Good thing human population growth seems to level off and start dropping after awhile.

Fair point. But I do think it is important to protect Lemmy’s reputation. It’s less about salesmanship, and more about standing up to bad takes and random, misc bullshit.

Agreed. Even in those threads though, in my experience. Even if the op is asking, op is not the only one in the thread. More often than not, people will jump in specifically to badmouth us.

I always see a lot of pushback against any alternatives proposed on reddit itself. There’s a pretty strong, probably multi-faceted resistance any time anything new is mentioned. So, it’s good to keep in mind you will face that, and be prepared with some patience and counter-arguments.

One of the big disadvantages we have is that we’re still somewhat under-developed, due to being newish still, alongside not having corporate-levels of resources to pour into development.

This leaves us open to things like the recent spam flood. These things will get ironed out over time, but until they do, they’ll inevitably harm the platform’s growth.

In just the past 6 months though, apps have rolled out and steadily improved, some security issues have been addressed, and larger communities have built-out their admin capacity. So, we’re approaching being primed for growth, but that recent spam flood took me aback for a second.

You want to make a strong first impression, since it carries a lot of influence and you only get one shot. So, before we really do heavy campaigning to try to draw people, we want to make sure they’ll have a good experience while they’re here. I think we’re close, but not quite there yet.

Progress has been steady and overall positive though. One thing I think that gets underestimated is the importance of the size of our body of old content, and how much it helps to grow that. The meme communities having pages and pages of memes to scroll, the news communities having articles on everything in triplicate, the tech communities having thousands of interesting old convos to look at, the art communities being crammed full of art, etc etc.

That body of old stuff ends up being a kind of bedrock that future users will be more interested in building off of. Then the niche communities will start to pop more imo.

Sounds like a fantastic option for folks that don’t like any mandatorily enforced censorship.

They should all go there.

Liberal in the traditional sense, as in, believing in liberty, I’m being technical. Not meaning “leftist” the way the word has been rebranded by right-leaners. So, their adoption of “no rules” is ultra-liberal, or libertarian perhaps.

And all social consequences are social. Drawing a distinction between legal and social is arbitrary. Suffering is suffering, and employing it to control dissenting voices is fundamentally illiberal. If you can prevent certain messages from appearing on your platform, you have successfully executed a form of control.

Thus, their ultra-liberty is an illusion. It’s not real.

Sure. Go over into 4chan and try any behavior they would describe as “white knighting” or “simping”. You will rapidly experience some social consequences intended to dissuade that behavior.

So, I’m not a woman, nor am I overly feminine, and I still call out toxic bullshit when I see it. If you want to say the problem is women/feminists though, fine whatever, if we cleaned up our own shit first, we might be able to make that stick. But when we’re bastards and they’re bitches, and we complain, we’re kinda the fucked up ones, y’know? Since we were supposed to be strong in the first place.

Unless you just think life is shit and everyone should get used to it. Then, just move to Russia or something, for everyone’s sake.

So, spaces that encourage toxic masculinity do exist, and they are fully aware of their ruination. See: 4chan.org.

edit: I see some of the confusion here, since 4chan is seemingly liberal, due to having no formal rules. However, that is an illusion. A man is not actually free to say anything they like without consequences there. It’s just that the norms will be enforced by the community, instead of any kind of authority. This is not actual liberty and freedom, simply indoctrination cloaked in an illusion of freedom.

Real freedom would allow a man to express something like sympathy, or being against gamergate, and express that opinion in peace. The reality of such spaces does not actually permit this.

It seems liberal and free, but in effect it is not. This is similar to how Trump seems to be strong sometimes, but in reality is weak and cowardly. Toxic masculinity loves its illusions.

Liberal, as in, believing in liberty. Freedom. How many mens spaces do you know of, where a man is completely free to open up, with full liberty and freedom from immediate consequences, about feelings they may have inside of them?

There’s actually not a lot. It’s a reflection of masculine indoctrination, where men in many places are made to feel like they almost need to be ready to become a soldier at any moment. Guarded, careful. It’s no good, unless your country is actually at war.

Somebody has to fill this place with content…

JK Rowling also writes as Robert Galbraith.

I just want to point out that our fairly optimistic views and plans for Lemmy has very likely specifically attracted trolling attention. We have a target on our backs, because some people just like attacking nice things. Most of the internet is not very nice, so does not need to be attacked. We are trying to do something different though, and that will attract some negative attention whether we like it or not.

Since they want to have a chilling effect on the community, hopefully demotivating some of its userbase, it is necessary to embody a willful refusal to be chilled.

For each of us.

Such a cool style. “How to communicate texture in as few brushstrokes as humanly possible.”

We will never be able to compete with them for as long as they remain federated with us. We will simply have no unique value any longer. All of our development–open source. All of our content–available to the federation. He will have rightful possession of it all, everything we are.

However, he does not have to share his development with us. He does not have to share his hardware resources with us. He does not have to limit himself to only the capabilities that we want to be added.

He can, if absolutely necessary, buy us. One big Instance at a time.

Our only path forward with any independence is to defederate immediately and ruthlessly. This way, we keep our content. We keep that unique contribution, that we can use as a competitor to eventually demonstrate our value to the rest of the world. That’s the only way possible for us to have any chance of eventually toppling him, instead. We must retain our unique value. We must protect our content. If he wants it, make him scrape it and repost it with bots or something.