Vote for 3.

Honorable mention for 11 but all of these are fantastic. Great job by the artists.

Sorry, I don’t use wefwef. In the main browser, you can navigate to the community and the “block” button is right below the “subscribe” option.

Near as I can tell, there are certain communities that have a “rule” that every time you browse that community, you must post something before you leave. This leads to a lot of low effort shitposting that I guess some people find fun but I just blocked those communities so my /All feed wasn’t cluttered.

I don’t love this example because enjoyment of the object isn’t really a cost. If I buy a book or a videogame or a movie, the time it takes to enjoy the media is the value, not the cost.

If you’re talking about maintenance and upkeep on your car, that is a different type of cost that has to be weighed against the cost and time expenditure of a bus pass or whatever your alternative was.

In other words I feel like this is a catchy phrase that kind of falls apart once you start to dig at it.

I feel like there’s a lot more to this than “pay it twice”. If you’re talking purely in dollars, then you’ll want to consider maintenance and upkeep over the expected lifetime of the object and compare that to alternatives. Additionally, everything has an opportunity cost because no resource is limitless and you could have allocated it elsewhere. Finally, emotional and other intangible benefits are something that most people have a very difficult time quantifying.

If you want to say “consider more than just the purchase price” then I’m with you.

I’m not certain all that is necessary but I agree there should be no more than one active vote at a time and it should be pinned to the top. It’s quite easy to miss what’s going on if you don’t happen to log in every day.

I have an awful 1.5 hour commute to work. Ideally I’d like to be fully remote - but my company insists that isn’t going to happen. My second choice would be convenient, safe, and affordable public transit - but my city insists that isn’t going to happen. Autonomous cars wouldn’t be a perfect solution but it would be a heck of a lot better than the road-raging humans I have to deal with now.

Nay

Based on our positive interactions thus far, I’ll respect the spirit of the question and try to answer truthfully.

I live in a blue city in a very red state. Many of my friends and most of my family are deeply conservative. I have a lot of empathy towards poor, rural, (mostly white) conservatives. They are told since birth by their parents, teachers, pastors, and other authority figures that if they work hard and pray harder they’ll have a good life. Of course, this rarely works out because various demagogues like Trump abuse their loyalty by promising the moon and then robbing them blind.

The majority of these folks aren’t inherently bad people. They’re poorly educated, economically oppressed, and sick and tired of being told that they are the part of the problem because their ancestors owned slaves and Reagan was an asshole. They’ve gotten the short end of the stick for years! Is it any wonder that they cling to misinformation that gives them a common enemy or insists that the shitty state of the world is not their fault? Can you blame them for making a distasteful joke out of ignorance?

Hate is never acceptable. But all too often, “liberal” communities go straight to demonization and never attempt to open an honest discourse or rehabilitate people from years of lies and misinformation. Poor rural conservatives are victims too and deserve our respect and our empathy. Many are too deeply indoctrinated to engage meaningfully. But some aren’t. And shunning them, refusing to talk to them, leaving them alone in their echo chambers doesn’t do anyone much good. At the point where nearly half of Americans think that Trump is a good idea, the rest of us need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our institutions and ask how things got this way. I refuse to accept that it’s because people are inherently assholes, there must be more to it than that.

I don’t blame anyone who just wants to come online and look at pictures of cats and unwind and not deal with all this heavy bullshit. But I think the world would be a better place with a little more empathy. Call me naïve. Call me idealistic. But for my part I’ll keep trying. Thanks for the meaningful dialogue on the subject.

There’s a lot to unpack here. For brevity I’ll just say I’ve looked through a few of the linked threads and spent a few minutes on the EH home instance. I don’t claim to be an expert or know the full back story. I have seen some horribly unfunny memes, several jokes in poor taste, and some problematic assertions with regard to LGBTQ issues. Not my crowd at all. But in my admittedly limited time it also hasn’t been enough to induce the moral panic many users here are having. I mean really, “calls for extermination of marginalized groups in support of fascist government actions”? That’s quite a leap from the childish shitposting I saw.

At the end of the day, a majority of sh.itjust.works does not want to associate with exploding-heads, it will likely defederated, and life will go on. I just worry that when the first response is always to silence those we don’t agree with, the future of Lemmy looks very fragmented and full of tiny echo chambers. As I said elsewhere, blocking and banning a few bad actors is a small price to pay for having a vibrant sustainable community.

