Sorry for misunderstanding / misremembering your “mod” status but you got the point perfectly regardless: it’s one thing to be the absolute best worker that we can be, though it’s quite another to be put in charge of things. The latter should kinda terrify us tbh, bc one has to balance so extremely very many things.

I’ve heard it said - and I don’t know enough about the truth of the matter to either verify or contend - that the job of a manager is to say No to things. At a guess I would think it’s far more but perhaps deep down, it’s not? Either way, it highlights how very different the job of someone “in charge” is from us mere plebes. I railed against this thought for my entire life… but now I think I was wrong, all that time. And it is these newer kinds of thoughts then that give me pause when attempting to judge others who display knowledge that I am aware that I lack. e.g. the situation in Gaza is complex as fuck, but I just don’t understand how people think that Trump could possibly in any way help there more than Harris would have - but hey, perhaps the people who scream BoTh SiDeS sAmE the loudest and/or most often must surely be correct? (/s)

And that’s why I am against joining any kind of “revolution” until and unless I totally understand the issues, bc otherwise it’s the same as the people who showed up on January 6 at the capital of the USA, ready to “defend the constitution”… except that’s NOT what they were doing there AT ALL! But worst of all, they of all people didn’t know themselves why they were there, or what they hoped to accomplish - how can you “defend” something that you refused to read in the first place? Real revolutions take time, and more importantly effort Case in point, if we want to wean off the world’s dependency upon Reddit, then we need to actually make the Fediverse a place that people want to visit. Instead, we choose to remain a Nazi bar. And yeah, that bothers me, though I have little say in the matter. Except when it comes to myself that is, which is why I am commenting here from PieFed, which is not Lemmy at all (and yet the community we are both commenting in is). That more narrow issue I feel like I understand perfectly, so that one I’ve already joined a revolution for:-).

I’ll leave you then with this thought: let’s assume that the/a revolution has already occurred: what then?

Like “defund the police” is a slogan that people say often, or did before they switched to ACAB, but if we ever achieved that goal… what then?

In one sense, the internet was already an example of what comes next: like socialism, everyone is equal and can do whatever they want. Hence why virtually nobody wants to be a mod, bc it requires effort. Those who scream the loudest that their voices should matter (though curiously never their opponents, for some odd reason?:-P) are the very ones who absolutely refuse to lift a finger to do something for themselves - like spin up an instance, or create a community, or help mod an existing one. And those that do, like Midwest.social, end up making it an echo chamber where only people who agree are aloud.

Most of us need to wake up and realize that we are no good at like… things, and stuff, and junk. Hence why it behooves us to listen to a wider range of inputs. Except that’s nearly never the real goal: that of appearing to win some argument online in order to salve our egos:-). Also truth really does take some additional effort to understand. And it lacks that sexy “punch” factor, i.e. it enrages people less hence gets shared less. For instance, if you want to know why I personally learn more towards a less extremist viewpoint, it is due primarily to videos such as this one: https://youtu.be/6spSrC9c8WE. Tbh I don’t know fully how I should think about it all, except that I realize upon watching that there is more that I don’t know than that I do.

But to reiterate the issue at hand: mod your community however you wish. I literally stepped down as head mod of [email protected] after creating it so that the community could move into a different direction - allowing for more serious discussions of contentious topic areas (like jury nullification). And that is what I wished: to both not hold anyone back from being able to discuss things if that’s what they wanted, but also not having to be ultimately responsible for getting my instance in trouble with law enforcement agencies in the USA. I feel that I may not be explaining this well, so one more try from a different angle: you definitely have responsibilities as a mod to set forth good rules that people want to be governed by, but after that the users also have responsibilities to follow those rules. A few people who refuse to do that shouldn’t be allowed to destroy all that you have built - which would be bad not only for yourself but also all the other members of your community. I hope that makes more sense!:-)

