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It's quite fitting as a vim using HAM (with a callsign username), that the top comment on that thread is also a HAM saying how you can also do this in emacs. The world changes all around us, and yet it's always the same.

Hams don't let hams upcase ham. :)

Old style interface on a development focused lemmy instance has completely replaced reddit usage for me

This is the equivalent of /r/all across the lemmy world

https://old.programming.dev/?sort=Active&listingType=All


How's the built in censorship and cultural bias with Lemmy?


It definitely seems to lean left, from my (American) view. That might be because most of the western world would classify as left by my (American) standards?

There have been some right-wing and far-right instances, but they seem to get de-federated by the majority.

Hope that helps.


"Left" and "right" tend to decoher once you move outside a particular political space into another (e.g. one country to another). The UK right wing party introduced gay marriage, but even the most left wing part of the country (Scotland) isn't particularly progressive (e.g. majority disapproval of allowing gender self identification to 16).

Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US standards gets quite confusing. The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.

On the other hand, there's full support for plenty of state intervention and state support, e.g. pretty much no one says they want to abolish the NHS.


> Similarly, trying to judge the UK on racial issues by US standards gets quite confusing. The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.

Not directly related to Romani treatment in Britain (not familiar enough with that to judge), but sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better words to distinguish between race based bigotry and culture based bigotry.

eg often I notice for a person there will be a difference in how they treat/view "acclimatised" descendants of immigrants vs new immigrants due to being ostensibly the same race but different culturally. Of course racists will still have bigotry for both groups.


> sometimes I wonder if the english language needs better words

Words like this are not bad by coincidence, they're bad because they're incredibly politically important words and thus have their meanings and connotations fought over intensely.

It doesn't matter what new word or words you try and put in place, if they relate to things people have different strong feelings on then the meanings will become messy over time.


The word I think you're searching for is, "xenophobia."


In this connection, the book Lavengro by George Borrow is interesting reading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavengro

Excerpts from the Wikipedia article:

Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851) is a work by George Borrow, falling somewhere between the genres of memoir and novel, which has long been considered a classic of 19th-century English literature.

Theodore Watts, in an introduction to the 1893 edition, declared that "There are passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England".[9] This edition started a run of reprints which produced one or more almost every year for 60 years. Lavengro was included in the Oxford University Press World's Classics series in 1904, and in Everyman's Library in 1906.[10]


> The common British attitude towards Romani would make even the confederate flag wavers of Texas call them racists.

I think you are misjudging the confederate flag wavers, what makes you say this?


it's awful. it's like a single reddit. the instances are atomic, so you get world-moderators, who are all "tankies" in lemmy own parlance (left, communist, heavily sided with russia as ussr continuity)

very toxic place. kinda like bizarro TwitterX.


If you use lemmy.ml, sure. Or if you don't curate a frontpage of your own topics, sure. But I joined through some unaligned Scandinavian instance, found topics I like, and stay away from the /r/all equivalent, and it's just as tolerable as Reddit, if less populous.


Isn't it federated? How could global moderators decide what's visible on all instances?


federated is a meaningless word.


I joined a instance focused on Android and follow another "mainstream" sub, and don't see that. There are some instances that are very "tankie" learning though... I avoid them, like I avoid any far right/left subs on reddit.


Good, it leans left, but not so far left that it’s just LGBTQ/feminist spam. It doesn’t have a bunch of right wing trolls so far. It’s like the early days of Reddit.


> Good, it leans left, but not so far left that it’s just LGBTQ/feminist spam.

It's not quite _spam_ but I think it's fair to say it's much more left-leaning than mainstream Reddit.

Some of the biggest communities, even non-political ones, are on instances such as Blåhaj (LGBTQ-oriented), Lemmy.ML (Marxist-oriented), Hexbear (Marxists on meth).

Short of subscribing to a defederated instance, you need to go out of your way to avoid left-wing content on Lemmy. Whereas on Reddit you could get rid of most of it by unsubscribing from the top 100 subreddits - which is something you wanted to do anyway for the sake of quality, even if you were the world's biggest leftist.


There's a really good quip here about how leftwingers are naturally the most likely candidates to give away free web forums instead of trying to run web forum businesses, but I'm keeping it subscribers-only.


The early days of Reddit was heavily libertarian, if only reddit voted in 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul would have been a two term president.


That's correct. When people speak of the early days of Reddit it seems like they are talking about whatever time long ago they initially joined.

I'm always hesitant to make accounts on new sites, so I thought I had waited a long time to join officially, but I ended up being in the first 500 accounts! From the earliest days (the del.icio.us to Reddit influx) it was a very libertarian place. Sometimes annoyingly so.

Reddit has shifted so many times over the nearly 2 decades, but most who stay for a long time have realized that it's great for pocket communities in smaller subreddits, as long as they last and aren't co-opted. The bots are the worst part at the moment.


I remember in the early days of reddit there was a guy who would post links to his Austrian economics / Murray Rothbard blog every day, and they would end up on the front page because they had like 50 upvotes.


It was a pretty left leaning libertarian though. As soon as those racist papers he authored came out he quickly fell off of Reddit’s radar. Not to mention, he co-opted at lot of the left’s iconography with his re”love”ution campaign.


It looks like Old Reddit, but the content is New Reddit.

