I’ve felt this way since those ghouls gleefully broadcasted “shock and awe” and bombarded the center of education and civilization for thousands of years in Baghdad and making up lies why they did it. They literally made up the WMDs and the babies in the hospital and every justification. The only reason for the destruction of Iraq and a million lives was their fucking empire. The liberals all forgot about it already but I didn’t. I still have nightmares. This is all that and more.

The west has never stood for anything but violence and empire. Nothing has changed. These evil ghouls are writing me on an anarchist lemmy server about lesser evil and kamala and I’m like what the actual fuck, these people bombed innocent people my entire life while smiling with their perfect teeth on tv and you think I give a FUCK about your election?

It is mind numbing.

The democrats have won most of the elections in the past 30 years and they are still going more and more right. I don’t think you’re correct in this analysis. Hilary Clinton and Al Gore won the elections and didn’t become president, even discounting that the democrats have been in power for the majority of this century and they have only become more and more right wing.

US Elections are decided when they do redistricting and manipulate the voting districts to ensure the results they want and isn’t a real democracy. The US is run by oligarchs who run their enterprise corporations and the power is concentrated there, not in the government.

I don’t care enough to go through the ridiculous “meanwhileongrad” and “hexbear” nonsense to do this legwork, I trust the experiences people have and believe them. sjw has an obsessive user goat and hexbear has way to much stuff I am about 45 years too old to even understand to find the example.

All of it is targeting and harassment driving. People notice and don’t post because of this. I have people telling me this directly and have no reason to think they are lying. I think both hexbear and sjw should stop this behavior and am not preferring one over the other.

It is actually going well, I realize that simply posting every day is not valuable and creating posts that create engagement is more important than spamming links. I found that the hexbear tactic is the right one, posting threads asking for engagement then having users post follow ups works the most and creates the best experience. Simply having Eeddit clone communities with a bunch of links and no engagement will never meaningfully grow a community, especially when the one doing it stops posting. Lemmy will never grow following the tactics of venture capital and existent social media, we have to develop actual communities of friends. Unfortunately that means sometimes people you think are your friends betray you on a simple disagreement.

My biggest problem is with Lemmy users themselves and their internal politics and drama machines. All drama communities that post pictures of other users to call attention to them are toxic and prevent engagement. If Lemmy wants to grow they need to stop acting like Reddit.

This is real feedback from my users:

“I don’t want to make posts online knowing that people outside the community will deliberately read them in bad faith to try create a drama post that causes outside users to make antagonistic comments.”

a different user went on to add:

“Recently there was a survey on pronouns and gender identity on hb, and then an anti-misogyny discussion afterwards. It ended up with a cycle of s.j.w and .world users screenshotting comments on hb, creating drama posts, then hb users screenshotting those posts back to hb, etc etc etc. All instances should ban posting content from defederated communities imo, or what is the point of defederation.”

This is really problematic for me that people don’t want to post because if they say the wrong thing or if it is taken the wrong way we get harassed. I know Lemmy has decided to attack all “tankies” which basically has no definition other than “person I don’t like and must harass” now people are too scared to post lest they be on the receiving end of harassment. This is going to really stifle the meaningful growth. As someone who has now been posted about multiple times in these communities it feels really bad and is generally for no purpose. To grow lemmy and to boost engagement and to boost comment engagement this must be addressed. Until it is addressed and large instance owners allow these harassment communities to continue to fester we will never grow into a true large scale social media platform.

The other major problem I’m having are people with large amounts of federated accounts that then wield them to manipulate the votes. Sometimes it is really obvious and I can address but other times it isn’t and will only take a computer developer with moderate skills to design some kind of harassment bot to aid in this agenda. Turning off downvotes helps, but even boosting the wrong thing stifles engagement and enjoyment and really needs a long term solution, I’m hoping that some kind of fediverse idP will be established so that we can separate the identities out from the communities and have some basic level of protection against this level of astro turfing.

So you’re saying paying people gets results? Crazy!

I have about 500 dollars in credit for meta advertisements and I am thinking maybe I can advertise my instance to vegans on facebook/instagram but I’m not sure it would really turn into any conversions to be honest.

I actually pirate things because I don’t like spending money, don’t care about content creators and want to save for retirement more than I give a fuck about anything else

Wow, I thought that was the most boring thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. I chose the wrong industry.

Ever notice that Larry Ellison looks like Satan?

Thanks for the reminder to delete everything I’m not using right now lol

I also prefer freetube to the containerized web hosted softwares like Invidious because I sit at a personal computer all day.

Thanks for the gold!

Go ahead and use these services. I don’t care about you, what you do or what you think. You are deeply unserious if you are not paranoid about the surveillance and I really have nothing to discuss with you.

My behavior is toxic because I am saying VPN services aren’t safe? OK whatever. I really don’t care what the fuck you do. Go ahead and pay money for these services 🤷‍♀️

You might have heard about Edward Snowden? Have you looked into anything that he leaked?

I am not worried about my torrenting traffic. I am worried about installing their software on my machine and giving them wide access including port mirroring.

Oh also people use VPNs to buy DIY hormones online, what happens when the inevitable US anti trans witch hunt happens?

Yes, a hosted seedbox paid with crypto and self managed keys is the way to go for torrenting