All true but just fine again may depend on your definition. It’s going to cause major inconvenience for everyone at minimum I think.

I don’t know what to tell you. I am fully aware of the history and difficulties in migration out of authoritarian governments. Sometimes situations that are quite different in some ways nonetheless share common features. That is all I’m saying, but you seem to be too emotionally triggered by the differences to acknowledge the similarities. Maybe take a step back and think on it and you will see them.

As far as your second point… yes… that’s exactly the problem I am outlining. The current system will almost inevitably lead to non-democratically managed instances, regardless of intent. In order to change that, we need to change the underlying system. I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to. Again, ease of migration has an effect on the severity of the problem, but not the underlying dynamic itself.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch. Fundamentally, I lack the expertise to do so, though I’d be interested in a community discussion on how this could work.

This is very similar to telling people being exploited at work to get a better job or start their own business. Sure, theoretically, this might sometimes solve the problem, but it’s going to be a much better solution if we change the underlying system that creates these problems in the first place.

One could also simply move to another country if desired. I think there is a parallel. Obviously that’s much simpler with instances than countries but there is still a commonality here.

The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.

Again, I have acknowledged the problem is far less severe with instances compared to countries. But the power structures involved are quite similar.

I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.

So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.

In a shallow analysis, one could blame admins for not implementing democratic governance (as you claim LemmyGrad has done). But you need to remember that running an instance is typically an unpaid act of mutual aid done for the community—blaming admins for not doing more work to make a better system seems a bit harsh when it would take substantially more work to set up such a system.

A better solution would be to build democratic mechanisms into a social media platform itself. This would allow democratic decision-making in defederation and other issues by default, rather than forcing admins to create such a system from scratch. I actually think both Reddit and Lemmy were steps in this direction, with Reddit adding upvotes and downvotes to democratize content curation, and with Lemmy’s federated nature at least allowing user choice in which admins they want to be subordinated by.

However, both of these platforms were created by people who believe in authoritarian ideologies. These democratic elements were added individually to solve specific problems—neither Lemmy nor Reddit had an explicit goal of making a more democratic platform in all respects.

I am hoping that the online space will continue to evolve in this direction. Since I doubt Lemmy developers share this vision, there may come a time when people who want this will need to migrate to another platform, or create a fork of the current software. Since I’m not a developer, can’t contribute myself, but I will keep my eyes open for good ideas in this vein.

I don’t think it is failed. It has reached self-sustaining levels for many topics. It will need further growth to make smaller, niche topics self-sustaining. Whether this growth will take place is an open question. I know my instance is growing in terms of activity, but I’m not sure how others are faring.

But as long as it isn’t shrinking, I think it’s well-positioned to absorb more growth as users discover it or become disillusioned with Reddit or other sites in the future.

I’m not aware of any left vs right definition that would place the kkk on the left. Can you provide one?

Where did you get the idea that the KKK was left wing from?

There is definitely a fairly large subset of problems that are rather effectively solved by running away from them.

The issue appears when the problems are of your own creation but you simply run away instead of solving the underlying issue. So if you keep kicking beehives, you should stop doing that.

Reminds me of bing’s chat feature that gives citations that don’t contain the information in question.

Basically all of them.

Not sure which version everyone is on but the cross-posting button is broken in the latest Lemmy version. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Yup that’s what I was talking about.

Maybe if you have an electric car you could hack in and replace the space ship sounds with your preferred space ship sounds. Might be illegal though.

I see. You definitely would need to consider how that fits into the desired campaign narratives. If the whole campaign is about freedom fighters opposing Lord Ajax, it makes little difference if one character starts out as more of an outlaw than another. But if the campaign is meant to be knights of the round table doing quests for the one true king, it might be more of a problem if a player has to have a secret identity or sit out most social encounters. I wouldn’t want to impose that situation on a player unless they are specifically interested in playing that role.

No but I would consider requiring a reflavor if it was incompatible with the setting. Not sure that’s ever come up but it could.

Or are you asking about in-world legality?

When they seized power as happened in Russia, China, and many other countries, they consistently murdered or enslaved dissidents. And they defend such practices to this day. I am an outspoken dissident in my current society and surely would be in their imagined future as well.

So you’re saying we’d have to inhale the milk?

Is it possible exposure to these antigens in milk could protect you from future infection?