It's just a stream of political dreck and virtue signalling. I really don't need to see Trump in every second post and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter, Reddit, etc.


Yeah, Lemmy is a pretty decent platform but the suggestion of browsing "All" is godawful, if one is looking for something closer to pre-smartphone internet.

You need to curate your homepage a bit to get a good Lemmy experience. The tech side may be like Reddit, but the human aspect is more like a couple dozen vBulletin forums rolled into one.

Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people. Some instance admins may be power-hungry and prone to drama - but you might not care if the only subreddit you follow from their instance is c/jazz and you just click on Youtube/Spotify links from it.

Is it a pain? Yes. But I still prefer to deal with a couple dozen weirdos than with a single billion-dollar company.


>Some of the instances are (imo) full of straight-up insane and, worse, perpetually angry people

This has been true for every instance of every Fedi thing I've ever tried to use or thought of using. And many instances block single-user instances so forget about running your own unless you only want to interact with the absolute fringest nutjob basement-dwellers -- because the "mainstream" Fedi is already fringe.

I once had the dumb impulse to reply to someone who was mad about fluoride in drinking water with "you probably get more fluoride from your toothpaste" and I deleted my account as I started to receive arguments about brushing your teeth, as it made me realize exactly the kind of people I would be interacting with on this network.

Honestly I think this is grows out of the incentives for operating a homeserver. There's a negative financial incentive so you must have some other kind of motivator, likely a desire for influence or power.


Similarly, I replied to someone suggesting they pay for a service and I received multiple replies suggesting I kill myself.

This wasn't on some random Marxist community, this was on one of the big tech communities.


Internet death threats are so common and boring that I only notice the amusingly new ones, like “I hope you can take advantage of Canadian healthcare.”


The way to save the internet is to force everyone to have a recent picture of themselves next to any post they make.


That would almost certainly end up with the internet becoming one gigantic linkedin and everyone leaving it to flock to whichever underground 4chan-esque service pops up with a promise of pseudonymity.


That's actually how you kill the internet. This won't change people's minds. They'll still think all those "offensive" things. They just won't post them publicly anymore because of the social consequences. You'll never know what people are really thinking.

I prefer to know. I want to experience the full spectrum of humanity.


Is that why Facebook is such a nice and balanced website?


You uncle McRacy doesn't have 200,000 followers. Your cousin McFatt does.


Sorry to say "you are holding it wrong", but browsing by all is just terrible. Much like reddit, things improve a lot if you subscribe to the communities that interest you and ignore everything else.

Granted, Lemmy's issue is that the user base is not large enough to have developed a long tail of interesting communities, but hopefully this will change as it grows.

Also, I know that finding the communities is difficult, so I've put together a website to work as a crowdsource of reddit-to-lemmy communities, https://fediverser.network


Hate is keyword here. I really wanted to like Lemmy, but almost all instances are full of frustrated hateful people. Even if sometimes rightfully it's still to toxic. Wild tankies appearing here and there are no help either.


I really don't need to see Trump in every second post and read about people who hate cars, meat, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Exactly. All I see online is people talking about politics, their jobs, their families, their hobbies, the environment, technology, etc.


Thanks for this link, this is great


While I agree with most of this statement, there is one example I can think of that caused actual change. I would say Emmett Till's mother's decision to have an open casket funeral and refusal to have his remains touched up by the mortician, was the spark the Civil Rights movement needed.


I'd like to introduce you to what has happened historically when labor was met with the national guard. Whether or not this would happen in the modern era I cannot say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre


I do think, in 2022, anything of this nature happening on US grounds would not go over well at all. See the counter example, such as the Kent State shootings[0] which lead to a massive public outcry. It would, from a PR perspective at a minimum, completely obliterate public support for the railroad companies & the government and immediately give it to the workers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings


I do believe you are correct and that it would end up with a humongous outcry from the public in support of the workers.


I very much enjoyed Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.


Great book, well ahead of its time.


Tangentially https://lite.pbs.org/ also launched this year.


I feel like I'm obligated to share this almost 20 year old Spolsky post that gave me my understanding of characters.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...


In that same vein, here's my introduction to Unicode about 10 years ago from Tom Scott.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4


That's more about the UTF-8 encoding than Unicode itself.


poor man gave me and many others something like half of our introduction to computer science, but has gotten far more fame as the "emoji guy" for his repeated bouts with this particular part of unicode :)


They already de-google the entire codebase. You can see which parts are removed here https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... and they keep up quite well.


Yeah... what happens when Google decides something important can't work without one of the disabled features?

Look, Google controls Chromium and they have the resources (and incentive?) to keep these smaller browsers running in order to keep up with them.


It's all anecdotal, but having been full time RVing for several months now after selling our house time has slowed to a crawl. Before we sold our house the days flew past at 100mph. It's amazing how little control we can exert on our own perception of the flow of time.


Yes, it's incredibly frustrating to hear people assume everyone has high speed home connections. I operate entirely off cellular. 150 MB is not chump change and it certainly does not download in 2 seconds. If it's not a problem that affects the developer shipping the software it's not a problem that gets noticed or cared about, unless it ends up on a PM's radar or sentry.


Every time you hear someone making false assumptions about internet connections, don't forget to mention Dan Luu's excellent page on this! https://danluu.com/web-bloat/


Thank you for linking me to this this, it's a wonderful write up that I had not seen before!


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