They fully support the Russian invasion

wut? Even lemmygrad.ml doesn’t - their support of the Russian Federation’s invasion has always been critical, not full. Just like their support for Hamas is critical - it’s extremely obvious that neither the capitalist-run RF nor the Islamist Hamas are groups they agree with at all.

(I am not a campist, I’m simply explaining the campist concept of “critical support”)

Just ban everything and everyone you don’t agree with.

They were specific about what they didn’t agree with: Authoritarianism.

And if they don’t want to tolerate guests from an instance that allows Zionism, then good. Any feddit.org members who think their admins’ permissiveness is tolerable are complicit in the promotion of Zionism, even if they aren’t intentionally complicit. Yes, hanging around with pro-genocide people should earn punishment, such as ostracization until they stop hanging around pro-genocide people. It’s a social media account on the Fediverse, switching isn’t difficult.

We did the same thing to Wolfballs, until their admin closed the instance because it was filled with literal neo-Nazis calling the admin a ‘race-traitor’. Tolerating every belief is utopian, pointless and self-destructive.

If you have a bit of time, please collect evidence of when that targeting and harassment happens. I’ve already seen a few accounts using low-quality /c/MoG posts to try and demonize .ml, lemmygrad and hexbear so it’s useful to have a post or posts to point to showing that it’s a harassment circlejerk, not the credible spectators they pretend to be.

First things first, I do not defend nutomic’s ignorant transphobia. It’s unfortunate to see how legitimate complaints about capitalist exploitation of trans issues (rainbow capitalism) can be wrongfully misdirected into reactionary anti-trans victim-blaming. Their personal writings on trans issues are harmful.

And I don’t think Lemmy really is defined by the politics of those instances anymore. Their politics are largely optional, especially now that many other instances have grown. These days, I see more red-scare posters than tankies, who regularly inflame off-topic instance drama whenever they see a username from one of the instances.

The cm0002 compilation linked is a list of trolling strawman claims, many are either completely made up or shamelessly misframed. I’ll pick a few representative ones to talk about, obviously there’s too many to give proper attention to in one reply:

• The first one: [Dessalines:] “Slava Ukraini” is considered a “Fascist slogan”: Yes, this is a true claim from cm0002 and a fair position from Desallines to hold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Ukraini#Second_World_War . Openly-fascist groups like Azov Battalion maintain a strong presence in Ukrainian nationalism, so the preservation of this slogan isn’t a historical oddity.

• ^^ We also see cm0002 list another post of a user being banned for saying “Slava Ukraini”, which cm0002 knows is considered by lemmy.ml staff as being a fascist slogan, but instead knowingly misframes the ban as “Showing support for Ukraine on .ml is worthy of a site ban”, which simply isn’t the case. fwiw, I do believe the two devs, in the busyness, do a terrible job of explaining their perspectives in ban messages, using quick messages like “orientalism” or “Rule 1” which will just puzzle someone who doesn’t understand how what they said was offensive.

• [Dessalines:] “The BBC is not a credible news source”: I don’t unconditionally agree with that as a general statement, but in the context of some political topics, this is a fair position. They’re a state-sponsored channel, and like all countries, the British state has biases too. Here is one case of MI5 state intervention into the BBC ongoing for over 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/“Christmas_tree”_files .

• “[Davel:] Response to a valid report of “NK is actually good” as propaganda/misinfo”: The report is right there to read, it’s not claiming “misinfo”. Spreading political beliefs is not against the rules of that community or the instance, why should it be? The point of thinking about politics is to improve the world. cm0002 just assumes saying some basic positive things about countries they don’t like should be banned. That is a chauvinistic belief, and them posting about it this way is propaganda in itself. Yet we can assume someone reporting their post for propaganda would get a similarly dismissive reaction.

• [Cowbee:] "Propaganda is good actually”: - and then you click on the link and now it’s changed to the lesser strawman - “Propaganda can be good!”… cm0002 is, again, making false statements to fabricate an extreme position out of some pretty boring factual claims, and then points to them and says “Look at all this extremism!”. Just look at the comments on that post, even they’re saying Cowbee is right, and that’s a politically-motivated circlejerk in a circlejerk community. cm0002 is inventing and exaggerating to create drama, and in my experience, drama spreaders are much more effective at driving people away than unpopular communities.

As a side note, and I want to point out that that I’m commenting about media propaganda practices and not taking a side (I support the working class in both Ukraine and Russia, I would pop champagne if Putin and their friends were shot tonight, and the same goes for Russian mercenaries, the Azov fascists and the US vultures prolonging their proxy war at the expense of Ukrainian people), but it’s always puzzled me that the phrase “illegal invasion” caught on. What the hell does a “legal invasion” look like? Laws are written by the victor, there is nothing inherently wrong with breaking law. 🏴‍☠️💿

[This user claims to have blocked the instance I registered on, so I assume they won’t read this]

Lemmy is what it is because of the beliefs and values of instances like lemmy.ml. There have been many other attempts at creating reddit alternatives, decades of them, from voat to raddle. The lead developers have clear values which guided Lemmy into being a better platform than reddit and the other reddit-like forums - free-and-open source, anti-commercial, decentralized, and counter to the pro-US media hegemony. These are not incidental, values aren’t a syncretic pick-and-choose buffet! They are a result of the socialist ideologies of the admins of each of those instances, and how they have been applied to material reality.