Supposedly the reasoning is that whatever you do that is less than total overthrow of the entire system is not good enough. So strikes are “not good enough”. This ofc ignores how totally overthrowing the government is also not good enough - see e.g. how Putin is managing “communist” Russia, or Whinnie the Pooh bear is managing “communist” China. Communism has never been managed to be implemented successfully irl. Yet somehow the tankies kNoW bEtTeR than literally everyone else world-wide about how things should be done? (Or else they are, however unwittingly, part of the disinformation campaign designed to further advance the Russian and/or Chinese agendas? indeed it is eery how both the Alt-Right and Alt-Left messages point to overthrowing the USA and UK and other governments, almost like that’s the real goal all along, and whatever means to achieve that are simply convenient tools to use?)

Despite the lack of success of communism irl, people still advocate for murdering CEOs, as if that would somehow solve… anything? For one thing it’s the system that is broken, and for another, the current level of technology is very much not on the side of isolated lone wolves who want to overthrow things. Moreover, the people I see espousing such ideas can’t even seem to articulate a cohesive argument, much less a convincing one, i.e. they are full of shit and their ideas don’t hold weight, and just bc they make the claim that they should have total freedom to speak their minds (which is ironic, considering how little “freedom” places such as Lemmy.ml offers its userbase), does not make it so. TLDR: liars often lie, perhaps first and most notably to themselves.

And even if they were going to actually do something - what makes it okay to discuss such a thing on the clear open web? On an instance that isn’t theirs? And in a community that they don’t bother to put in effort to moderate? And given how very often done from mere hours to days old accounts, even so much as contribute to at all? Like people were putting down Lemmy.World admins and mods for placing a brief (~24 hour iirc) hiatus on discussion of the very controversial and charged topic of jury nullification, which they (rightly imho) worried could have actual legal repercussions for instances in the USA. I mean, if you want to make your own instance, or your own community, then go ahead, but otherwise what right does someone have to complain about how some other admin/mod decides to do their business? Modding is a hard job, and people take it far too much for granted how much EFFORT is put into such by so many people across the Fediverse.

When people refuse to acknowledge the latter, that’s when I know that they are not clear thinking people: totally ignoring the long- or even short-term ramifications of an action (like, what if the current mod were to be forcibly removed: what comes next, when so few are willing to do the task in the first place?!) is merely one sign among many that everything else that they say is similarly likely to be totally false.

Which doesn’t make them subhuman or whatever, but does, to me, mean that they should not be in charge. So don’t let them sway you, if they lack any convincing evidence to back up even the smallest portion of whatever it is that they are trying to say. Not everyone is equally likely to be correct on the Fediverse. Not even if similar things are said from one hundred accounts. What makes something correct vs. not lies in its agreement with actual reality, period.

And that’s the problem with modern “leftism”: it is not actually “leftist”. The states lifted up as being such (Russia, China, North Korea, etc.), and the spaces put forward as espousing those belief structures (hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.ml, midwest.social, etc.), are the very ones that look to me to be the MOST authoritarian instances across the entire Fediverse? Someone can debate all day long how “oh no, the USA is doing genocide!?”, but just try saying “oh no, Russia is doing genocide?!” or “oh no, China is doing genocide?!”, or on midwest.social merely downvoting a post from the admin there, and see how long until you are banned. That’s authoritarianism, regardless of whatever words are used to describe it.

Hence why I have started taking to calling it the “Alt-Left”, b/c it’s not the real Left, it’s an “alternative” one, which has wrapped so far to the Left that it is all the way Right again. Eating its own, excluding rather than tolerating people and ideas, advocating for violence - including literal genocide (e.g. Uyghurs + Ukrainians). Watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt-Right Playbook, play for play the tactics of the Alt-Left are precisely identical. BoTh SiDeS sAmE for instance has no logical basis in factual discourse, but to someone not paying attention, if it is said often enough, can take on the seeming resemblence of truth? I can’t tell you how many times someone with an account on lemmy.ml ignores >90% of what I say, hyper-focuses on one tiny bit, manages to get that wrong too, and blatantly tells me the exact opposite of what they just told someone else mere minutes ago (cough Cowbee cough). Such “control the conversation” tactics are just too childish for me to enjoy engaging with anymore these days, and yet sadly are all too common (I can only assume that it somehow “works” inside of their echo chamber? or else that they simply don’t care yet keep doing it anyway. you really can get a LOT of mileage out of just sticking to your position no matter what facts are presented to the contrary, b/c a lot of people just give up arguing against that, mistaking that stubbornness for a form of “strength”).

