Israel's invasion of Gaza and the West Bank are known terror attacks; news at 11.
Zedstrian
joined 1 year ago
Apologies for the delay; got caught up working on a paper for university, but finally got around to writing my version of a megathread post. I understand if @MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml decides to keep the new one that was just posted instead, given my tardiness, but here's what I came up with:
What is Lemmy?
Lemmy is a network of news aggregation and discussion forums, similar to Reddit. The platform has thousands of communities—Lemmy's name for subreddits—covering a vast range of interests, ranging from common ones such as technology@lemmy.world to niche ones such as disasterresponse@slrpnk.net. Lemmy's federated structure means that users on one instance—the name for a server hosting Lemmy—can message users and subscribe to communities on hundreds of other instances as if all were on a centralized platform like Reddit.
Centralization incentivizes a platform's owner to progressively increase monetization practices over time, as has occurred with Reddit, due to the inability of users to leave without losing access to valued content. Lemmy's federated structure affords its users the flexibility of joining one instance and moving to another without losing access to their communities, discouraging the administrator of any instance from prioritizing profits over the best interest of users.
How do I join Lemmy?
Joining Lemmy is like making an email account: after making an account on one instance, you can message users and subscribe to communities across different instances. Although you can navigate the full instance list and choose one yourself, I suggest joining lemmy.ca (hosted in US), discuss.online (hosted in US), or sopuli.xyz (hosted in Germany), as they have high uptime rates and use Fediseer to defederate from spam instances. To maximize your Lemmy connection speed, choosing an instance hosted near to you is recommended.
As an alternative to the default user interface, third-party developers have created several Lemmy web apps for use in desktop and mobile browsers, as well as standalone apps for iOS and Android. Voyager is often recommended for mobile, having distinct web app, iOS, and Android versions available. Alternative web apps include Alexandrite and Photon, while alternative mobile apps include Arctic for iOS, Connect for Android, and Thunder for both iOS and Android.
(I started to write a paragraph about how a user from one's home instance needs to subscribe to a community for it to become searchable, and was going to mention Lemmy Federate and Lemmyverse as solutions to that problem, but it might be too in-depth for an introductory post.)
Suggested the same to @MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml via a PM on Reddit yesterday (there my account is u/Zadsten, a secondary account I had forgotten about when deleting my u/Zedstrian account after the Reddit blackout, and thought it'd be better to make use of an existing account than make a new one).
As I had discussed ways the pinned megathread could be improved and updated, he offered to let me write a new one that he'd then pin. As it's among the best ways to teach Redditors about Lemmy, I'm going to spend time today and tomorrow writing a version of my own that communicates the core details in a clear manner, with secondary sections to answer anticipated questions.
As it's important for the post to be clear, straightforward, and informative enough to encourage Redditors to try out Lemmy (but not so much information as to make Lemmy appear overly complex to newcomers), I'm more than glad to take feedback before I post the new megathread. I'll post the initial paragraph here for review tonight, and the remaining sections tomorrow, perfecting it as much as possible to maximize the odds of Redditors switching over. 👍
There's already been major backlash, is the author living under a rock?
Zelenskyy giving interviews to propaganda outlets like Newsmax, especially in giving in to Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in peace talk negotiation, is just dealing into Russia's hand. Trump's odd pandering to Putin means that Zelenskyy should be spending his time wheeling and dealing with as many European politicians as possible, since Trump will take Russian bribes in a minute over recognizing the illegality, authoritarianism, and ethnic cleansing associated with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the countless war crimes that it has perpetuated in the process.
Fucking over Ukraine by cutting off support and pretending that Russia's invasion has any legitimacy whatsoever means that without Europe's involvement there won't be Ukraine–Russia talks, but rather Trump having a wet dream has he sees Russia follow in Israel's stead by annexing Ukrainian territory, stealing its natural resources, and ethnically cleansing its population, much as Trump would do to Canada too if he could.
Definitely think that it's beneficial for any instance we recommend to have direct links to alternative frontends, even if they don't implement it in their backends directly.
Although I deleted my primary Reddit account after the blackout, after some password resetting trial and error I found that I had an alt account I had forgotten about and had thus not deleted, so I'll do my part in recommending and explaining Lemmy whenever I see a Reddit post without replies.
When trying to onboard new users though, the simplest process possible is ideal, so any confusion about using one website to load content from another, which is itself federating content from others, could be simplified via simply recommending an instance with built-in support such a frontend already.
I think it's good to maximize federation between instances that engage in civil, unbiggoted discussion. If you read the Fediseer censure logs, there's clear, documented reasons for defederating from the instances it lists.
In the case of hexbear and lemmygrad, brigading and extremist views would dissuade most redditors from staying.
Somehow it's not shitty enough for them yet 🤔
While an overload of mindless far-right, conservative, bigoted, and transphobic videos on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and similar posts on Facebook and Twitter, undoubtedly played a large part in indoctrinating so many people (as has been the case in countries such as Hungary and Turkey), it's still crazy that so many people were suckered in by Trump's lies about reducing inflation, when his first term in office proved how shitty he was, as well as the reason why Roe vs. Wade was overturned. It shouldn't have taken countless constitutional violations in only the first month of a second term as president for people to realize that.
If corporate oligarchs haven't fully dismantled what remains of the country's severely flawed democracy in four years' time, then there's every chance that they'll buy the presidency again in 2028, apathetic to the rise of fascism and the dismantlement of civil rights.
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The cartels wouldn't be nearly as powerful if American gun companies weren't producing so many guns, knowing full well where they're ending up and how they're being used.
In any case, talking about Mexico's cartels is just Republicans trying to distract the public from their own white supremacist, bigoted, transphobic, and xenophobic policies that make them far more dangerous terrorists than all the Mexican cartels combined.