We aren’t special.

You should dial this statement way up. The population of Lemmy is definitely not a representative demographic. Nor is Reddit’s.

And there is Shinigami Eyes Firefox extension for this reason exactly.

Consent of the oppressed

Imagine responding like that to any Lemmy post:

*Proton endorses Trump

*K

*Gaza ceasefire

*I’m baby

Oh, outch, what a blow to all the First Amendment absolutists of Lemmy, who chose to stand up to EFF and Techdirt. Here are some more arguments against X/Meta put in the most coherent of ways.

There is no democracy without free media, and no free media without democracy.

Down with the corporatist power grab. NO PASSARAN

At this point the ones preaching against trans liberation are the same ones that will take away your union protections. This is the long and short of it.

The premise of this meme is overly simplistic. Effectively equating a social media platform with a website hosting specific beliefs.

Here are, from the top of my head, some ways Big Social is different, regardless of country.

• Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
• Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
• Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
• Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
• Modeling user’s life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
• Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
• Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.

I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech.

This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off.

Even harder than the EU did.

Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function.

Sometime ago I started a discussion about the “Role of Attrition” in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises Here it is

I won’t validate your line of questioning my personal beliefs, since there is no way of winning this. It is dishonest and weaselly. Nor will I tolerate the various associations and insinuations behind your question, which have my ml membership as a starting point.

I have nothing to prove to you. My post history is right there for everyone to see, and it is also a recommended reading for normies. Tell me if you find sth there. Do that for a significant sample of ml users and present your data, if you want to prove a hypothesis they are pro-Putin or pro-China.

You people beating on the dead horse of “lemmy flagship instance bad commies” is sickening really.

I will not consent to you putting me on the spot as some kind of ml specimen, nor I want to stand out and say “I am different”. I already stated, I am an anarchist doing just fine in ml, and I have my own questions about defederation and why this instance tribalism is going on.

Yet you guys keep responding to me as “that ml user”. This is unacceptable. This is the type of trolling that you accuse “some” instances of, and this shows that there is something fishy about this whole ordeal.

That’s because you stoop too low.

I hope you get the help you need.

It started as a meme but this ml-hatred is a conspiracy cult at this point. I have no interest in defending no Stalinist or whatever, but I will not succumb to this false logic of judging people for signing up to the flagship instance, home to major Linux, Open Source, and Privacy communities.

In fact, I think spooks and trolls spreading disinformation under privacy and anonymity questions is a greater problem than the spectre of the bad ml/grad/hexbear user. Now, you folks are adamant that the instance someone signed-up for, often blithely, can accurately judge their character.

This is superficial and moronic and you only come up with ad hominem responses for me pointing out that your logic is abysmal. Plus, it might really hurt to admit you are wrong, since shitting on the flagship instance seems to be an unhealthy obsession for you people.

This is moronic, and I shouldn’t validate it with an answer. There are tons of trans users in ml and I hardly think any of them holds any favourable views on him.

because you’re one of “the problem.”

I always aspired to be a problem. But see you have no justification for this statement. You are just lumping together everyone who shares a lemmy.ml address without an iota of data other than your personal impressions. This is just plain lamentable.

Having said that, I hold extreme views right enough, since I don’t think there is such a thing as a middle ground to fascism. Do you see my 100% no-pasaran as a problem? And if yes, how low are you willing to stoop before setting your priorities right?

Anti-authoritarian is a word, so there’s that.

In all good faith, I am an anarchist who found ml randomly from some Privacy/Open Source searches. I signed up because I thought it was cool to be admitted in the flagship instance and I liked the anti-bigotry guidelines. Then I found out about all the drama, and I have zero fucks to give about inter-instance beefs. ML let’s me be, and I had no serious issues so far, I mostly like the crowd there, coming from Reddit even more so.

What is the real joke is categorizing people by which Lemmy instance they sign up to, and justifying it with a weak truism that “people self select for communities”. I believe it is utterly stupid, and t can also be motivated. In Lemmy.ml I have met some of the brighter minds of our generation.

This “instance tribalism” is beneath me. You can’t ignore this comment, it will live rent free in your head.

They do not matter at all.

I beg to disagree. If “useless internet points” don’t matter, why is there a billion dollar marketing industry surrounding them? I mean all kinds of data mining conducted on all forms of internet reactions. People are paid good money to crunch these types of numbers, including who is casting the votes (man, woman, white, black, American, not-American, liberal, conservative, etc, etc). Then there is the troll/astroturfing angle. There are different types of campaigns that pay drones to upvote or downvote stuff, for marketing purpose or state-actor agendas.