Identically then to the people who are inside the Alt-Right movement - but who never seem to actually be aware of that? - the people in the Alt-Left are perhaps kind-hearted, well-meaning, and may e.g. show up to try to overthrow a government (all while claiming to be there to “defend the Constitution”), but it’s not their intentions that I take issue with so much as the fact that they need to read a book prior to going to such an extreme (or two, or even three - and yes, I am sure that they think that they have, but I mean here that it would be helpful to read all the variety of SIDES to an argument, before claiming to fully “know” what to do there?). It does not help that the internet is anonymous and thus that I could be arguing with a literal teenager, or someone with the intellectual equivalence of such. It always comes down to: they can do whatever they want, but so too can I, and yet the burden therefore falls onto me to decide what to do, since they apparently refuse to have the discipline themselves to read or to understand things prior to pushing for their chosen philosophy.

If you think about it more I suspect you will come around to my way of thinking there. For one thing, the form of argumentation looks precisely identical to those often used by the Alt-Right, while for the another the content looks at least functionally identical to it as well. e.g. here’s an image from a post on lemmy.ml that was shared just prior to the election:

The translation here is “bOtH sIdEs SaMe” - which actually worked to sway the election of the USA. Over time I’ve heard the argument shift from “we’re not the Alt-Left”, to “okay so we’re the Alt-Left, but you don’t have to worry b/c unlike the Alt-Right, we have no actual power”… but if such messages are swaying the election of the nation with the most nuclear warheads on planet Earth, then isn’t the latter no longer true?

Question: and how is this not likewise advocating for genocide?

(shared in this post to [email protected] 7 days ago)

Answer: b/c murder is okay when our side does it.

And how is this post to [email protected] any different at all from those style of posts that I used to see on Hexbear.net? Reaction-baiting, spoiling for a fight, picking on points of contention for the purpose of “dunking” on one’s opponent, rather than attempting to find common ground and have discussions of greater depth and substance.

100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to have outright chided me for having done so, b/c of the extremist content. And it’s not just “over there” - by federating with these instances, we choose to host it over “here” as well. e.g. a poster on the wall of a Nazi bar may have been constructed thousands of kilometers and multiple nations away, but if it was transported to you and accepted by you and pinned up by you in your bar, then it is “you” who are advocating for that (Pro-Nazi) message?

I’ve already given up checking Lemmy while at work - I don’t want these server names appearing in those logs, in case something happens and they start wondering why I am visiting this Alt-Left space. *I* am not planning on doing anything illegal like murdering a CEO, but if I am hanging out at this “Nazi bar”… I can well understood why someone might question if I myself am a “Nazi”, or in this case the Leftist equivalent?

I’ve had to block a lot of communities in order to maintain my sanity. Like, others are free to do as they choose but I should have that freedom as well too, yeah?

It’s the Nazi bar problem: how do you be friends with a Nazi, who is nice to you most of the time? (The difference here is that Nazis were and neo-Nazis are Alt-Right, while the ones we are talking about here are Alt-Left, but is there all that much difference, really? both are okay with murder as not the last but somehow rather almost the first resort, having no clue about the horrors that they would unleash upon society if they got their way - and just exactly like the Alt-Right, their way is the only way, no openness to discussions to the contrary).

Highly ironically, Reddit used to have this problem, and do you know what they did about it? They banned the leftist extremists, enticing them to create Lemmy as a Reddit replacement. i.e., this is not merely a Nazi bar - it’s their bar, while we are the freeloaders here. I find that thought highly interesting…

You don’t want to be known as a nag, do you?

