“Yeah, sure my friend here is a nazi sympathiser, but he respects me”

It’s important to be tolerant and to respect other people even if we disagree on things. But there are limits to that.

I don’t think it’s selfish. At all.

If you let him know you’ll be there for him whenever he decides to leave the cult, you’re pretty much being generous. You don’t owe him forgiveness, but offering it up front might also make it easier for him to one day get out. And it might make it easier on you as well.

For those on supported platforms who want to stay informed: Anne Applebaum is also active over at @[email protected]. :)

I think lemmy.ca would be a great home for it!

My first thought for an alternative was Mander.xyz, but they seem focused on natural sciences exclusively, and I wouldn’t want to bother them with the discussion on whether history is a science.

I think the biggest challenge of running your own instance is not the challenge of setting it up, but to remain dedicated to running it for a long time and set up a management so that it can keep running even after you one day let it go of it. If it gains a user base but disappears after two years, it might do more harm than good compared to a community hosted at for example Lemmy.ca.

That said, I would love to see it happen!

Sorry - that was me writing too quick. For all intents and purposes the drone strike was the end of him, but you’re right he was not killed by it though its purpose and function was clearly to eliminate him, and it did so successfully.

I changed “by” to “via” for accuracy.

The admins, @[email protected] and @[email protected], might have something to contribute to this discussion!

He escaped his palace in a convoy, the leading car of which was bombed by a US drone. He then tried to escape on foot and hide, the mob/resistance caught up with him, and had him executed.

So basically it was a NATO mission, just with extra steps so that we can claim not to be directly responsible.

You could PM the mods on Reddit, tell them you’re worried about the direction of the platform, and ask if they want to join the effort/let them know the door is open. That way there would probably be little drama. :)

As for moderation, I don’t think it would be a huge challenge. The biggest hurdle is in producing content to get the community going and to stick with it, which would honestly be too much work for me personally.

Regarding Bluesky: On Mbin (successor of Kbin) these days it’s possible to post “microblogs” directly into communities, and have them appear organically in Bluesky as well. I have tested this a bit, but never posted anything interesting this way. Should try with an image post to a community.

Yeah, I also started out on Kbin, which might explain my handle. ;)

I think one of the best things about this place is being able to stay with old interfaces. Sometimes what we’re used to is what’s best. I would have loved it if the old phpBB forums I used to frequent stuck around long enough to federate rather than disappear!

And we have plenty of tech nerds weighing in with their five cents, so at this point I’m more interested in hearing from “normal” users.

If you start posting history museum content I will be interested in following it for sure!

I lately stumbled over a discussion of Lemmy on Reddit (linked from [email protected], I guess), and some of the people in the discussion seemed to genuinely believe that Lemmy had completely died off following the first few days of interest from the Reddit community, similar to Tildes and whatever other services popped out through the years.

It’s pretty fascinating, as I wouldn’t think it takes that much to double check and realize the community on here is pretty vibrant.

I think part of the reason this happens is that the front page on Lemmy is less sensationalist and appears more slow moving, and there are of course fewer votes as we are not millions of users.

Which is where I spiral into checking what this comparison looks like in reality, and this comment becomes truly off-topic:

This is top five on the front page of Lemmy.world at the moment, not signed in:

• 1 day ago, 1.67 k upvotes: “Used to consume not produce”. A meme about the kids not knowing what a C drive is.
• 13 hours ago, 570 upvotes: “Democracy is when the White House boasts about its king”. Screenshot of white house tweet stating that Trump is now king.
• 2 days ago, 758 upvotes: “Europe preps huge defense package in boost to Ukraine: ‘Never been seen’”. An article about European aid to Ukraine
• 1 day ago, 469 upvotes: “So, is the USA screwed?”. No stupid questions.
• 2 days ago, 868 upvotes: “Joe Rogan dethroned by anti-Trump podcast in the charts”. Newsweek article.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, also not signed in and incognito for good measure:

• 2 hours ago, 15k upvotes: “The shower in the apartment I moved into self-destructs”. A video of a shower that has been assembled wrong.
• 4 hours ago, 20k upvotes: “Thursday’s front page of the British Daily Star. Putin’s Poodle”. The front page of a British tabloid.
• 20 hours ago, 18k upvotes: “What will Americans do if Social Security is reduced or done away with?”. Ask reddit.
• 19 hours ago, 9k upvotes: “Trump finally calls out the Ukraine scam”. Fascist propaganda from the conservative subreddit.
• 8 hours ago, 40k upvotes: “Trump can’t end birthright citizenship, appeals court says, setting up Supreme Court showdown”. CNN article.

So of course, if you’re used to the pace of Reddit, the Lemmy frontpage will appear slow, as if the site is half dead. Meanwhile, seen from Lemmy, the Reddit frontpage looks like it’s a dangerous fucking tool made and controlled by capitalists to pacify and brainwash the masses, spewing out bullshit at an alarming pace.

But yeah, point is, no wonder they think we’re dead, there’s an article from two days ago on the front page.

Anyway, glad to have you back!

Just yesterday I watched the BBC documentary HyperNormalisation from 2016, and it has completely changed the way I understand disinformation. I would recommend it to everyone.

The term hypernormalisation comes from a Soviet author, who used it to describe the sense in the late stage soviet union that nothing was real, nothing mattered, and nothing could ever change. When you know everything you’re told is a lie and everything you do is effectively part of the lie, it becomes incredibly hard to create an effective opposition; everything exists within the framework of lies.

Putin perfected this political theatre in Russia, and Trump has taken Putin’s strategies to the US. But the documentary argues that the west has been creating a “fake world” for much longer; a useful apolitical landscape where friends and enemies are clearly defined, and the complexity of the real world are conveniently left out. The overarching goal was the stability of the system; specifically, the balance of power between the US and the Soviets, and Kissinger’s fucked up vision for international politics.

It explains, among other things, how Gaddafi could be our greatest enemy one day, BFF with Bush and Blair the next, and killed via an American drone strike the day after, all while western media expects us to completely accept the narrative.

It also talks about the development of cyberspace, the different visions for it, and how eventually it turned into algorithms feeding us distorted reflections of ourselves to the interest of anonymous third parties.

It’s a long documentary, but I strongly recommend it. I think it captures some of the underlying problems that brought us to where we are today, and it gives a more honest description than pretending like everything was fine until Trump came along.

Watch it on archive.org or on Peertube (the instance seems somewhat unstable). Here’s the Wikipedia article.

It changes from server to server and community to community. It’s important to keep in mind that a world news community is not only a world news community; it’s a world news community hosted at a specific instance. Some of them will be run better than others, and if one gets the feeling one community attracts the wrong audience one might be better off avoiding it and checking if someone has already started an alternative community somewhere else.

That, and blocking people who make no valuable contribution.