https://unitedchans.fandom.com/wiki//leftypol/ and linked pages.

No contradiction. Law is a dumb basis for deciding what you like and don’t like.

Comparing the Taliban and the Confederacy are apples and oranges. I don’t support or like either, death to the Taliban, but the Taliban were (for worse) the dominant army in the area after the USA armed and financed their precursor mujahideen. So, unfortunately, they were the only group practically capable of preventing the USA invading them from the other side of the world to seize the Afghani resources. It wasn’t an invasion over slavery laws. It was for oil and trade routes, and so many people will side with the Afghani state over the imperial Western alliance despite the Taliban being a disgusting regime. And remember, the Taliban were only in power because of the Western foreign interference, so it’s not like there was a real Lincoln trying to free Afghanistan from the Taliban. History of the region shows that there was never a sincere attempt to ‘install democracy’ there, it’s pure Public Relations propaganda.

Did Trump even say that at all? I remember laughing at Sebastian Gorka.

Don’t tell me the propaganda machine can’t even get basic names right…

Also consider not having an economy where our jobs dominate our lives.

There’s plenty of studies, videos and anecdotes discussing how despite technology becoming more and more efficient, we work more hours a day in the Industrial era. Most of the older culture we consider traditional didn’t come from the media industries we see today, they came from families and communities having enough time to spend together that they can create and share art and other media relevant to their own lives.

(although given the decentralised framework of the fedi, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the traditional sense).

It’s possible to dominate and softly-control a decentralized network, because it can centralize. So long as the average user doesn’t really care about those ideals (perhaps they’re only here for certain content, or to avoid a certain drawback of another platform) then they may not bother to decentralize. So long as a very popular instance doesn’t do anything so bad that regular users on their instance will leave at once and lose critical mass, they can gradually enshittify and enforce conditions on instances connecting to them, or even just defederate altogether and become a central platform.

For a relevant but obviously different case study: before the reddit API exodus, there was a troll who would post shock images every day to try and attack lemmy.ml. Whenever an account was banned, they would simply register a new one on an instance which didn’t require accounts to be approved, and continue trolling with barely any effort. Because of this, lemmy.ml began to defederate with any instance which didn’t have a registration approval system, telling them they would be re-added once a signup test was enabled.

lemmy.ml was one of the core instances, only rivaled in size by lemmygrad.ml and wolfballs (wolfballs was defederated by most other instance, and lemmygrad.ml by many other big instances), so if an instance wasn’t able to federate with lemmy.ml, at the time, it would miss out on most of the activity. So, lemmy.ml effectively pressured a policy change on other instances, albeit an overall beneficial change to make trolling harder, and in their own self-defence. One could imagine how a malevolent large instance could do something similar, if they grew to dominate the network. And this is the kind of EEE fears many here have over Threads and other attempts at moving large (anti-)social networks into the Fediverse.

Almost all of my creations which I share (mostly code and visual art) are entirely volunteer work. Community culture doesn’t cost money. Entertainment does not need to be a job, even if it must take time and work.

Of course industrial large feature films cost full-time money. But I don’t come to online communities for that.

The upvote/downvote button is not a [] petition for making a problem go away by disagreeing with it.

Unfortunately, in a material way, it is. Downvoting a post is a way of lowering its visibility on the platform.

I’m not complaining about it being crypto - I prefer crypto over credit card payments for online stuff. On the other hand, any monetisation of online communities leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I came to Lemmy years ago to get a step further away from for-profit internet treating me like a customer. Root of all evil, and all that.

As a wildcard (my first pick is already here) I put forward Pathologic. I’ve never played it and playing it seems torturous, but it’s absolutely an amazing game with an powerful immersive story. Or perhaps, it’s an amazing game which is a powerful immersive story. The game mechanics are a story-telling mechanism, rather than a mere medium to overlay story onto.

Hbomberguy video: Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why

Thank Goodness You’re Here

Just by the name and you mentioning it’s a comedy, I suspect it’s a nod to the TV show Thank God You’re Here (or more likely the British version), where performers such as comedians enter a surprise setting and must improvise.

• https://youtube.com/watch?v=FnM-cWvPoMg
• https://youtube.com/watch?v=rAmIG2c3e_0

My blind playthrough was great, despite or even due to mistakes made. Lost once playing sport so badly it destoyed my self-esteem, but also won a miracle 5% perception roll right at the end (although we scared it away). On my first playthrough I intentionally tried to avoid losing and I played conservatively enough for the game to start bullying me over it, which is great design.

I’m the kind of person who thinks it’s hilarious how fragile the player can be where (esp. because of the class I picked). The cursed chair didn’t get me but it sure made me laugh.

“World Socialist Web Site”, the paper of the Socialist Equality Party (who, in my personal experience, are toxic idealists who will counterprotest pickets and any union action whatsoever)

I’ve had great experiences with reading socialist news sites. They tend not to care about ‘the spectacle’ and don’t like ads. Although you still have to avoid the ones like WSWS who just use it as a platform to call other socialists ‘pseudo-left’.

Side note: There’s a great famous analysis of the US media in the book Manufacturing Consent. You can find a PDF online, but at the very very very least you should read the Wikipedia summary. It explains the reasons why media organisations almost inevitably have some of these biases and bullshits.

What do you think was the source of the general disdain in the UK?

You can check online for rationales of why anti-abuse groups now prefer the term CSAM, but afaik CSAM (child sexual abuse material) is effectively an updated and less casual term for the same thing. Something can be sex abuse material without meeting various definitions of pornography.

Red Jenny

8ch was the reddit of imageboards in more ways than one; reddit infamously hosted /r/jailbait and other horrible subreddits for many years. Socialist subreddits (incl. those which were historical roots of lemmygrad.ml) weren’t really affected by reddit also having CSAM, fascist, etc. boards because one can completely ignore they exist elsewhere on the site. The same was how /leftypol/ was. And in both cases, the community was on a crappy site because it’s free hosting, there’s no implied common values.

however they also tolerate loli porn

Ah, I wasn’t even thinking about non-photo stuff. I don’t know enough so I’ll take your word on that one. They would definitely do their best to delete the photo stuff, because it’s capitalist advertsiting, spam, disgusting to the point users would leave the site and also grounds for being reported to their server host. But I can’t say I would be surprised whichever way they approached cartoon stuff, and I think it’s reasonable to bring up ‘chan culture’ there.

I don’t think the historical roots to 8chan are particularly relevant to this issue, because looking at 8/leftypol/ on the wayback archive, they explicitly had an anti-loli rule. It was just one board at the time rather than the collection it is now, so 8chan’s notorious freeze peach US Libertarian liberalism didn’t apply to /leftypol/ then.

Looking at the leftypol.org moderation thread quickly, it… leaves an impression. There’s some real wannabe-cop shit going on.

It looks like part of the reason for the understaffing is that after four years, they finally banned an openly abusive moderator. Then other mods just kept using that name/account to continue moderating under a false name. So they currently have mods trying to justify gaslighting the userbase with a zombie account. Then there’s a long essay one of them made when they left a year ago, which I just don’t have time to look at today.

On the wiki and booru, it looks like the other English-language socialist imageboards are:

• leftychan : a split from mods who disagreed, run democratically
• GETchan : completely independent site (not a left-/pol/ offshoot) with much politically-stricter moderation hosting a casual chat lounge board and a flag-collecting international board. Now I see the name, I remember their YouTube channel filled with great music collections including original archivism.
• Nuclear Change : a board with a knack for running online projects rather than generic chatting, also run democratically