I think that initial sign-up even if it mentioned that it was for topic areas, was actually joining you to communities? (Bc the actual “Topic” areas seems to be invariable) I mean, based on those Topic areas that you selected, it Joined you to Communities that will fill up your All feed.

You can now “leave” a community at any time, and while this doesn’t seem to block it from showing up in the Topic areas list - more’s the pity, bc it really should - it at least stops it from showing up in the All feed. And ofc you can (re-)join other Communities as well.

So as we are seeing, things tend to work slightly differently than Lemmy.:-) What I find helpful is how my entire “workflow” is different on it: since Lemmy doesn’t even offer Notifications for posts from communities, for those where there are only like 0-3 posts per day, I prefer receiving those Notifications rather than have to “find” the communities as I would have done in Lemmy. Like, this works much better than hoping that they show up in a Feed somewhere, especially when a community is small like [email protected]. Then again, this would work better for someone who checks things daily, although… there is a “Mark all as read” button as well.

On Lemmy I used to browse All rather than Subscribed, but on PieFed I usually use a combination of Notifications and rarely browsing All or like when I want a concentration of news stories (ahem, even from communities that I’ve “Left” even:-), then that is available as well. This whole aspect of PieFed really works much better for me overall, though indeed it took quite some getting used to it at first to discover what was possible and have to re-think my workflow. I hope this description helps you think through what may work best for you, or perhaps you’ll just copy this.:-)

Well I know a way but you won’t like it. Actually two ways.

The first is to start your own PieFed server instance. The second is to message an existing person who admins one to add it. Whenever I add new communities, like [email protected], it just goes under the generic Home -> Communities, while in comparison [email protected] goes underneath Home -> Topics -> Chilling and so that’s where AskUSA should have gone as well.

Perhaps in the future, whoever brings in a community could make a suggestion as to which Topic areas it should lie underneath, but PieFed is fairly early in its development and thus kind of “polish” is still being added. But for now, it’s something that is predefined by whoever admins the instance.

The good news is that the devs & admins are EXTREMELY responsive, both in speed and concern for what they are making. Like, if you ask for it, there’s a very good chance its prioritization would be increased over other things to get it working faster. Here’s an example post of mine showing such conversation: https://piefed.social/post/301249.

Oh and perhaps I misunderstood you - something like a text listing of them should be available within the code itself, if that’s what you meant? Or there’s https://piefed.social/topics - is that what you mean? I just noticed that the way to access this list changed just today or yesterday I think - this page used to exist but it was also a drop down list as well (that never worked right in my desktop browser, though did on a mobile), so if it is being difficult lately that is likely why:-).

Though beware if you are considering making PieFed your daily driver: it helps if you know your way around Lemmy and have a backup account for when you can’t get things done using PieFed. Searching for instance is not great, so trying to find a post I usually do with Lemmy rather than PieFed. Another is that Notifications are more than a little bit broken: e.g. your very comment reply to me here I had an extremely difficult time trying to find - I read through every comment on this thread before finding yours in fact. The reasons this can happen are many and varied: posts that later get removed still remain in your Notifications area, as do users from instances that you have blocked, and if a comment is buried too deeply in the chain in a post then you’ll need to click the Continue thread button, except you won’t know which one of those to click in the first place, also a comment can be auto-collapsed or even hidden, frustratingly even if it was not at the time you replied but then that happened later then you similarly to these other situations won’t be taken right to it when you click the notification. Honestly sometimes I’ll go to Lemmy, visit the post, and search for my name and see all the people who replied to me, then walk up the chain to see some text to search for, then switch back to PieFed to actually do the reply… So anyway: TLDR: PieFed is quite interesting, and I do use it for my daily driver, but it can also be quite frustrating until some of these more foundational issues are fixed.

