Hi all,

I'm seeing a lot of hate for capitalism here, and I'm wondering why that is and what the rationale behind it is. I'm pretty pro-capitalism myself, so I want to see the logic on the other side of the fence.

If this isn't the right forum for a political/economic discussion-- I'm happy to take this somewhere else.

Cheers!

I didn't want to direct this question to Americans specifically because, at this point, other countries have shown support to Israel in one or the other way. If my country was financing this, I would be taking the streets. Shit, I'm right now in the hospital but all I can think about is protesting anyway just to feel I did something to stop this madness.

Are you doing something about this? Are you feeling unsettled? How do you feel about all this mess?

EDIT: So, buying Chinese stuff takes the USS Gerald Ford to Gaza’s coast. Also, TIL that that chocolate my cousin gave me when she was 20 and I was 5, (delicious stuff!) made me a slavist-ish. The fact remains, this genocide is being paid and supported by taxpayers money; of course, I was hoping that most of us didn’t pay taxes wishing for this. Thank you all for your responses, some of them were hard to swallow.

Title

Give me your worst, Lemmy! Absolutely nothing is off limits. Let’s get fucking weird!

I post this here because /c/iama doesn’t seem to be a thing…

Don’t hold back you jerks!

EDIT: It’s just about 05:00 for me. Night night! I’ll answer any other questions. In a few hours!

I've posted some controversial stuff, and I understand why I would be getting down voted for that. But I see some of my posts and comments are in the negatives for seemingly no reason at all? I don't really care about the karma because I can't see it anyway, but I'm worried that comments and posts here are gonna get downvoted and dismissed without further consideration solely because of the negative score, like what would happen on reddit. I suspect someone, a troll, a bot, or a misclick downvoted my comment or post and people just followed along downvoting in turn. It's either that, or I genuinely said something bad but I can't figure for the life of me that it is indeed bad. My prime example is my support post for commenting under certain posts, why did that get the downvotes? And I see this kind of thing sometimes on other people's comments as well, and I'm baffled, is it me who can't understand why something is bad, or hive mind came here too?

EDIT: it seems i wasn't clear enough. a) I'm not worried about getting the actual downvotes. I'm worried about downvotes stopping to be a tool to gauge content. b) I'm not worried about controversial opinions' downvotes, I already said I'm not surprised I got downvoted there. I was talking about totally mundane posts, like that one support post. c) I'm not talking about people simply disagreeing, I'm talking about people immediately disregarding a post because of the downvote count. it's not correct to say this doesn't happen, it totally does and... how am I supposed to prove that? all it takes on reddit is see a comment on 0 for no reason and see it quickly drop to -5

I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.

The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your "career" and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.

This is evident with how most people develop "hobbies" outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating "hobbies" and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.

Here's how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:

• more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
• learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
• more gardening
• participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
• become a tour guide for my city
• cook and bake for my neighbors
• academic research
• open source software (and non-software) contributions
• pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
• pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
• participate in more than one "professions". I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?

Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It's unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.

Please, help us to better understand how we can effectively funnel reddit users into Lemmy across all demographics, leveraging the average Lemmings advantages like expertise in automation, ai and bots?

What tactics/strategies do you propose? Can we automate the process? Can we somehow add ai to make it more fashionable?

NO LOLLYGAGGIN

When I first started using Lemmy it seemed like such a nice place with interesting discussions. It seemed like the first group of people to join after the app exodus were being quite careful to be respectful of the existing culture.

Now, it seems as though the culture from Reddit has completely replaced it. Toxicity and all. I will say I do follow a lot of communities from a wide range of instances so it's clearly not everywhere.

Am I the only one who's feeling like we've just stormed in and bulldozed Lemmy?

When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of "information should be free" has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.

The arguments I've heard about tracking etc are misguided and don't understand the actual risks.

Firstly, posts on the fediverse are already likely being consumed by advertising platforms like Facebook & Google. It would be trivial for big tech companies to setup relays that act as scrapers.