Sure basing your self-esteem on internet points is harmful and useless, but seeing internet reactions as a narcissist fuel only is also naive and misleading. Given the OP wants to get genuine feedback to his opinions to use as a political or moral compass, the question of the feedback quality is not moot at all.

It should have no bearing on your life what so ever.

The feedback quality is also indeterminate. We can’t know the proportion of astroturf, spooks/trolls, and genuine users in any upvote/downvote score and/or reaction. This can lead to a situation where the feedback to your opinions is always muddy, and vague. Do my opinions suck or is this their problem? In real life you won’t get honest feedback to your opinions anyway, for reasons of politeness. I read once this is why conspiracy theories thrive in Facebook more than Twitter (old study), because a network of acquaintances will not challenge your BS, but a crowd of strangers will.

For all these reasons I think the OP’s question is a valid problem we don’t yet have good answers to. And it is relevant to any platform, Lemmy included.

Certainly. I try to do the same, in fact I craft my comments so that they are immediately useful to others. Nonetheless, this might be not enough. Trolls are there for a reason, and you have to accept that our comment-section skirmishes do not add up to much, especially when you consider state-sponsored trolling and mega-corporate push of the far right agenda, across all media outlets, including social media.

Perhaps peppering responses with links is counterproductive. Why not follow a more consistent strategy? Such an approach would for example summarize the opposition’s view in good faith, give a name to the fallacies in it, and respond not only by providing a link, but a short synopsis of what the link is and how it refutes those fallacies. This approach helps not only rebut the opponent, who may be unwilling to listen to reason, but everyone following the conversation in real time or in the future. For this reason it is also great to use archived versions of links, whenever you can.

Right enough, I came across a Wikipedia article “Politics of Harry Potter” yesterday, it was weird to read. Especially under the light of Rowling’s (um… post 2015ish?) transphobic saga, most of the cringe article reads as a complete trainwreck in hindsight, since Rowling had been celebrated by the Left and condemned by the Right at the time. Hilarious.

Some random quotes for your entertainment

Bill O’Reilly joined in the political fray over Harry Potter character Albus Dumbledore’s outing by asking if it was part of a “gay agenda” to indoctrinate children. He called J. K. Rowling a provocateur for telling fans about Dumbledore’s sexuality after the books were written. His guest, Entertainment Weekly Senior Editor Tina Jordan, called his “indoctrination” claims “a shallow argument”, saying “indoctrination is a very strong word” because “we all know gay people, whether we know it or not.”[11] O’Reilly continued the following day, saying that the real problem was that Rowling was teaching “tolerance” and “parity for homosexuals with heterosexuals”. His guest, Dennis Miller, said that tolerance was good and didn’t think you could indoctrinate a child into being gay.[12]

(Replace gay for trans in the statement above and try to not roll on the floor laughing)

Catholic fantasy author Regina Doman wrote an essay titled “In Defense of Dumbledore”, in which she argued that the books actually support Catholic teaching on homosexuality because Dumbledore’s relationship with the dark wizard Grindelwald leads to obviously terrible results, as he becomes interested in dark magic himself, neglects his responsibilities towards his younger sister and ultimately causes her death.[46][unreliable source?]

Rowling herself says:

“I do not think I am pessimistic but I think I am realistic about how much you can change deeply entrenched prejudice, so my feeling would be that if someone were a committed racist, possibly Harry Potter is not going to have an effect.”[21][non-primary source needed]

“People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity.”[25]

“I’ve never thought, ‘It’s time for a post-9/11 Harry Potter book,’ no. But what Voldemort does, in many senses, is terrorism, and that was quite clear in my mind before 9/11 happened… but there are parallels, obviously. I think one of the times I felt the parallels was when I was writing about the arrest of Stan Shunpike, you know? I always planned that these kinds of things would happen, but these have very powerful resonances, given that I believe, and many people believe, that there have been instances of persecution of people who did not deserve to be persecuted, even while we’re attempting to find the people who have committed utter atrocities. These things just happen, it’s human nature. There were some very startling parallels at the time I was writing it.”[78][better source needed]

Might I add, the latter statement (likening DeathEaters to terrorists) and her expressed belief that the trans movement are like the Death Eaters, leads to the logical conclusion that she thinks trans activism is …terrorism? I would not put it past her, and I can’t fathom what a real Ministry could do with such a false equivalence.