It’s been a while since I used Arch, but it was smooth sailing while I did. In general, gaming means Steam, and Steam ships with its own runtime so it is not really impacted by whatever library versions are packaged by the distro. Gaming is a very common use case. You’d have to pick a pretty obscure one to find something where it isn’t tested and somewhat streamlined.

I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessible. Is this not true?

This is not true. ActivityPub (the protocol Lemmy instances use to speak with one-another) does not intend to be a redundant, distributed datastore. There are a few reasons for this. One is practical. It needs to be affordable to start a new instance. If the requirements for starting a new instance entail mirroring significant parts of the fediverse (a network of over 2 million users and 22,000 instances) it would be impossible for anybody to do it unless they were Google/Facebook.

Another has to do with trust. A community has a home. That home is chosen (ideally) because the admins can be trusted. That instance is the universal source of truth for that community. If communities didn’t live on a specific instance, they would be vulnerable to various forms of hijacking. The home instance has the final say on who has permission to comment, and who has permission to perform moderator actions. None of these actions could be trusted if they weren’t cleared by the home instance first. Third party servers perform basic validataion against the currently known ban list / mod list / etc, but this could easily be spoofed by malicious instances.

When an instance goes down, it is kind of similar to a netsplit on IRC. A queue of outgoing messages build up on your instance, which can be seen on your instance. Queues of messages queue up on other instances, which can be seen on other instances, but they won’t be synchronized until the destination instance returns (this depends specifically on which inbox the messages are directed towards - I’m not particularly familliar with the specific implementation in Lemmy).

Finally (though not really), ActivityPub isn’t designed to be a broadcasting protocol. In the case of Lemmy, and other Reddit-like clones, it effectively acts as such, but it is intended only to send messages to the places they belong. If you post a message and the subscribers to that message only exist on 3 servers, that message ONLY gets sent to those three servers, even though there are thousands of servers in the network (at least, this is how it is supposed to work in theory).

I might have some details wrong here. I’m more familiar with how Mastodon works (and how it fails) at this point after troubleshooting various problems on my instance.

Liberalism has an actual definition, and it is not the colloquial definition used in mass-media to refer to “the left half of what is acceptable.”

Liberalism is an idealist (another word which has a very specific definition) political philosophy which champions private property, constitutionalism, republicanism, rule of law, and free trade. It has a philosophical canon, flowing through writers like Locke, Montesquieu, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Paine, etc. Further economic works, like Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” are built on this philosophical underpinning.

Marxists are materialists. This is in contrast with the idealism of Liberals. While Liberals believe ideas are the force which drives change in the material world, Marxists understand that ideas are just a reflection of the material conditions they emerge from.

Liberals find themselves banging their heads against the walls of the institutions time and time again, because from their perspective, these institutions are just a reflection of ideas, and as long as the justification for an institution on paper is sound, there is no reason to think it cannot be reformed. An institution like the US Congress, or the Executive Branch is never at fault. It is simply a good institution simply being run by bad people. Marxists (and Anarchists) reject this quite simply, by looking at the material incentives involved, and the long ghastly history surrounding these institutions.

“Combating liberalism” does not mean being a piece of shit to anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders or Jeromy Corbin. There is a genuine struggle to ensure the new crop of social media platforms don’t simply end up defending the legitimacy of the established institutions at the expense of genuine radicals who find themselves at odds with the actual longstanding policy and practices of these institutions. To avoid situations like when mastodon.lol banned CODEPINK, a prominent anti-war organization, for being “Tankies.” This is Liberalism, and it should be combated.

It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

What the FUCK do these liberals think they are doing every day on social media?

For the love of god, listen to some Citations Needed and stop self-congratilating your media literacy because some fucking dork with a website tells you the New York Times and Washington Post aren’t biased.

Removed by mod

On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).

You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).

In summary, Discord is strictly a service. Matrix is a tool you can apply however you see fit.

Support for groups (i.e. communities on Lemmy) is coming to Mastodon sometime soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_für_Sexualwissenschaft

In the state of Florida, it is illegal for school teachers to tell their students WHICH books the Nazis chose to burn first.

Elections aren’t going to save us. I will make sure to vote against anybody who has the slightest whiff of engaging in this anti-trans hysteria, but you could hardly describe this place as a democracy to begin with. The desires of the people have absolutely nothing to do with what gets enacted as public policy in this country.

We need to prepare as if the state will do NOTHING to protect us, and treat any counterexample as a pleasant surprise.

In general, I find the term “democratic socialism” to be pretty cringe. It’s like saying right up front “I’m not like those OTHER socialists!” Socialism is a liberatory project. Socialism is the auto-emancipation of the working class. THAT is what democracy looks like. Rule of the people.

Liberation comes hand in hand with revolution though. Socialism will certainly NOT be very democratic for the people who own vast amounts of real estate, productive machinery, and propaganda media empires. Those people will certainly need to end up on the wrong side of a gun for the project to succeed. The wise ones among them won’t force us to pull the trigger.

It will be a hostile take-over. It will be a break from the constitutional order. It will be a break from the “rule of law.” When the ruling class starts losing the game, they will flip over the table. All your precious civil liberties will be torn to shreds. Fascism is simply capitalism under crisis.

