Many of them are just straight up lying, a little bit to you and a little bit to themselves.

For others, it’s the sense that they’ve lost the golden age of their fathers made BY and FOR their fathers alone, for which someone must pay.

1. I’m a good person.
2. Being a good person means I hate bad people.
3. The people who are against me are bad, because I’m a good person.
4. Trump hates all the people I hate and is a strong male leader, so I follow him.
5. The only people who would attack him (read: me) are bad people.
6. People complain and produce false charges when they are afraid of their enemies and need to take them down.

Conclusion: I identify more strongly with Trump for being attacked for being right by bad people.

The sad thing is that, short of taking a mental sledgehammer to some really important internal concepts of self-esteem and value, you can’t stop this train of thought, and you’ll upset them for even suggesting it’s what they think. The closest you can get is putting in their heads the sense that Trump won’t win, in which case they’ll glom onto the next narcissistic, reactionary blowhard.

If you want some more detailed dissection of this thought process, read “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altmeyer: https://archive.org/details/The_Authoritarians_Bob_Altemeyer_2006.pdf/page/n2/mode/1up

It’s an easy read, but damn if it wasn’t chilling the first time I read it, back in the Obama years.

Has some real “of COURSE I’m anti-union” vibes.

Sure, but there’s a distinction between maintenance and profit.

If that requires a maximum ratio of active users to average donation, then it’s feasible, and has the potential to survive with a more invested userbase than a site that’s severely bloated with lurkers.

“Older” “30 years or more”

HEY

It’s sad that the same people who want their god to reign supreme over everyone and everything always seem to make him so weak that even an icon is dangerous. It must be utterly exhausting to be so threatened all the time.

Yeah, the best social networks are designed to prioritize…socializing. It’s like building a public park and people start asking where the money comes from. The point is that it’s made for people to use.

That works for me, until I accidentally move it too far and downvote. Then it’s a struggle to get it back to normal, and then it seems primed to downvote again, because it’s a struggle to get to the upvote again.

I agree with you: I think decline of a site is an inevitability, especially after advertising is needed due to increased traffic.

But I personally don’t need Lemmy or anywhere else to be permanent, since what I get out of it is either transient (scrolling for memes and things that pique my interest) or meaningful enough that it remains with me, meaning enjoyable or thought provoking discussions.

Granted, I’d rather alternative sites not go tits up in rapid succession while the shuffling corpse they’re trying to ape continues to slog on mindlessly, but keeping the impermanence in mind makes it easier to see these places as areas to congregate rather than the end to surfing the web in general.

“‘There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women's bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.’” From: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2814

There were (and are) a ton of utterly ridiculous beliefs about what can cause harm to women, but I find this one particularly amusing in an age where millions of women fly on planes. Imagine the plane takes off, leaving all those wayward uteri spinning in the dust at the gate…

Remember back in the old web when letting people know your real name was a horrifying breach of personal privacy? Heck, having the same username for multiple places gave me the hives, if it was unique enough.

We need to go back to those days; not just for safety reasons but because there’s a freedom to the individualized anonymity of being a (apparently) distinct user in each instance.

“Honey what’s wrong, you’ve barely touched your Androgyn-Os.”