They’re an idea that big forums are actually awful and you’re better off in smaller communities.

Mostly, it’s a pain because it can be hard to find some escoteric bit of knowledge or expertise when you don’t have a Reddit sized forum to troll through.

But that’s where spaces like Discord excel. Nice, tight communities of hobbyists and specialists who are routinely online and regularly churning out useful content.

As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.

But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.

Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.

Really looking forward to this shit showing up in AI-edited Wikipedia citations in the near future.

It works, in no small part, because the community is small and people have known each other by handles for years now.

But the flip side is that a few of the mods on Hexbear can be just as draconian in their administration policy as anyone on old-school Reddit. So you periodically see otherwise friendly and active members vanish from the site.

I just remember, in the very early days of these kinds of online communities, that people would actually try and organize to do shit. Like, you’d have folks on /r/Houston talking about a bunch of redditors going down to the Houston Food Bank to volunteer. Or you’d have some serious fucking shit out about a landlord with folks offering to come down and help out. I even caught a “my car is broken, I don’t know what to do” with a “don’t worry, I can help out” and a final “omg, its fixed, thank you so much!”

Now its all talk. Nothing is real, its all just fucking ads and Mr. Beast style stunts. Nobody has any kind of trust or empathy for anyone else online. The closest you get to a material social network is people on Nextdoor screaming about how a strange car drove down the street and desperately asking everyone on the block to call the police and report it at once.

Shit fucking sucks.

It’s literally a quote from Joseph Stalin.

By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

pro-authoritarian takes lapping up PRC koolaid

Koolaid is when you spend 16 years building trains.

Truth and Liberty is when your roads are falling apart faster than you can resurface them.

No no no. This is Whataboutism. It doesn’t count.

the number is growing, not shrinking

EU car sales at 3-year low in August, EV sales plunge 44%

From just last month.

Cars are extraordinarily expensive to purchase and maintain. As the European domestic economy struggles under a host of economic headwinds, individuals are finding it more difficult to buy new cars or repair existing ones. This has been complicated by spiking the price of cheaper imports with high tariffs. Also, by the poor funding for domestic infrastructure in Austerity-focused European governments.

I don’t think Iran will need to wait that long. This looks like the US/Israel are planning a joint operation counterattack on Iranian facilities. Which will trigger a retaliation in turn as Iran escalates in kind. Etc, etc.

The big difference now is that the US military will officially be getting its hands dirty in the region, much like we did in Desert Shield / Storm and in Libya. Very possible that the ghost of John McCain finally gets its long-sought-after bomb bomb Iran.

people in reality have cars and need to park them somewher

I’ve seen a number of denser developments start burying their parking lots, or stacking them on the roofs. You get denser (and conceivably more walkable) neighborhoods when places are built up this way. But it also drives up the cost of development and is only viable where real estate costs are astronomical. Then you’ve still got these six-to-eight lane Stroads intersecting the city blocks, with relatively little pedestrian infrastructure for crossing safely.

So if I live in a (atrociously overpriced) condo directly next door to a Whole Foods, you’re still stuck hustling across enormous expanses of asphalt in order to make a simple grocery run.

Compare that to a dense urban neighborhood I lived in for a few months in Leeds. Walk downstairs, cross a simple cobbled two lane street, pop into a small grocery / sandwich shop combo, grab lunch plus essentials, then pop home inside 20 minutes. No risk to life or limb and I didn’t even need a bike, much less a car.

You can find spots like this all over Italy, France, and Spain as well. Probably common to the Eastern Bloc, too. I’ve just never been. But the idea that people “need cars” is more predicated on the fact that we’ve created these oceans of asphalt and concrete in the states which are uncross-able without one.

“Dark urban alleyways are the scariest parts of a city”, I say as I dart across twelve lanes of traffic on foot.

Look to my home country Denmark and see how many left leaning parties exists. None of them are Communists btw

Western bloc countries purged their governments of explicitly communist parties back in the 50s and 60s, during the hottest years of the Cold War. The parties that formed in their wake had many of the same ideological inclinations operating under different monikers. So you’ve got Red–Green Alliance and more left-leaning voices in the Social Democrats talking about public housing and land reform and a worker-lead democracy, just like explicit Communists in Cuba and Vietnam and South Africa and Korea and India were seventy years ago.

Similarly, “conservative” parties organized under UKIP, National Front, FDL, or the AfD espousing all the same racist, ultra-nationalist, imperial expansionist views common to 1930s European fascists. None of this shit is new in the material sense. It’s just fresh paint on the old frame.

Plenty of people like Lemmy.world

It’s one of the easiest instances to join, thanks in no small part to the focus on growth over doctrinaire censorship. Consequently, a lot of people who don’t like .world end up joining it just to get access to the other more tightly administered communities.

someone comparing .world with .ml in politics

Everyone to the left of me is a psychotic delusion America-hating Tankie.

I’m a rational, centrist clear-eyed moderate making fact-based decisions using my extensive expertise on the subject matter.

Everyone to the right of me is a Russian bot or a troll.

Adding anyone reading this to the Victims of Communism memorial.

People are idiots for buying them.

Americans have set the bar for vehicle quality so low for so long that they likely don’t realize they’re driving a lemon.

Not everything needs to be political.