That’s a fair point and an interesting distinction regarding hosting content - I had assumed that your home instance was simply fetching content hosted from elsewhere but I really don’t know much about the underlying technology.

And we can certainly all pack up and go separate ways. I just worry that excessive fragmentation is an existential threat to the success of the ecosystem. Today I don’t feel like there are enough users on Lemmy to reach a self-sustaining critical mass - if the barrier to entry is too high, we won’t get enough engagement and this could turn into another failed experiment like Google+. If the price to pay for having a full vibrant community is downvoting and blocking some bad users every now and then that’s something I am willing to do.

Finally, I think this interaction has been a good example of what I hope to get out of Lemmy. I don’t agree with many of your points, but I am glad for the conversation and think I have learned something by exploring a point of view different to my own. If we had been siloed with only like-minded people, that would not have happened. Food for thought perhaps.

For that example, you are referring to the sarcastic comment about the child in a mask? Why not just downvote and move on? Idiots say dumb shit all the time, online and in life. I legitimately don’t understand why this has you so concerned.

From these replies and others you seem to be of the opinion that any conservative ideology is heinous - and for what it’s worth many here seem to agree with you. Personally I feel that turning some communities into liberal-only safe spaces while isolating others into conservative echo chambers only radicalizes both groups and makes constructive discourse increasingly less likely. People with other beliefs exist, vote, pay taxes, write laws, etc - perhaps if we spent less time demonizing each other and more time understanding why people feel certain ways we’d all be better off. Lemmy may not be the ideal place for such conversation, but where is?

There is quite a lot in that thread that I find distasteful and wouldn’t personally engage with. But I don’t see anything that is a “Nazi bar” as you describe it. I see a lot of unfunny shitposts, some political bait of questionably authenticity, and some bad faith discussion of transgender issues that other users attempted to moderate. I don’t see doxxing, inciting to violence, NSFL material, CP, or anything else heinous enough to warrant defederation. Just a lot of Fox News talking points which, like it or not, a large percentage of the US would agree with.

Who here has concrete examples of content from exploding-heads that is objectionable and wasn’t immediately downvoted, blocked, and/or banned? Terms like “Nazi bar” have been thrown around quite freely recently and it’s giving me a bit of boy-who-cried-wolf vibes. Being conservative does not make you a Nazi. Being a troll does not make you a Nazi. Voting for Trump does not make you a Nazi. Perhaps some members of exploding-heads ARE Nazis, but calling any viewpoint you don’t agree with as fascist or evil cheapens the term and prevents discourse.

I’m sure there is stuff on that instance that I won’t want to see. But that’s what the “block” option is for. When I first joined sh.itjust.works, nearly half of my /all was Hentai which I have no interest in seeing, and frankly found some of it disturbing. But I blocked those communities and now have an experience I enjoy.

Count me in the “defederation as a last resort when all else has failed” crowd. Over-fragmentation leads to less content, less engagement, and more echo chambers. If an army of Nazi bots suddenly floods us out, then we can take an appropriate action - but I have no evidence to suggest that is currently happening.

I agree with the spirit of this 100% and will support any way I can. I only hope the implementation is free of trolls, bots, and other bad actors.

This is hugely personal to your own interests. Personally I am subscribed to communities around news, science, gaming, whiskey, and my favorite sports team. You can always use the community browser to look for something specific or just keep an eye on the “all” listing to see if something catches your eye.

Ok so help me understand here. The root post is Beehaw complaining that their four admins can’t handle the new influx of users. But isn’t that the entire point of moderators? Shouldn’t each community be responsible for dealing with trolls, etc? From what I’ve seen of Beehaw, they’re attempting to have the same handful of admins moderate every single community, which was never going to be sustainable and IMHO misses the entire point of this sort of experience.

I find this very disappointing, not because I’m hugely attached to Beehaw (although their large gaming community has dominated my feed this week). But rather because the first response to whatever adversity they were facing, real or perceived, is to take the nuclear option. The biggest drawback to Lemmy as opposed to Reddit is the over fragmentation and the lack of quality content, so intentionally increasing those challenges feels short-sighted and bad for the ecosystem as a whole.