And keep in mind that these instances aren’t some outsider aberration, they were the three largest Lemmy instances until 2023, they remain large and popular, and host popular active communities frequented by users of many other instances.

And while Zedestrian perceives lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad and Hexbear as problematic (and I have my criticisms of each of them), from my perspective, many of the big liberalist instances are far more problematic, tolerating right-wing bigots, allowing obvious pro-US think-tank propaganda accounts, and banning users from advocating for action (including, where necessary, violence) against the ruling class destroying us and our planet. That’s a big reason why many left, for were banned from, reddit. Should lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works therefore be removed, for being problematically close to the harmful behaviors of reddit.com that many of us are trying to escape? That’s a serious reputational liability too, it can drive users away if they can’t find the places they want to join.

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.

but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience

Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)

If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.

no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks [snip]

Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.

On the topic, I’ve been seeing plenty of war-hawk think-tank accounts who only post propaganda, like:

• Scotty@scribe.disroot.org
• Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org
• randomname@scribe.disroot.org
• 0x815@feddit.org (and all their alt-accounts, including 0x815@feddit.de and thelucky8@beehaw.org )

They are clearly not involved in our communities.

I’m not a soulist like the user you replied to, but for another perspective, mine is that rights are imaginary constructs which mean nothing if unenforceable.

People have some rights to not be murdered; that’s not an opinion if we have a compatible definition of ‘rights’, it’s written in law, it’s ingrained into mainstream liberalist social norms and ethics. So the right exists as a social idea which sometimes manifests in real consequences. However:

• I can get murdered by the government or law enforcement who proclaim to enforce my right to not be murdered! It’s a conditional right, not the idealistic universal right it’s often made out to be.
• And there are some people who I wouldn’t really care if they were murdered. I don’t weep for Wnssolᴉuᴉ’s lynching. I don’t mind that Ken McElroy’s murderers weren’t charged. Sometimes we just don’t have the luxury or power to go through the ideal routes of justice. And to be clear I also don’t advocate for murder for a big long list of reasons, many of them are obvious. For example, I think the assassination of Brian Thompson was morally just and cathartic, it stopped an antisocial social murderer who would not have been held accountable by law, and the fear it created may feasibly have saved some lives of UHC customers in the short term, but ultimately I do not advocate for such adventurism as it’s proven historically to do little to create long-term systemic improvements, and can easily go wrong and cause more damage than benefit, as we saw with the “golden age of Propaganda of the Deed”.

The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?

I think the point is that the sea lion is feigning civility while harassing someone over a casual opinion.

My response would be that if we extend the metaphor, like you did, and substitute the absurd ‘sea lions’ for a race, then harassing the racist doesn’t bother me. Bigots don’t deserve peace. It’s absolutely harassment to stalk and interrogate someone who doesn’t want to talk, I just wouldn’t care that they’re being harassed for airing such bigotry.

(On the other hand, if we assume the original opinion is not a metaphor and replace it with a similarly absurd statement, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, then the sea lion would be acting unreasonably. If someone followed you around online and kept bringing up how you prefer pizza to be prepared, demanding a calm discussion and insisting on peer-reviewed proof that pizza tastes better a certain way, while you ask them to stop, that harassment would obviously be uncalled for. For what it’s worth, the author made a comment that it wasn’t meant to be “analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics.” - but I say it’s a though-provoking interpretation to explore regardless)

I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.

I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.

Good to know! Hope I won’t need it.

So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.

At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.

If any of you have a spare laptop, maybe you can run a live OS for people to play around with?

That’s alright, and I’m also a little bit sorry for nitpicking! I just saw it as an opportunity to illustrate how complex this whole software mess is.

I’m not sure if you’ve come across it yet, but there’s a well-known copypasta posted to satirize the way many Linux users will nitpick terms.

Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully.

I wonder if it’s still early enough to give people taps on the shoulder - “don’t feed the trolls, friend”.

I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.

On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like “No politics. No insults. No drama.” Toxicity isn’t inevitable, there’s nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don’t bother with.

edit: and on the flipside, there are also communities where toxicity is expected and it’s amazing to see someone acting nice there, it might even be done as a trolling method.

But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

I still check mine, but occasionally I’ll know I’ve said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I’ve asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))

That’s one of the benefits of having a forum small enough to have a community. Troublemakers stick out like a sore thumb.

It’s not only about many people here being technical, of course you’re right that it plays a big part, and it’s also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there’s a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.

Furthermore, Linux (as a whole) is not a for-profit project, or a singular organization.

Desktop Linux is far from it’s only purpose, and many of the devs are far more interested in their own use-cases: servers, embedded systems, supercomputers, phones, special purpose OSs. Wikipedia even has a page for the wide range of use beyond desktops and servers. So we can’t simply treat devs as a unified group with a common goal like we can generally do with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Steam, etc. unless you pick a particular distro!