European. Polite contrarian. Insufferable green. History graduate. I never downvote reasoned opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine (which may be why you got no reply). Low-effort comments with vulgarity or snark will also be ignored.
Amusing. And what detective work! Your time is valuable, careful not to waste too much of it.
Personally I’m not especially bothered by sockpuppetry in itself (talking of people wasting their time…). But it’s obviously important to have a plurality of viewpoints. If only they would sockpuppet more creatively!
This seems right. Personally I’m not sure I could roll my eyes harder at the fact that so many people in 2026 are so ignorant as to be prepared to call themselves “communists” - after all the famines, the purges, the 40 years in which much of Europe was struggling to escape (literally) from communism… And then I saw that you, too, call yourself a communist! So I guess I’ll stop there.
Except to recommend you the Ones and Tooze podcast, in which the brilliant host (an ex-communist) recently did a whole series, in great and illuminating detail, on the various communist thinkers. Which I listened to… dutifully.
Out of interest, how do you know it’s sockpuppets?
To be honest I’m genuinely a bit interested in who this might be. I’m imagining a disgruntled Hong Kong exile with too much time on their hands. Also seems likely to be Chinese in that they have a top-down concept of information, not seeing that obvious and relentless propaganda will just backfire with a sophisticated and relatively informed audience. Perhaps I’m being slightly optimistic, but I can’t see how they’ve convinced anyone here that “China bad” who didn’t already think that.
The real issue is that AI bots are making Q&A forums de-facto redundant. StackExchange posted its stats recently, and activity is dropping through the floor there too.
Of course, this leaves the question of what the AI bots are going to do in a few years when they have no new original content to eat. But right now they still have a banquet.
Ironically, the most active user on the current #2 China community, !china@sopuli.xyz, is an absolutely indefatigable anti-Chinese propagandist.
This person, @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org posts multiple times per day, usually quite sensible and well-sourced articles, but always on the same downer subjects (repression, Uighurs, corruption and so on) and never anything that paints China (let alone its government) in the slightest positive light. Since nobody else in this community can match their posting stamina, the end result is a community that, to newcomers, looks like one rando’s “I hate China” blog. Hardly surprising that it’s not a very successful community.
I’ve asked this user to consider dropping the tempo a bit, and been met with defensiveness. I complained in private to the mod, who is completely AWOL, and they didn’t care. Oh well.
This is great but perhaps there’s some other more appropriate community to put it.
Some general thoughts. I have done multiple CMS transfers of large sites involving Wordpress, Drupal and Discourse. No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming. That’s why the simplest option would be to stay as close to Wordpress as possible, using a fork for example to fix to the ethical problems you perceive. Otherwise you’re almost certainly going to find it’s much easier to archive and start afresh, with the compromises that implies.
If you do dump Wordpress, in your position I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo. So much simpler and more secure. But that’s just my opinion.
For a successful community, this one (which I also lurk in) is oddly topic-specific. They must be doing something right. Copy them!
This is what RSS was invented for. Sigh.
And we were told cancel culture had peaked.
this place is never going to be good for any discussions where people disagree strongly.
Most users downvote what they dont agree with. Its a circle jerk echo chamber where we all agree or get downvoted.
So true, and so sad. This has been such a disappointment to me, and even a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t realize how badly most people respond to seeing viewpoints they don’t fully share. Personally I don’t get the point of discussion where everyone agrees, but apparently that is quite a rare attitude. So I share your pessimism, but with one glimmer of hope. There is at least one forum which has cracked this problem: Hacker News. The issue being that it’s frequented by exactly the kind of techie Spock-like personalities that aren’t representative of the general population.
That’s fair. The R-site does not have any ATProto clone yet, is that correct? Lemmy is still mostly a ghost town for non-techie discussion. As I understand it, Bluesky is already a moderately successful replacement for Twitter. My general point is that we cannot afford a 3-way struggle between corporate social media, ATProto and the fediverse (i.e. ActivityPub). There just isn’t enough attention to go round.
Great news. What would be useful: a quick primer on what exactly the end user needs to do in order to interact with Bluesky (AKA Twitter 2.0) from a fediverse account.
Disclaimer: IMO Bluesky has eaten part of the fediverse’s lunch and there’s now no beating it entirely, we’ll need to compromise and join forces.
I’m trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.
Agreed. This seems like the lowest hanging fruit, the absolute minimal solution.
Given the emergence of Bluesky and the parallel rightwing echo chambers, the fediverse does not have the luxury of splittism IMO.
This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded “0 comments” is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter.
For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.
Thought experiment. 2 communities:
Which is the healthier community?
So you’re saying that (you think the data says) most people here are not blanket-downvoting anything that gives them marginally bad vibes, and that the damage is being done by a busy few? Interesting if true. I too basically never downvote, on the principle that it’s toxic and hostile and just not something that has a polite equivalent in person. I had assumed I was a massive outlier.
All decent advice. Here’s a thought experiment.
Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about [etc]
By the same token it would be bad to stop such a discussion, right? Right.
Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits
Therefore it would be bad to *destroy" such communities, right? Indeed.
Upvote the things you like
So, it would be bad to downvote the things you - personally, subjectively - don’t like - right? It wouldn’t? Why so?
Don’t downvote other people’s good-faith opinions. It’s petty, it’s juvenile, it’s toxic. Even if you don’t see it that way. It’s precisely what will discourage the participation we all want to see.
I’m mortified :( It’s never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of “Our differences shouldn’t be minimized because they make us special” was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.
Try not to take it personally. You waded into a subject which has become a sort of rationality-free zone. Perhaps more so even than Israel-Palestine, or immigration in Europe. On these topics there is almost nobody left who is interested in nuanced debate, it’s now only a question of identifying which “side” one’s interlocutor is on, and then unloading on them (or downvoting, or deleting, or blocking, or banning) as appropriate. You stumbled into sterile trench warfare, basically.
Soon after I joined Lemmy I was banned from a (somewhat serious) community for making the same mistake you made. I learned my lesson. With certain topics, genuine debate - open-minded, good faith discussion - is just not possible. I see it as a failure of Lemmy, yes, but mainly of the whole medium of text-based social media. It’s certainly not your fault.
He talked about it - some variety of Trotskyism IIRC. A bit of a surprise but shouldn’t have been. Tons of former Maoists have been in high positions. Even a neoliberal head of the European Commission (Barroso).
On the supposed virtues of communism, you won’t convince me but I suppose you know that already. IMO the world would have done very well to listen to George Orwell, someone who saw through it all on the basis of up-front experience 90 years ago. That might have saved an awful lot of needless suffering. Or Orlando Figes, who wrote a book whose title says it all: “The USSR: A People’s Tragedy”.