I never really liked Reddit. I avoided it for a long time, but finally relented and grudgingly signed up in 2011.

I was always on the lookout for a new home, and would follow links to any place that looked promising, but none of them ever panned out - they were always too dead or too narrowly focused or too shitty or behind a paywall or something. And I’d go back to Reddit.

Immediately after Spez’s petulant AMA, I happened on a link to join-lemmy.org. I was especially eager to find a different forum then, just because Reddit was set to get much worse much more quickly and the CEO is a twat, but I really didn’t expect anything of lemmy. I assumed that, just as with all the others over the years, I’d browse around a bit, be unimpressed, and leave.

Instead, I looked around and liked what I saw. And the more I looked, the more I liked it. And I just never went back, and have been here ever since.

I don’t think we can gatekeep it either.

But we can, or not, encourage it. I’d rather not. I’ve never - not even once in more than 30 years online - seen a forum get notably popular without it also, and obviously as a direct result, going to shit.

The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer.

If the masses discover the fediverse and move here, that’s not going to remain the case, guaranteed.

They’ll bitch and moan because content isn’t centralized (we’ve already seen that), and the rent-seeking fuckwads will, one way or another, rearrange things so that it is centralized, and specifically so that they can then squat on top of it and suck profit out of it, and it’ll end up just another facebook/twitter/instagram/reddit.

Count on it.

Why on Earth would we want to do that?

The last thing in the world the fediverse needs is a bunch of idiots blundering around in it.

Everybody else doing it.

Bluntly?

This is the dumbest variation I’ve ever seen on the already dumb idea of trying to compensate for a perceived lack of content on Lemmy by just cribbing stiff from Reddit.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Reddit, Lemmy or anywhere else - if the username checks out, then the username checks out, and that’s an amusing tidbit worth mentioning.

And this is definitely a case in which the username checks out.

And I stand by everything I said there.

And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.

And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.

And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”

If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

I doubt you’d even get a coherent sentence. Just random strings of emotive nouns and adjectives with irrelevant verbs sprinkled in here and there.

SOS Pads and Scotch Tape

Mark Sandman

I suppose one could. I have no idea why anyone but an emotionally disturbed moron would though.

It seems sort of like condemning punching yourself in the nose while punching yourself in the eye - it’s like you somehow managed to both get the point and miss it completely, at the same time.

No - anarchism, by definition, is the complete absence of institutionalized authority.

Those around here who are calling for the destruction of institutions have no intention of creating a society free from the hierarchy of authority - they want to destroy the current authority merely so that they can replace it with their own.

Again, they’re about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists. They’re as authoritarian as fascists - they just have a different set of norms they want to forcibly impose, and a different set of people they’re eager to oppress and murder along the way.

I haven’t seen a single anarchist on Lemmy. Not even one.

The most obvious group, and the one this thread is about, is about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists.

Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?

I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go.

The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.

“Authoritarian” is fairly meaningless in this context. All societies and political structures rely on authority to maintain social control to greater or lesser extents.

“Authoritarian” doesn’t refer merely to the existence of authority. It refers to a system under which, on balance, individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority - a system under which there is more likelihood that an individual will be constrained by authority than that theybwill be free to act as they choose.

And note, before you even go there, that that doesn’t mean or imply no individual liberty. Again, the issue is the balance between individual liberty and governmental authority.

Where does liberal “democracy” derive its authority from?

Why are we suddenly talking about democracy?

Why then do studies repeatedly show that there is no correlation between popular opinion and policy? Why do the majority of Americans want public health care and yet it never passes?

Why are we now suddenly talking about representative “democracy” instead?

Yes - of course there’s a gap between actual public sentiment and the machinations of representatuve "democracy - that’s most of the point. It’s a system that’s been sold to the unwary to give them an illusion of self-determination behind which the oligarchs can hide.

How is that relevant to anything? (Other than a broad argument against institutionalized authority in general, which I’d agree with).

There is no such thing as a distinction between “democracy” and “authoritarian”

Not necessarily, but as a general rule, there is, simply because it’s more difficult for oligarchs in a representative democracy to enact their will. There’s a number of hoops that they have to jump through in order to maintain at least some semblance of serving the will of the people, and that specifically because the people still retain some significant freedoms (remember - it’s about the balance between freedom and authority).

In effect, oligarchs in a representative democracy have to trick or coerce people into not exercising their freedoms or exercising them poorly.

In an authoritarian system, the balance favors the government in the first place, so they’re far more likely to be able to simply issue decrees and then enforce them, without having to muck about with all of the pretending to be serving the will of the people stuff.

Granted that it’s not as significant a difference as gung-ho Americans might wish to believe it to be, there is still a difference.

Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing

Actually, I would say that it is inherently a bad thing.

That’s an awful lot of why I’m an anarchist - I believe that institutionalized authority cannot be justified and is inevitably destructive.

But that’s sort of beside the point.

People always justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn’t “authoritarian”.

This reads like classic projection.

And in fact, I just wrote another post in which I pointed to what I believe to be the fundamental flaw at the heart of the tankie position, and it was pretty much exactly what you wrote here.

My position is that if you’re going to hold that authority is legitimate, then that means that you are legitimately subject to it. You don’t get to pick and choose, just as you wouldn’t allow those who would be subject to your authority pick and choose. Just as you hold that they’re rightly subjugated if those with whom you agree are in power, you’re rightly subjugated if those with whom they agree are in power.

It’s either that or you carry your aversion to being made subject to someone else’s authority to its logical conclusion and cede to others the exact same freedom you wish to have yourself.

You can’t have it both ways. You’re not some sort of demi-god, deserving of special treatment. If you can rightly oppress others they can rightly oppress you. If they can’t rightly oppress you, you can’t rightly oppress them.

That last is the main reason I’m an anarchist.

Oh and, more broadly I’d note that virtually all authoritarians believe that authority should be directed in a specific way. That’s exactly how their irrationality manifests - they don’t advocate for authority broadly, because that carries with it the risk that they might end up subject to someone else’s authority. They advocate only for their own authority, or for that of their ideological fellows.

So what that boils down to is that they explicitly advocate for visiting on other people that which they explicitly oppose being visited on themselves.

Or in simpler terms, they’re self-centered assholes.

I’m not an anarchist by accident.

That’s exactly why it’s cynically amusing - because they “believe it should be directed in a certain way.”

Specifically, they’re entirely on-board when someone who happens to wear the same ideological label they do uses it to, for instance, massacre “dissidents,” but the instant anyone else uses it in any way that causes some minor inconvenience for themselves, they start mewling about how oppressed they are.

Ah… it’s so deliciously cynically amusing to watch tankies whine about being subject to someone else’s authority.

It would take all of about three minutes for you to simply register an account with an instance that already matches your preferences.