Thank you!

It doesn’t take that many people to create an active forum. It takes even fewer to make for an active sub-forum. And it’s so easy to pull in content from elsewhere here if you want to discuss it with your little group.

The push towards centralizing Lemmy has always seemed like an artifact of people not actually wanting to leave Reddit, but drawing a line in the sand anyway.

Tankies are people who play apologetics for authoritarian dictators who have claimed to be socialist or communist, and who will often excuse any action in opposition to “the west”.

More formally, they’re the cathartic branch of Marxist-Leninists (MLs). Lemmy’s a small space, and it’s a place that many MLs landed after bouncing off of Reddit, and the core developers count themselves as MLs.

The flagship Lemmy server is lemmy.ml, but the Tankie trolls have their own server, lemmygrad.ml where they go and be all 4chan-like.

I cannot stress this strongly enough: You have not been “using Lemmy” for 1.5 years now. “Lemmy” isn’t a service the same way Reddit is, it’s a web engine, like Joomla, or like phpBB.

You’ve been using lemm.ee for 1.5 years.

Nobody wants to hear this, but there’s no “Lemmy”. This emergent network of social media sites isn’t a coherent thing, and it’s not a stable concept. The attempts to make this look like a singular space are to the ultimate detriment of the network, because implicitly lying to end users about what they’re doing informs how they behave.

You’ve been using lemm.ee. Lemm.ee has copies of content on other websites, but those websites have different rules, and different expectations than lemm.ee. You don’t get to pretend otherwise because of where you’re reading the content, and there is no guarantee that you will have further access to content from any other website than lemm.ee.

This is a reality that people simply do not want to face, for some reason. Everyone wants to imagine that federation is just centralized social media with some voodoo in the background, but it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and this is the wild fucking west.

You’re going to get your toes stepped on if you treat it like something it’s not.

You should understand the rules of the places you are posting to, yes.

This is why “let’s pretend this is centralized social media and ignore the fact that we’re all on different websites” is a bad idea, actually. You don’t get to parachute into someone else’s house and expect the rules of your own home apply.

It’s very similar to RSS in concept, just two way!

If you follow a community (or a user, if you’re using something that allows following user accounts, which Lemmy does not) on a remote website, that website will send the website you’re using a copy of all future content they post, and your website will include it in your feeds (as well as in the sites’s ‘global’ feed). It doesn’t really matter what software those other sites are running, so long as they A) use ActivityPub, B) have federation turned on, and C) have not blacklisted the website you’re using.

It’s like following a Twitter user or a Reddit subreddit from Facebook. And it highlights that that’s a thing they all could have done, if they all wanted to work together to make it happen.

They didn’t. Fedvierse developers do.

So, there are different types of… the jargon term is “actors”, but you can think of them as, like, accounts. Each user has an ‘actor’ associated with it, and each ‘actor’ has an inbox. But there are also group actors, which are not individuals, but more like a system or bot account. Group actors just “boost” (reblog/re-shaere/etc.) content that is sent to them.

You can follow other actors, both on your own website, as well as on other sites. When you follow a remote account, your host site will request the remote site send all future content posted or “boosted” by that account to your host website, and then your host website will add it to your feed.

Different software allows different kinds of requests. Mastodon makes no distinction between user or group accounts, and let you follow all of them. Lemmy, though, uses group actors for its communities, and only allows users to follow groups. This means that Mastodon users can see Lemmy discussions, and contribute to them, but Lemmy users cannot follow Mastodon users or interact with their posts unless they’ve been boosted by a group actor.

Other software has other abilities. nodeBB lets group actors follow other group actors, which has the potential for mutual group synchronization. mbin has both a Reddit-like interface as well as a separate microblog feed, separating out group and user content. Hubzilla (and I think Friendica?) allows accounts to have multiple actors, letting you manage multiple ‘personas’ from a single login. And they all speak the same language, which means they can accept content from all the others.

It’s a familiar enough looking place, with some good discussions. But what’s super cool - at least to me - is that “Lemmy” isn’t just Lemmy. There are people here using websites running all sorts of engines. Mbin is a different reddit-like platform that cross-communicates with Lemmy. Friendica is a Facebook-like engine that can talk with Lemmy. NodeBB is a traditional forum. Mastodon, Misskey, and Akkoma are Twitter-like platforms that can show up here, too.

It’s a mesh network, with each node having different strengths and weaknesses, different UIs and UXes, and different rules and goals.

It’s both familiar, and also something totally different, both at the same time.

Welcome to the wilderness!

Well, Reddit endorses fascists, so I think it makes perfect sense already, really.

“Don’t hurt my friends”

100%. The people who have turned away from the Republican party have only done so out of a distaste for Trump, and maybe Elon. They are almost certainly not opposed much of what is being done, just how they are going about it, and who is doing it.

Or, they’ve just had their faces eaten by leopards, and are upset that they’re suffering the consequences of their actions.

You don’t get to be a Republican in 2016 or 2024 without being ok with burning the whole system down, with dreams of it being to your own benefit. They just don’t trust the current would-be monarchs to be the ones to actually give them what they believe they’re due.

They also had their god emperor refusing to wear masks, and political leaders openly denying the disease.

They had support for their grievences.

They won’t get that over the economy. Instead, they’re getting “this is necessary” and “you’ll just have to make some sacrifices for the economy”.

The showrooms are still standing, so I don’t think the Yankees are protesting hard enough.

They should call the French.

There are multiple publicly accessible food databases out there. Waistline uses Open Food Facts and the USDA food database, for instance.