholesome smol bean democracy and Putin is punishing them because he hates democracy on principle, you are missing a whole lot of what’s going on. The Reddit response to the war was that everyone became Ukrainian nationalists overnight. Even as Ukraine descended into martial law, banned opposition parties, media and labor unions, and devoted itself to full mobilization. The actions of the Ukrainian state are somewhat understandable under the circumstances, but I’m not sure how you get back to egality, fraternity, and liberty coming out of these conditions. You might just get the fraternity, but a very dark, nationalistic one.

Instead of taking sides, what most of these “tankie” / “russia apologist” leftist communities are trying to do is figure out what the hell is actually going on. They certainly aren’t on NATO’s side, which is enough for most to call them Russian stooges. There is an intense fog of war, and the only thing you will find from either side is war propaganda. Ask the Ukranians and they have killed a million Russians. Ask the Russians and they have killed a million Ukranians. The enemy is constantly on the verge of running out of munitions. Tons of “great man theory” attempting to do psychoanalysis of Zelensky or Putin, instead of examining the political and economic factors driving this war. At the end of the day, it is the working class killing each other in another war for bourgeois states, and the apologia for national chauvinism only makes excuses for it. No war but class war.

If that is all true, the logic behind advertising it on Reddit at that time, and sticking to the position of “free speech absolutism” is kinda questionable. Maybe don’t plug your social media site when all the reprobates from r/C***town are looking for a new home. For your own good.

Another site was founded by a former Reddit admin over at tildes.net, but he was very explicit about what he was trying to do (2019 announcement - tldr: ban assholes, shun low-effort posts). It never had the problems Voat did.

There is a big problem with all these tech bros where they think an algorithm or a piece of software are what makes a community. They have no concept of society. No thoughts about what diasporas or social milieus they are trying to assemble. No thoughts at all about what the purpose of the thing is in the first place. They are very bad at this shit. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone be like “What if we did something like Reddit, but on the blockchain?” without even asking, who is this for? What problem does it solve?