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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • I totally get what you mean and feel similarly angry about the star wars sequels, but not about the rings of power. Only thing that annoys me is the insertion of varying phenotypes, but no reason to get angry, it’s fantasy. Other than that there are many things to like and a few to dislike.

    I also don’t get how everyone claims how they find this or that part of the story so boring, the production design is amazing enough to gloss over parts that you don’t find that interesting.

    They also tell the story pretty straightforward without big twists. And they let the viewer experience how Sauron deceived the elves and others, and experience how confused the stranger feels about his purpose. Except for the “no horses” in Episode 4 the storytelling is pretty good.

    If you do not talk yourself into a rage and discuss it in a positive sub like r/LOTR_on_Prime you can totally enjoy it.



  • I’m getting tired of this hate wagon bullshit and now mainstream media is doing it. Anger memes or outrage sells and spreads, so it’s profitable.

    The show isn’t amazing and you can criticize it but it’s quite enjoyable. A lot of people enjoy it. It’s not slop. It takes some liberties and things but overall the storytelling is pretty solid. Creature design is amazing. They tell the origin story of the hobbits, the istar and sauron. The legends are slightly different but that is why they are legends.

    I very much look forward to season 2. I do not look forward to the inevitable review bombing and hate posting. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it, and yeah if it gets cancelled due to lack of interest that’s fair too. The problem is that both reactionaries and profit-seekers are weaponizing online outrage and clickbait and manipulating ratings and online perception.



  • The actual superhero/blockbuster/action/thriller propaganda is that problems are always caused by a few bad apples. But there is no spoiling the bunch. Once the newspaper and honorable elder governmentals get wind of it all is return to the good old status quo.

    That is the real problem - that we learned to not question the rules of the system that lead to negative outcomes. That rules and conditions that make negative outcomes all but inevitable.

    Of course debating the financing of institutions and bylaws that impact socioeconomic policies would make for an awfully dull superhero movie!


  • But does it have unicode emojis?

    😀 😁 😂 😃 😄 😅 😆 😇 😈 🕧 🕯️ 🕰️ 🕳️ 🕴️ 🕵️ 🕶️ 🕷️ 🕸️ 🕹️ 🕺 🖇️ 🖊️ 🖋️ 🖌️ 🖍️ 🖐️ 🖕 🖖 🖤 🖥️ 🖨️ 🖱️ 🖲️ 🖼️ 🗂️ 🗃️ 🗄️ 🗑️ 🗒️ 🗓️ 🗜️ 🗝️ 🗞️ 🗡️ 🗣️ 🗨️ 🗯️ 🗳️ 🗺️ 🗻 🗼 🗽 🗾 🗿

    Hmm it specifically seems to be missing emojis



  • Yeah thinking about this, individual servers for specialized topics seems like the way to go. I guess it depends on the type of community. Vegan is large enough but still a specialized community that yeah doesn’t need size. It’s specialized but not a niche.

    But other niche communities, e.g. av1, jpegxl or velomobile, are too niche to work without more people. I think.

    But it would still be good if you could at least set a community to automatically “forward” to a new instance. And maybe that a community could “export” the posts from existing instance to a new instance. Then you could move or merge. I believe something like that is needed.




  • Ok I’m just thinking out loud here…

    Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
    THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.

    There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.

    And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don’t need downvotes since there wouldn’t be too many “controversial” topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn’t enough “tagging” on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post “funny/silly” or “unconstructive” or “misinformation” or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I’m wrong with this.

    But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn’t support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can’t filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.

    Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more “post-truth”, not just the fascists but the “leftists”, liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it’s bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they’ve been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to “heal”. But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don’t just mean the socialists lol).

    And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the europe@feddit.de community lost 75% of it’s users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.

    So I think it’s not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.

    Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂


  • Yeah it is thriving, what I meant is that to have a chance to replace reddit, lemmy needs to find some technical solutions (moving / migrating / merging of communities) and somehow stop fracturing into islands.

    But maybe that age of the internet has passed and people are no longer willing because of trolls, bad faith actors, sock puppets, bots… and the increasing polarization of ideology and propaganda.



  • I tried like 4 different lemmy instances before settling on lemm.ee because it hasn’t defederated from the socialists or “tankies”. So I can participate.

    This defederation fracturing lemmy really speaks to both self-censorship of allowable ideologies and also bad quality of admins and mods several servers.

    If lemmy can’t somehow federate communities separately from instances I don’t see lemmy thriving.


  • Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?

    Maybe it’s just me but it seems the synchronization of public opinion on reddit / lemmy with Empire seems to be getting worse. (EDIT: It seems to be getting more “convincing”)

    Like there was some opposition from the “progressives” and “leftists” about the Juan Guaidó sham and you could argue about it without getting downvoted into oblivion, but now very few dare to talk about the latest attempt to capture Venezuela’s oil.


  • I’d argue that weird isn’t being used as an insult, but to state that the bullies are in fact not representing the norm. They are outside the norm but pretend to be normal, they insist on being normal - which makes it weird. It’s not an insult to us, but it is an insult to them. Which makes it funny.

    Fascists believe in inequality based on identity, while we kinda thought we had this already sorted that we all believe in equality now. Like all people created equal. But their need to define an identity as superior and then attacking anybody outside the norm is being used against them. And it IS weird to do that, most people simply don’t care if you’re a little weird. We still have to learn to be more tolerant to more weirdness and not react with biases or irrational emotions. Respect weirdness.

    So weird isn’t being used as an insult but as a way to rob them of their power - their attempt to define a new normal. And their arguments and attacks against anyone else are becoming increasingly bizarre, less founded in reality, absurd claims. Comical. Weird.

    There is the metaphor about slowly cooking a frog without him noticing, shifting the overton window. Weird sort of resets that. It is more an attack on what they DO than what they are.


  • But if there are differences, I hope you can explain them without involving any kind of “injustice” towards Russia.

    Geography? Hey wait, you’re trying to trick me! If I explain the differences I loose the debate!

    My point is that from Russia’s point of view (true or not) NATO is a hostile military alliance that has slowly been encircling Russia for the past decades. Russia’s protests were ignored so after the 2014 coup supported by literal Nazis (from their point of view) they started to use military interventions. US / EU / NATO did double down on arming Ukraine with weapons so they saw themselves “forced” to invade.

    I’m not excusing any of this - but these choices and events made this war predictable and inevitable. I’d go so far and say that if Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine he would have been deposed by the militaristic powers he cultivated. It’s like poking a bear and then crying foul when he eats your face.

    Thus my example about China arming Mexico. The US would react in the exact same way, and we have ample historical evidence for that. And it’s not my point that this excuses anything, it’s that these things are predictable so we do carry a responsibility to deescalate, demand negotiations so Ukraine gets their land back while Russia gets security guarantees. But judging by the complete troll answer in Tuckers Putin interview that isn’t in the cards right now.

    But there was no resistance to this geopolitical “gambit”. And now everyone is presenting a completely false version of history.