Secondly, the value in platform's tracking individuals is for advertising. There is no mechanism for these platforms to identify you browsing the we if your instance federated with threads. Your instance won't share cookie sessions etc with threads. It doesn't increase your exposure.

Thirdly, these platforms have the know how to deal with spam and they will be incentivised to share that tech with other federated instances.

Don't get me wrong, Facebook is an evil company. But I haven't heard a decent argument as to why them joining the fediverse is a bad thing. We always have the option to defederate in the future.

Change my mind.

I think this is mostly a US thing. Why use yearly salary? You're not paid once a year, are you? Most likely once a month. Referencing monthly salary makes much more sense.

"I'm making 50k". Great, now I have to guess - dollars? Monthly? Yearly? If yearly then what's the monthly paycheck? Net? Gross?

I used to downvote fairly often on Reddit as a sign to disagree or to push down really disgusting bigoted comments. And to be honest, it became a habit to just downvote without replying. However, now that I’m on lemmy and not Reddit I’ve been actively trying to not instantly downvote things and instead move on or take the time to reply. Has anyone else been trying to do this?

This would save young Americans from going into crippling debt, but it would also make a university degree completely unaffordable for most. However, in the age of the Internet, that doesn't mean they couldn't get an education.

Consider the long term impact of this. There are a lot of different ways such a situation could go, for better and for worse.

I'm a heavy emoji user, texting is such a poor medium for communication, many times people get the wrong message, but with an emoji you'll get an idea of the face I'm making, so less chance of misunderstanding

I noticed that every time I add an emoji to a comment it gets downvoted, so I tested my theory, wrote a comment without an emoji, got upvotes, went back and added an emoji, got downvotes..

On Reddit people use emojis a lot, on Lemmy I NEVER saw anyone use emojis, my account is new but still for the time I spent here, I never saw the use of emojis

So, is it just me, have you noticed this small detail ? and do you miss emojis the way I do ? 😭

So I've realized that in conversations I'll use traditional terms for men as general terms for all genders, both singularly and for groups. I always mean it well, but I've been thinking that it's not as inclusive to women/trans people.

For example I would say:

"What's up guys?" "How's it going man?" "Good job, my dude!” etc.

Replacing these terms with person, people, etc sounds awkward. Y'all works but sounds very southern US (nowhere near where I am located) so it sounds out of place.

So what are some better options?

Edit: thanks for all the answers peoples, I appreciate the honest ones and some of the funny ones.

The simplest approach is to just drop the usage of guys, man, etc. Folks for groups and mate for singular appeal to me when I do want to add one in between friends.

I was homeschooled previously with a small group of other children and we fart in class all the time.

Now I'm in public school for high school and no one is farting. I was very sheltered and public school is like a whole new world for me, so I don't know what the norms are. I've been holding it in but my stomach hurts and it leaks out anyway.

I don't understand how there are so many more people in high school and yet zero farts...

I'm really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I'll coast right through it. I'll also accept "I don't" and "very poorly" as answers

I am one of the admins of Beehaw and I'm trying to get some feedback on our potential move.

Let's start out with a little Beehaw history before judgements are passed, please.

A handful of us were beta testing Tildes when we decided to have discussions on a Discord server.

We decided that our 'Northern Star' or guiding principle would culminate as 'Be Nice' with purposefully vague/flexible interpretations. Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons.

We talked for a little over a year and some of our members became impatient. Then someone stepped in to suggest a couple of platforms that we could consider getting started with.

One of those platforms was Lemmy. None of us knew, at that time, anything about ActivityPub.

During the Reddit exodus (surrounding the API outcry and blackout), our instance exploded. We were, initially, crippled by the mass amounts of users seeking refuge.

Thankfully, someone stepped in and volunteered hundreds of hours of work to stabilize our instance and refine it further.

After many hours of talks, it became clear to us that our overall goal could be achieved outside of Lemmy/ActivityPub.

Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.

This seems like a good place so far tbh