If any of you have a spare laptop, maybe you can run a live OS for people to play around with?

Community rule 1.

Sabotage a city with this one weird trick!

That’s alright, and I’m also a little bit sorry for nitpicking! I just saw it as an opportunity to illustrate how complex this whole software mess is.

I’m not sure if you’ve come across it yet, but there’s a well-known copypasta posted to satirize the way many Linux users will nitpick terms.

Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully.

I wonder if it’s still early enough to give people taps on the shoulder - “don’t feed the trolls, friend”.

I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.

On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like “No politics. No insults. No drama.” Toxicity isn’t inevitable, there’s nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don’t bother with.

edit: and on the flipside, there are also communities where toxicity is expected and it’s amazing to see someone acting nice there, it might even be done as a trolling method.

But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

I still check mine, but occasionally I’ll know I’ve said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I’ve asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))

That’s one of the benefits of having a forum small enough to have a community. Troublemakers stick out like a sore thumb.

It’s not only about many people here being technical, of course you’re right that it plays a big part, and it’s also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there’s a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.

Furthermore, Linux (as a whole) is not a for-profit project, or a singular organization.

Desktop Linux is far from it’s only purpose, and many of the devs are far more interested in their own use-cases: servers, embedded systems, supercomputers, phones, special purpose OSs. Wikipedia even has a page for the wide range of use beyond desktops and servers. So we can’t simply treat devs as a unified group with a common goal like we can generally do with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Steam, etc. unless you pick a particular distro!

Enough folks drank the coolaid,

You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said “please censor me”.

with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet

I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.

Tor is slow

It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation

and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers

This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they’re doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.

Lynx

I know of two other uses for it:

• Conveniently setting up a software with a web interface while on a headless server
• Looking busy at bullshit jobs - see the Looking Busy anecdote near the bottom

Most of all: it’s run non-for-profit. There are no ads, donations are optional (I have the means to chip in a bit each year) and its not VC funded and therefore has no intrinsic pressure to enshittify like reddit repeatedly did. Lemmy does not exploit me.

I’ve been able to make (very minor) improvements to the codebase.

I could download and host an instance if I thought there was one my hobbies needed.

I can move around pretty easily without missing much if admins are moderating in a way I disagree with, or kowtow to corporate interests or garbage national laws. And some of the reddit admins (not merely subreddit mods) were abusive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNBqjKFS1_c

I remember seeing a “Yakko’s World, but with every country the US has bombed since WWII” and was sad to see they forgot the first one in the song, “America”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

(Any other times?)

I feel like the Taiwanese air force wouldn’t bother with these unofficial patches if there weren’t at least some truth to it.

I don’t see the logic in this sentence. What makes those soldiers a more reliable source than you or me? Taiwanese people read memes too.

what was that ideology again? Oh that’s right, it’s Marxist socialism

Marxist socialism isn’t idealist. In fact, it’s one of the few ideologies which isn’t idealist. It’s based on an scientific economic analysis of capitalism. Contrast this against our current system, liberalism, which is the failed idealization of liberty. Liberalism neglectfully kills hundreds of millions even in developed and politically-stable countries, but it’s just normal at this point.

You’re not morally superior to fascists

Morality is idealism.

If Marxist socialists had a similar movement in size and influence to Trump and MAGA and were in a position to win, the sane majority would be just as terrified

Oh no, they’re going to improve life expectancy and stop billionaires wasting all our hard work! The terror!

If anything, you, SleezyDizasta, should want Marxists to be in a position which threatens the ruling parties, because them being threatened is the only way you will ever get any of that big list of reforms you posted, bargaining to try and deradicalize the masses away from unrest. We saw this happen in Western bloc countries near the USSR such as the Nordic countries, considered the most progressive but gradually sinking back in line with the rest of Europe now.

dissolution is genocide

Dissolution doesn’t even suggest killing, at all. I don’t think you know what words mean.

This is the type of [whole paragraph]

I was referring to Palestine. Perhaps I should have specifically said ‘the region of Palestine’ but I didn’t want to be condescending by stating the obvious.

How dumb do you have to be to think that Americans in America would cheer on for idiots that think their country is evil, illegitimate, and should be destroyed?

How dumb do you have to be to think that most Americans like their governments?

[skipped over a lot of obvious bad-faith bullshit lol]

Heh, it’s poetry.

The organization is full of full blown vile Marxists who to “abolish capitalism” and establish socialism

Well, yeah, they’re socialists. Why shouldn’t they want to abolish capitalism and establish socialism? There’s nothing vile about that.

They outright want the destruction of Israel.

The dissolution of the state of Israel. Their worldview understands it as a settler-colonial ethnostate, just like former apartheid South Africa was. Jews, Christians, Muslims and others co-existed in Palestine before the Zionist state of Israel was established, the two-state situation is segregation caused by the establishment of a Zionist regime.

They organized a tone deaf pro-Palestinian rally on Oct 8th right after the attacks when the world was still in shock

That is a perfectly-appropriate time to rally support. They are pro-Palestinian and wanted to make it clear that people believed the resistance was supported, regardless of whether they are critical of the methods. The mass media gets to have its voice immediately, so rallies should not wait either.

They condemn social democracy

Yes. Democratic socialists are not capitalists and would not consider liberal democracy (especially the US version!) a working form of democracy, and don’t consider social capitalist parties within it to be effective because they must work within a broken system. Social democracy is a false hope to them.

And their interests are not with the US succeeding, they are nothing more than assets of our foreign adversaries.

Most socialists will understand the US as a settler-colonial imperialist state from day 1, so yes, their interests are ultimately that the US (as we know it) should stop being imperial terrorists that most of the world (including state allies) hate. But to call that being “nothing more than assets of our foreign adversaries” is ignorant of the very real and growing discontent with the US’s own borders. A lot of US citizens hate the US governments and how they work, and to blame that on foreign adversaries will ultimately prevent them from being solved and prevent their numbers growing.