the fediverse is the nickname given to [instances using] the pubg protocol

Haha I’m guessing that was meant to say ActivityPub

the original instances of lemmy all have a strong leftist bent

[Bonus info]

Reddit has a history of big events when a clump of subreddits get banned all at once when a newspaper reports on them. A lot of right-wing ones went to Voat and later *.win, and some socialist ones (notably /r/GenZedong) went to Lemmygrad, which became the largest federated instance at the time. /r/chapotraphouse also made their own fork, Hexbear, although while it was the largest, it wasn’t federated with the rest for years. Most instances were either hard-left (e.g. Lemmygrad, Lemmy.ml, SLRPNK) or a slight left, but tge third most populous for a while was Wolfballs, a ‘free speech’ instance, de facto alt-right (US right-Libertarian style instance), which ended up defederated from almost all the others due to constant bigotry and rule breaking when posting on other instances. Wolfballs admin eventually shut it down before the Reddit API exodus because, among other reasons, they realized the neo-Nazis among their users were serious and not just trolling.

Overall, the few right-leaning instances are alienated from the bulk of federation and become islands or vaporize, but most just dismiss Lemmy or even the Fediverse at large as a left wing commie thing.

I don’t understand why it would be acceptable to submit generated code in the first place. I’d say it’s functionally asking others to complete your assignment. Sampling code excessively and without attribution is plagiarism.

And seconding that concern about people not even learning how code works. This was an issue even before chatGPT, when people would by-default look up stack overflow snippets or existing algorithms instead of thinking and training their mind to be able to solve actual real problems, but now it’s probably much more widespread as an easier way out. If the school is able to do a code exam in an offline environment, even with manual docs available, it should weed out the ones who didn’t learn pretty quickly.

fwiw, I suspect Hexbear users expect snark more. It’s basically the default mode in a bunch of comms.

From the name, I expected a Hannah Montana Linux type distro.

I hope they keep Alex Jones’s communism financing operation going.

I’m not sure why subs would be so weird and verbose. Maybe the translator is afraid the implication (rather than literal meaning) will be lost somehow, but really, ‘ja’ isn’t some loaded enigma.

On a side note, fan works (anything from subs to software to upscales and remasters) tend to be better, done out of passion rather than just an industrial chore.

I believe sometimes it’s done because there’s a lot to read and it might be (considered) too hard to read in real time. Which I understand, but it also annoys me too. It’s not what they said, and sometimes the way someone phrases something is important even if they don’t cut out important information, it can hint at their character or their emotion.

An interesting example I saw was in Archer. During an agitated rant, Archer finally interjects demanding someone answer the phone. The next shot is a plain still shot of the telephone, which the captions helpfully emphasise [PHONE NOT RINGING]; a recurring joke is Archer’s constant ear-ringing due to careless gun use.

Having seen other, more careless translations, I can easily see jokes (or in other contexts, important clues) like this being missed and it made me think about how film techniques can imply audio silently. If there’s a plain shot of a phone, a hearing impaired person might reasonably assume it’s a visual implication that the phone is ringing.

One trend which annoys me is having meaningful non-English simply listed as ‘[speaking language]’

Even worse is when, despite being another language, a common word (whether homophonic or loan words) would by understood regardless, just isn’t present in the captions.

Do you think things will get better?

Yes.

A lot of the problems we face are systematic, to do with how our society is organised rather than any human limit. They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries. The reason they’re aren’t solved isn’t because we can’t, but because the few most powerful people are powerful because of this rigged system, and have a self-interest in keeping it that way by any means necessary.

History has shown us clearly that even kings, dictators and other broken systems can be overthrown AND stopped from coming back, provided the people doing it are politically educated and organized. That’s the key. If we just get angry without a plan, we will end up like the pitiful Jan 6 riot. But if we educate ourselves with lessons from history and work to create a mass movement, we can finally move forward beyond this frightening present situation.

Privacy-focused isn’t a term I’d choose, but it certainly allows privacy-concerned people to use it, and like you said, avoiding the capitalist surveillance crap that for-profit companies are pulling.

Ones like Lemmy fit in fine to my threat model. They enable me to use privacy tools up-to-and-including Tor routing, without a phone number or other personally identifying info (you can’t do those with many other social media platforms). I can use the Fediverse pseudonymously, and if I ever want to, anonymously.

I’m not hiding this conversation from you, but I am hiding my identity from companies.

That’s a great point. While not the same, I think this relates to the bullshit assymetry principle (aka. Brandolini’s law), where as a result of the time it takes to respond to basic repetitive questions, especially those which are pretty easy to search around for existing answers, then entire communities can get tired of tolerating them. In some cases people just become rude and dismissive and in other cases staff actually just ban the person asking the question, which is already the case in some Lemmy instances.

One potential way around it I’ve seen is having a decent FAQ available and well-known within the community, so one literally just reply with little more than a link to a page with the answer already written. In fact, one site used to (not anymore) have a culture where people would just attach a whole book as a PDF and simply reply ‘read this’, maybe listing a chapter if you’re lucky, which isn’t very tactful but it’s pretty funny and still provides a low-effort, high-detail answer (albeit maybe too high-detail for the kind of person who asks such a common question to reddit instead of trying to find the answer themselves).

If we consider that phenomenon you described to be a problem, the solution is being able to make it extremely quick and easy to give a canned response and politely tell them to RTFM.

Apparently it was popular in US prisons until it was banned.

Because of the colonization and mining? Didn’t bother me, similarly I don’t like most armies but I can still find a military FPS fun to play.

Yes. They should have voted the dictator puppet out. That’s how we got rid of Hitler and Mussolini, and besides, their close neighbors are all democracies who would never interfere in any other country’s elections. Fruit companies aren’t that important, you know.

Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.

Free market trade! Except Cuba, they don’t get to trade.

Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn’t very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.

I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.

Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.

Hardly - they’re doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It’s purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.

The easiest way would be to quickly look up the ones you don’t know yet. Many have Wikipedia pages and the others usually have good home pages explaining what they do. But as you can see, there’s a wide range for hosting different kinds of media and discussions.