Karu 🐲

Microblogging is a terrible social media format when what you want from social media is to read and discuss stuff you’re interested in. In Mastodon, I can scream into the void, but I have no guarantee that anybody will be interested in what I have to say. If all you want is to keep tabs on people it works fine I guess, but as soon as you want to follow topics it becomes incredibly clunky.

You can search keywords or hashtags, but all you get is an unmoderated firehose of loosely connected posts about the topic you want, and other topics for which people use the same words. You can follow hashtags, but then you just get said unfiltered firehose on your TL. Unless everyone somehow agrees in how to use the hashtag, it’s pointless.

Frankly I think all microblogging platforms would improve if there was a closed set of possible hashtags you could use in your posts. Hopefully there would be a unified name convention for each topic, and each hashtag could have a dedicated curation team of some sort, that could remove or relocate posts. Likewise, users should be able to submit a new possible hashtag for everyone to use. This way, I would be able to subscribe to a hashtag, be sure that all the content I receive will be relevant to a topic I care about, and I could post to it knowing that other people who subscribe to the hashtag are guaranteed to be at least somewhat interested in what I have to say. Oh wait, I think I just reinvented Lemmy communities.

While we’re at it, Mastodon is not 2008 Twitter anymore. No one posts via SMS. Inline hashtags should not be a thing, because it lets people optimize the way they phrase their posts for discoverability, and abusing them makes posts very uncomfortable to read. I have not seen as many people on Mastodon doing this as on Twitter, but why even keep inline hashtags at all nowadays? Just keep tags separately from the post’s content.

Not willing to start an argument, since this whole topic about “tankies” on Lemmy is exactly as toxic, disingenuous and unproductive as it was back on Reddit, so I might not reply further than this.

But elsewhere in this thread I have seen you post “evidence” that was actually just some ridiculous meanwhileongrad thread. If we are going by those standards then I might as well pull out all the exaggerated out of context circlejerking about liberals that is common on Hexbear. If we are to drop our collective IQ to zero, we may well be playing this game in both directions. But oh wait, turns out it’s only bad when Hexbear does it to own the libs, but it’s fully solid compelling evidence when another certain instance does it about “tankies”.

The claim that .ml is censoring comments “for nothing else other than being against Russia/China/NK”, at the very least, does not match my experience of browsing .ml at all. But if you do have evidence as you say, I invite you to actually post it and let people discuss. It shouldn’t be hard; the modlog is public.

That said, I’m personally not interested in starting the 95474214th Lemmy argument about tankies this week on this website so don’t expect me to reply.

Jesus fucking christ dude, the insane obsession you guys over at lemmy.world have with tankies is unreal. Maybe go outside and touch some grass.

It’s always the same two instances complaining about the rest of the Fediverse not bending over to bootlick the US overworlds, and accusing the rest of somehow simping for other regimes just on the basis of opposing that. It is seriously getting tedious and insufferable.

On top of that, including lemmy.ml in there is just disingenuous. Grad and hexbear sure, they are spaces openly and deliberately created to discuss leftist politics. But there is literally nothing making lemmy.ml any less generalist than any instance, maybe other than a certain instance that is happy to ban and defederate anyone who dares question the US hegemony. You cannot bind lemmy.ml to “tankism” on any basis other than the Lemmy devs being socialist themselves despite letting anyone of any political creed use their software, unless you are dumb enough to take decontextualized meanwhileongrad-level bullshit seriously.

I moved over from .world to .ml to flee away from this American exceptionalism brainroot and, guess what? It didn’t work. I keep seeing the same constant complaints about this fictional group of Lemmy users that really like Putin and Xi or something and weaponizing those complaints to support and enact hostile actions against people and instances discussing anti-capitalist, anti-establishment policy. The only thing that changed is that now, besides that, I can also see leftists users engage in posts from my own account. So, funnily enough, the echo chamber effect became weaker after I moved to .ml.

It was a rather funny timing that this whole discussion about lemmy.ml being a hardcore tankie instance that should be widely defederated etc came to be about at the time that lemmy.world defederated lemmygrad and consequently ran out of red-flavored scapegoats to claim that they are being oppressed by some nebulous left-wing echo chamber.