I still use Invidious and Piped for searches and looking at comments, but they are currently broken (as far as I’ve seen).

These points both make sense given ideal conditions. People and businesses should have liberty over themselves, with the government serving as a neutral foundation representing the interest of voters.

Unfortunately, these ideal conditions don’t exist. The government isn’t neutral, but that’s not because of themselves or a democratic decision, but because businesses have more power to influence politics than you and me. Look at the major shareholders of mass media and social media, look at fundraisers for political parties, look at the laws made to bias the system. The government is evidently not a neutral foundation or a representative of the common people, but a dictatorship of the owning class (I’m using the term dictatorship not to imply one person ruling, but rather, that business owners as a class dictate the actions of politicians and therefore the government). And while it’s easy to consider this a crony capitalism or corporatocracy, it’s ultimately just capitalism itself taking its logical course, as business owners generally have a common class interest and the government cannot work without the complicity of business owners. We see this consistently in capitalist states, all the way back to the first ones. It’s not a fluke, it’s the power of capital.

We also see the trend of monopolization emerge - more money makes more money, more resources makes more resources, so small businesses are generally muscled out or incorporated into larger companies unless the government can force them to stop. So while you technically don’t have to interact with a specific business at all, there are many industries where you are effectively forced to interact with a small collection of the most powerful businesses or even a duopoly, even more so if you don’t have enough money to be picky.

So, while I agree, the government is supposed to be representing voters’ best interests, and business should not have power comparable to governance, they don’t represent us and businesses do govern, and history shows this won’t be changed through the electoral system they control. It has only changed when the worker class, as opposed to the businesses, has become the class directing the government.

Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, … ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it’s labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

I just don’t think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.

which does a lot of censoring, even though the creators are sort of, somehow, outwardly against censoring?

Another perspective on the Lemmy situation is that, for example, I can sincerely say I believe free speech has merits while creating a book club where political discussion isn’t allowed. Some would call that censorship, but restricting a certain community doesn’t mean I approve of unconditional societal censorship. “Censorship”, like many abstract concepts in the liberalist worldview, doesn’t make sense to think of as a universal value, but rather in contexts, like you pointed out with hate speech removal being in line with the beliefs of most people on the main Lemmy instances.

There are some concepts, for example, that I think are fine to discuss in an academic situation but should be censored in public spaces, especially when it comes to explicitly genocidal ideologies like Nazism, or bigoted hate speech.

I’m glad you mentioned the open infrastructure projects. For example, I use some of the few remaining nitter/invidious/etc. servers.

As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions.

Definitely. I’m already spending much of my spare time doing this.

“Which FOSS projects have enough funding that we should donate elsewhere?” is more-or-less asking “Which FOSS projects are overfunded?”, making it almost the opposite of “Which worthwhile FOSS projects are underfunded?”

Plenty of projects I rely on are underfunded or adequately funded, and there are many thousands of underfunded projects. So I’ll have no shortage of projects to consider. By instead asking for the overfunded projects, I can simply cross them off my list of projects to donate to.

That’s a different question.

How was it default? I’ve been here for years and in all that time, it was never default. It was one of the most popular, and the most widely shared, but that’s not the same at all.

The linked post given on the second point is a bit flimsy. It’s basically saying that if you use evidence published by a person with shitty views, you must have them too. To me, that’s absurd as claiming that referencing FBI statistics makes someone a federal agent.

It was made very clear from the start that .ml was not meant to be a ‘default instance’.

I’m not sure what I am any more.

Political labels are pretty junk, especially after centuries of mass media and propaganda in the mix. I find it helps to learn to convey your values specifically if you want to avoid that whole mess.

• The ‘left-right spectrum’ is subjective and relative which makes it pretty useless without having a ton of context. “Leftist”, by itself, is mostly a meaningless term. To socialists, a progressive liberal is usually considered center or even right wing. Some socialists even call other socialists right-wing. It’s just pointless.
• What the US mass media calls ‘liberals’ is a progressive liberal in political science. What the US mass media calls a conservative is usually a conservative liberal aka right-liberal, that’s why they constantly prize liberty and freedom. The US libertarian is simply a classical liberal. They’re all liberals!

Useful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nPVkpWMH9k - “Why the political compass is wrong”, explaining how vague and ultimately ineffective the left-right auth-lib models of politics are.

That assumption isn’t true. Socialists aren’t born that way, most come out of the status quo ideology of liberalism. By abandoning all liberals with blanket statements, we’d simply self-fulfill that prophecy. Even US libertarian militias, a peak of liberalist ideology, have sometimes sided with antifascists over fascists (see: Redneck Revolt lines of affiliation with American Pit Vipers).

You’re referencing a real trend, and there’s a kernel of truth behind it, however it’s harmful to the socialist movement to assume that as a universal inevitability.

You want violence rather than solutions

Violence is a tool which can, and in the past has, created solutions when used appropriately. It’s how we dissolve the fascist groups in my area.

The problem with extremist right wingers isn’t merely that they’re violent, the issues are:

• Their demands and rationale (based on their values as a ‘right winger’)
• *Their ill-conceived, anti-social use of violence *(e.g. race war PotD envisioned by neo-Nazi terrorists, a strategy that history has demonstrated simply doesn’t work. They’re not even achieving their goals, just slaughtering innocent citizens)

Look at prominent cases of whoever you declare to be ‘left wing extremists’. They’re typically targeting specific atrocious people or groups like neo-Nazis or heads of state or capitalist industrialists, not just terrorizing citizens.

And any sort of attempt at organization leads to Alphabet Squad raids and whatever bullshit charges they feel like throwing at you after deciding you’re guilty of being a dirty commie/socialist/librul/not them.

This is simply false, at least in the western countries I’m familiar with. Most organizations will get monitoring at worst unless they’re an imminent threat, plotting clearly illegal acts or in an unusually strict region.

Now, one could argue that effective organization will inevitably imply illegal acts or become an imminent threat, and that’s reasonable but that’s very different to claiming “any sort of attempt at organization leads to Alphabet Squad raids”, an unnecessarily and baselessly dissuasive claim.

The fact that Lemmy doesn’t calculate and show a user’s total post score is proof itself that it doesn’t reflect Lemmy’s political leanings.

I don’t know enough to say if it’s more insular or not, I don’t know how common it is to have the default sort as All, but we’re definitely worldly enough for other instances to have some users pushing stereotypes on us when we comment.

You do have some point about lemmy.ml having enough instances that you can get by with Local as default, but I assume most people would be subscribing to or exploring other instances too? I really don’t know.

Honestly, it depends on your circles and network. I only remember seeing The Picard Maneuver maybe twice, didn’t know of them before this week. I’ve seen your username far more, for example.

I just run mpv $URL

They’re anti-oligarch and anti-billionaire. Ask them about the fall of the USSR and its consequences if you don’t believe it. They’ll tell you how the Russian billionaires looted the place and sold the children into literal prostitution. All the gains of the USSR went to waste.

Any support some of them have for the capitalist RF is ‘critical support’ based on their theory of multi-polarity, not support for their capitalism nor their billionaire garbage running the show.

When was this questionnaire posted? I didn’t see it and get a chance to answer.

Also, I treat servers different to desktops due to different threat models. The server automatically applies security updates and keeps most feature updates sitting for a while for stability, but on desktop I just install everything within a couple of days.