Same principle as, “A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client?”

Might get around to tidying this 20-year-old mess up a bit - tho I’m not sure where to start lol.

I am not a proud man.

Tbh I can’t be objective about US politics right now. I’m going to ignore the Bonespurs administration as much as possible for a while. Hopefully over the next four years the righteous abstainers will figure out that refusing to vote didn’t work out well for them. Otherwise it will be the United States of MAGA and we’re probably fucked.

We didn’t collectively decide both sides are the same. The people who decided that were 10 million fucktwats who voted for Biden in 2020 but decided to ignore reality this year and let the convicted criminal win. They’re still polishing their moral purity halos for that.

You’re right, everything is black-and-white absolutes. I don’t know how I could have thought “westerners” are actually millions of individuals with distinct morals, ideals and behaviors. My bad!

Makes sense immensely, and tbh good to read such a thoughtful post. Superficial or “meme-level” thinking has become deeply ingrained out our culture. I attribute it largely to the firehose of content available, like an always-full inbox. It conflicts with our natural desire to finish something - you can’t finish the Internet. One way to deal with it is to process each item in the feed as quickly as possible - take in minimal information, make a quick value judgement, and scroll onward. It makes people more susceptible to misleading headlines and images that are well-crafted to squeak through their narrow attention spans. I think this superficiality plays a large part in leading people to plunk a black or white hat on everybody. Considering shades of gray takes too bandwidth. Drawing zero-tolerance lines in the sand is far simpler. But I’ve got to accept it as part of the environment, because complaining about it just gets me called a nazi lol.

No, I wasn’t familiar with that quote. Sokath, his eyes open. But nazis would not receive a friendly welcome here like in the bartender’s hypothetical story, so the same outcome is so extraordinarily unlikely, the reference seems like the same level of overreaction I said it was.

Encyclopedias are republished regularly and are free to use at the library, so really… time capsules and entitlement, srsly? Whatevs.

I agree, and the point of my comment wasn’t to suggest gay people and nazis are the same (or even similar), it was that the mere presence of something disagreeable doesn’t mean the place is full of it.

I’ve always voted liberal up and down the ticket, and in my daily interactions you would be hard-pressed to find me acting like anybody’s idea of a right-winger. But I don’t look at every detail of liberal doctrine as the sacred word of the gods. In many liberal forums you have to parrot all the correct doctrine and wear a pristine pure white hat, or people (apparently including yourself) will put a black hat on you. But really anyone who puts themself on a high pedestal of moral perfection is delusional.

I agree, which is why I recently kicked a MAGA guy out of my D&D group that meets at my house. I had tolerated him up to then because he generally acted decent and was a good player. But after the election I decided I just don’t feel like extending my hospitality to that anymore.

But on the flip side when I hear a phrase like, “uncomfortable with trans people” my first reaction is, “What makes you uncomfortable?” instead of, “Fuck you you fucking bigoted fuck!” For that moral imperfection in my character I’ve received name-calling and at least one ban. Whatever. People have irrational fears and I’m not going to exile them to the desert because their “eww” reflex isn’t pristine.

For me picking lemmy over reddit is a matter of liking the software a lot better. As a dev myself I think lemmy is much more elegant and usable, and IDGAF about the lead dev’s ideologies, as a dev they kick ass.

I too value the advice of people sharing their experience on reddit, but I also see way too many highly upvoted posts crediting Nikola Tesla with inventing everything but fire. Top google results are increasingly useless junk, but so are top social media results. Having grown up with physical encyclopedias I wouldn’t say information is “hard” to find.

Never thought I would see anybody call having to scroll past some sponsored links and reddit results “hard”. Compared to what, farting? Honestly folks, after 2025 we’ll probably all have a different view of what’s easy and what’s hard.

I’m not either, but that’s like saying “I don’t want my TV full of gays!” because a sitcom has a gay character.

Nazis and their ilk can be here, they just have to contend with a lot of disagreement when they broadcast their opinions.

“For example, in terms of attracting new users” - meaning that’s the whole point of the question, so I’ll address that.

Lemmy isn’t a corporation and doesn’t have to think like one. Market share means nothing. The goal is a high-quality app that does what its users want. If a majority of those users have a similar range of political views, that’s just how it works out. There’s nothing stopping ultra-conservatives from spinning up Lemmy instances if they want, blocking communities whose overall personality they don’t like, and banning users they don’t like. If this balkanizes the lemmy userverse, I don’t see that as an issue.

On a longer time scale the monthly active users has been steadily trending down for 4 months, from 48k to 44k. But the users per day has been steadily growing - apart from whatever TF happened on Oct 14 when it suddenly dropped by 50k if I’m reading it right. Database problem?

I’m kind of curious how these readings are taken. The Fox News claim of being “America’s most watched cable news network” is based on a Neilson rating that records TVs multiple times a day, which heavily overweights ones people keep on it all day whether they’re watching or not. Fox does much worse on another Neilson stat called the “qume” which only records one hit per day per TV if that TV was tuned to a channel at all during that day - a much better indicator that people deliberately switched to a channel to watch it for a while. I don’t suppose we know how these Lemmy averages are arrived at.

Anyway, the posts and comments per day - which to me defines “activity” better than number of users, are both steady upward lines - unless fewer users who are more active is a bad trend.

Nice! But the average users graph shows continual staggering growth, no sign of a plateau.

Different OG ex-redditor here. I think Lemmy’s UI is vastly superior. But full disclosure, I used old reddit.

How is it clear that Lemmy’s growth is nearing a plateau? And why does Lemmy need broader growth? That seems like a solution in search of a problem. A major advantage of not being a corporate social media property is not having to think like one.