That said, PieFed already can do more than Lemmy, in so many ways. For one, I can have it send me a notification upon every single new post in a community or my choosing, like [email protected] and !
[email protected], and for another, if I wanted I could have it cease sending me notifications for a comment that I made if people decide to relentlessly troll me for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards (this is no mere hypothetical situation: both hexbear and Lemmygrad have done this exact thing to me). I can also view a post without having to read any comments at all from users posting from an instance of my own choosing - instance blocking is horrible misnamed on Lemmy and does next to nothing along those lines, while defederation is dependent upon an admin, except that PieFed puts that ability to choose into the hands of its users. That alone made me want to choose it, but everything else is does is great too! Caveat: so long as I can fall back onto Lemmy when I need to.

Also PieFed has next to no moderation tools, so there’s a lot that is still coming.:-) I am definitely here for it!:-)

There are dozens of us - not quite a dozen dozen, but at least multiple dozens! (on PieFed) :-P

Omg I thought that was like it’s whole deal even!? 😞😲

I got my start on Kbin.social as well - he was ambitious, that’s for sure, but despite all the people clamoring that they could do things faster and better, that dream doesn’t look to me like it has materialized? Although Mbin is also good as it is, if you like the interface and also want the interconnection with Mastodon.

I do see features being added to PieFed over time, and hold out high hopes for it.

Sublinks also looks promising, though it was paused for basically a year due to its founder having a baby.

Well actually we use Arch btw…

No but it’s pretty early in development (and yet amazingly well developed for that) as a Lemmy alternative, and so I doubt there are plans to expand beyond that like to Mastodon or Friendica, at least until it becomes more fully featured regarding its Lemmy functionality. e.g. user tagging like @[email protected] is not implemented yet. It does already have hashtag support though:-). Certain features are just amazingly well done, while more basic and foundational features are needing to catch up. Thus it is something to watch with close interest, as well as a few of us with early adopter mindsets to test out even as a daily driver.:-)

It is good that not every post in [email protected] is contributed by a mod:-).

On the other hand, the most popular content also attracts those who just seem to want to say “eat shit and die” - like c’mon, at least tell us why you feel that way!? /s :-P

Fwiw PieFed (which is a Lemmy alternative that isn’t quite ready for mainstream usage yet, but is nonetheless coming along nicely:-) has Categories of Communities - e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/news - so that at a touch of a button you can switch to see a feed dedicated to that, or some other, topic.

Then see also those sub-topic links at the top allowing further filtering to your more specific desires, like “US Politics”, “World”, “RSS Feeds”, etc. Using this, you can have your cake (e.g. all the memes, yes I mean ALL of them!!! 😁) and eat it too (i.e. they politely go away whenever you want them too:-P).

That’s not really possible in Lemmy itself just yet (except probably in some apps but I don’t use those so not sure which ones) unless you create multiple alt accounts and set up subscriptions for each one tailored to a specific interest type.

Which wrapping back around to the OP, helps explain why we are far less active than those Fediverse activity stats show - e.g. I personally am 3 of those Monthly Active Users. Not that that’s bad, just saying that they are known to be inaccurate.

The real answer: https://lemmy.ca/post/35073012

We all know what that list would look like: https://feddit.org/post/3602869

TLDR version:

Beautiful! 😍

Hexbear essentially predated federation iirc, then migrated to Lemmy when that became possible. Hexbear is I think roughly the 3rd oldest instance - sorting its posts by Old shows that it is 4 years old, while lemmygrad.ml is 5 years old, and lemmy.ml is 6 years old. Lemmy.ca in Canada and the Finnish sopuli are both also 4 years old, mander.xyz is 3 years old, but Lemmy.world, by far the largest instance with ~80% of all users, is only ~2 years old, being formed at the time of the Rexodus.

Read some more about it here (don’t click the link there to follow further - in true hexbear trolling fashion it will simply take you to a picture showing a pig in the act of pooping, you have been warned) and especially here, e.g.:

Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy.

TLDR: bc they felt like it, then they didn’t, now it seems like they almost do again, bc facts are nearly always stranger than fiction:-).