Yes. I vote for a preemptive defederation lol.

Exactly! I vote to defederate from them on our end, because otherwise they can just decide to federate themselves and brigade and troll their way through our magazines. Some Kbin magazines might not be prepared for that.

Nothing they do is in good faith, so why bother with them?

I’ve seen their brigading on lemmy communities before. They will also serial downvote anything they don’t like.

Personally, I would vote to defederate from both Hexbear and lemmygrad. Kbin is nice because it feels like the majority of people are posting, commenting, and overall discussing in good faith. It’s a nice culture. Neither of those two instances fit with it.

Right? I never quite understood who it was actually for, either. I mean, notepad makes sense, but wordpad just seemed like a worse version of MS Word.

I guess it could have been for those who needed something more sophisticated than notepad but didn’t want to spend money to get Word?

Idk, that’s the only reason I can think of right now lol.

Yeah, same. It’s uncomfortable seeing that type of stuff pop up in the feed.

I am sure he will get to it, but for the moment my solution has just been to block the users when I see them, their community/magazine and sometimes the domain.

Seriously - the kid lost his hand, and they’re fined just over a grand?

I’m pretty sure some smart phones cost more than that. This might as well be pennies to the owner.

I would recommend blocking the OP - I don’t think they are going to argue in good faith. It doesn’t matter what facts we present because they will only believe theirs to be correct, and claim ours to be fabricated by the all-knowing, all-powerful, and simultaneously weak CIA/US.

While I think plenty of people have been standing up to him, it’s good to see someone like Jack Smith put a name to what Trump has been doing.

Trump’s strategy is to conflate the legal battles and the political battles, all the while having them reinforce each other. I wonder what a gag order would do to this strategy?

I feel like on average their conversation quality is higher than the other alternatives. However, as you said, it is not very diverse.

Tildes also feels very “primp & proper” so to speak. While the conversations are generally very civil and of good quality, I also feel like the place is ruled with an iron fist; step a little bit out of line, and you’re pretty much gone. This is then coupled with the fact that you’re not able to make custom communities.

In the end, its good for civil discussion within the bounds of what is already considered acceptable by the admin. I almost feel like it has the opposite problem Reddit does - whereas conversations on Reddit are largely driven by bots and the hivemind, Tildes is controlled by Deimos and whoever Deimos approves of.

I sure hope not.

I am not sure about others, but I am not comfortable with ANY possibility of Trump winning back he White House. Any support for him is dangerous and reckless.

Supporting him is only going to fuel the conspiracy theories he endorsed & started. These lies have shaken the trust in US institutions, especially with his base. His first loss resulted in him lying and causing instability. They actually stormed the capitol! That did not even happen during the US Civil War! If he loses again it will be no different.

Furthermore, any continued support is legitimizing his claims that he is being “unfairly targeted” or that the left is engaging in a “witch hunt” against him. What will his supporters do if he is jailed? What happens if he wins from jail!? Will there be violence? Probably.

And if he actually wins the White House again, what will happen? Now there is an actual traitor to the nation in the White House! I would be shocked if that didn’t also cause violence and instability! The amount hopelessness that would cause would surely create instability and a serious lack of trust in the United States and its institutions.

TL DR: Any support for Trump is going to cause instability, violence, and a constitutional crisis! I understand the Democrats think they can beat him again - and hopefully they can - but I would sleep a little better knowing he was completely off the table.

Darn - I was afraid this might be the case.

I was also wondering what happens if someone from a defederated instance upvotes/downvotes you or your post. Is that even possible?

I am still figuring out this fediverse stuff lol

I’ve not been to this tower, but the whole skyscraper-swaying thing totally weirded me out when I first learned about it. It all seemed so counterintuitive at first, but the fact these things are actually engineered to sway to withstand the wind loads on them is nothing short of remarkable.

Just think about it - the entire design, the architecture, the engineering, the columns, the floor plates, expansion joints (I presume), etc. are all designed to sway within a certain tolerance. These towers are so normal to see in our cities, but they really are hallmarks of human achievement.

It looks like it is possible on other instances? Beehaw apparently has a list of federated and defederated instances, but it also looks like it might be manually updated by their admins.

Does kbin have something similar?

TIL that 40.5% of the world’s rice comes from India. That’s a lot of rice that’s no longer going to be circulating in the global market.

Seems like this is also going to have the largest impact on Africa, who have also been impacted by the lack of grain exports from Ukraine since Russia invaded.

I feel like there should be a way to hold politicians like Tuberville in contempt. Not only is his cause complete bullshit, he is allowing domestic politics to get in the way of national security.

Of course, endangering national security seems to be a part of the republicans platform these days.

As someone who never really used Twitter, I find this to be kinda sad. Everything is shifting to video, and I hate it lol.

Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?

That being said, on the list of stupid ideas Musk has implemented since he bought Twitter this actually seems to be inline with what the rest of the (social media) industry seems to be pushing. TikTok is obviously the first one that comes to mind, but Instagram and Snapchat have been pushing videos for years, too. Even Reddit started promoting a videos over text-based threads - it’s a pain in the ass to get to the comments on a video post with their official app!

I’ll keep my fingers-crossed that lemmy & kbin are able to sustain themselves, because right now its one of the only places where text-based forums are not being pushed off to the side.

The Bible Belt I can believe, though I am not sure about the Rust Belt. It may have been true in 2016, but I think the 2020 election paints a different picture.

When I think of the Rust Belt, I think of places like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Of those cities, it seems only Missouri is hardcore republican (despite St. Louis’s and Kansas City’s best efforts). Michigan seems to have swung pretty left (though there are definitely still red areas), Pennsylvania voted blue and Wisconsin is on the verge of undoing a-lot of republican gerrymandering. Ohio looks like a red-leaning mixed bag, but it doesn’t strike me as a republican bastion.

Granted, most of these are major battleground states with both parties in almost equal numbers, but their conservative populations don’t seem to be anymore Trump-oriented than other states.

I actually agree with your assessment, though I was specifically referring to the debates, not the elections cycles themselves.

The democrats (and the left in general) had a propensity for hyperbole that labeled McCain and Romney as dire threats to democracy. At the time, I think thought of this as a viable tactic to win the election (in a way not too dissimilar from LBJ’s “Daisy” campaign ad against Goldwater). However, it essentially turned them into the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” when Trump came around, because huge swaths simply refused to believe them.

So, I do actually agree that democrats helped to create Trump, or at least helped to create an environment that allowed him to rise. How we stop Trump now though is beyond me.

Yeah, it is very disheartening to see. I still remember going back and watching previous debates before Trump, and they were all so civil! Even in the most heated moments, the candidates were actually discussing ideas and policy!

I cannot wait for Trump to fade away from the political scene. It’s just so sad to see how he turns everything into a debate about him.

Just based on Queens, NY, I think the republicans in NYC capitalized on some of the things Democrats “beat around the bush” or avoided talking about. The Asian American population in NY is very anti-crime, and the dems perceived inaction on Anti-Asian Hate created an opening some I think local republicans capitalized on. Even the current mayor is a former cop.

Now, how they got to be die-hard Trumpers is not something I understand. He did, after all, cause Asian Americans a-lot of grief with his whole “China Virus” BS during the pandemic…