The Liberals commit themselves to playing by the rules even when the fascists never would. Salvador Allende (the world’s first elected Marxist head of state) tried to do this, and in three years it ended in his death and a fascist military dictatorship. There is no room for idealism in revolution. The stakes are very real. You need to crush your enemies by any means necessary. Maybe you don’t give Rupert Murdoch the freedom of speech. Maybe you don’t respect Jeff Bezos’s property rights. Maybe you stuff all the Proud Boys into a mineshaft.

A lot of people whine about authoritarianism in the English speaking left, but the English-speaking left has no power to speak of. Just a bunch of very online sectarians bickering. We run around trying to cancel internet forums which amount to little more than fucking book clubs, as if they were the embodiment of high Stalinism.

X11 used to require very cumbersome MANUAL configuration, where you would specify the exact parameters of your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. If you accidentally ended up overclocking your monitor it would melt. For at least a decade, it has been able to run with no configuration file at all, but in the 90s/early 2000s you had to produce a unique >75 line xorg.conf file for your specific hardware.

You should be aware that the people over at Raddle have a massive grudge against Lemmy and they post shit like this all the time.

It is true. You can host an image somewhere (i.e. actually run the web server) paste a link to it, and if anybody clicks on it they will show up in your web server’s access log. Typically this will include an IP address and a user agent string (indicating OS, browser version, etc.). To mitigate this, Lemmy would need store copies of any media which gets linked here and serve those instead of allowing hot-links. Mastodon does this, but for the same reason it requires hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run a small instance.

I feel like PeerTube hasn’t broken through yet in the way Mastodon has, and Lemmy is kind-of broaching on. Mastodon itself is heavy for what it does. I need 8GB of RAM, >600GB of storage, and 2 CPU cores to run a 100 person instance. Lemmy is leaner (as well as some microblog style alternatives to Mastodon like Misskey / Pleroma). Peertube, on the other hand, can only get so lean. Hosting video content is orders of magnitude more intensive than hosting a text-based message board. It is much more costly to do this, and to compete with platforms like YouTube, it is not sufficient for just spin up a single instance. You also need to work out CDNs, caching, load balancing, etc.

Like Jack said, I’d just find an instance you vibe with and post stuff there, but it will take a lot of resources to grow the network as a whole.

This sounds like a comedy bit.

AFAIK the problem with resin printing is vapors, not particles. A respirator may help, but it is no substitute for proper ventilation.

Channeling Stallman and referring to the Windows 32 bit Application Programming Interface as lose32 instead of win32.

The lack of “Lemmy etiquette” is basically the whole point of the project. There is no general rule. There are places for shitposting, there are places for serious discussion. The civility fetishists get their corner, the people who enjoy replying to bigots with pigpoopballs.jpg get their corner. There is a niche for everybody - and if there isn’t - you can start one without being completely isolated from the rest of the network (at least, initially).

The situation on Reddit was absurd. The “Reddiquette” rules were generally okay, but very open to subjective enforcement. I spent many years on Reddit. I browsed a lot of different communities on there. But if one person on a community I browse makes a post saying “look what this asshole is saying” on another community I browse, and I go there an make an insightful comment, I am now “brigading.” If somebody wants to politely debate whether trans people have a right to exist, or whether or not we should send the homeless to concentration camps, and I tell them to fuck themselves, I am being “uncivil.”

Communities need mods and admins who have their back, not mods who become cops for the admins who become cops for the board of directors who only care about increasing KPIs and profit. The coolest thing that can happen on the Fediverse is landing in a place where the admins will eat a block or two to defend the integrity of their communities. This is something which is simply impossible on Reddit.

Facebook launched in 2004, 19 years ago, and bears more responsibility than just about any organization in Silicon Valley for the proliferation of abusive, invasive, proprietary, walled garden social media platforms. They function as an integral pillar of the state’s mass surveillance and propaganda operations. They have been complicit in many pogroms, including a genocide in Myanmar.

I assure you, they haven’t suddenly had a change of heart. They have a long history of acquiring their competitors and rolling them into their own private corporate infrastructure. If they intend to make a move on the Fediverse, there is no reason to believe their intent is any different than what their corporate history demonstrates. If they have their way, the Fediverse will end up no different than Instagram or WhatsApp.

Nothing eliminates more nuance than viewing some of the broadest and most substantial social upheavals in world history through the lens of Great Man Theory. To write off the struggles and sacrifice of millions of people, their successes and their failures, and lay them at the feet of one man. To treat history like this is to believe that the vast majority of its participants are unthinking, uncritical beats of burden with a predisposition to subservience. (The same applies to contemporary “hate the government, not the people” discourse, in which we are to assume the majority of Chinese citizens are helpless, brainwashed victims of totalitarianism)

When you treat history like this, you open up a lot of convenient shortcuts for yourself. You can claim that the October revolution was a much needed intervention, but then drop it immediately after the honeymoon period is over with some hamstrung claim that Stalin was too stupid or too selfish to understand what Lenin was trying to accomplish, or maybe Lenin himself was too stupid to understand Marx and the whole project was doomed. Or that we would be living in fully automated luxury communism right now if Trotsky had taken power.

None of this discourse delves into the actual social or economic conditions involved, nor the theory and practices which emerged from the crucible of revolution. Most importantly, it never makes any attempt to LEARN from this history, so previous mistakes can be avoided, and so proven effective strategies can be developed further and incorporated into contemporary struggles. It is navel gazing bullshit which conveniently discards the whole thing. The only lesson you learn from this treatment of history is that revolution leads to dystopia and that we shouldn’t even bother. The takeaway we end up with is that the people who disintegrated the Third Reich and put the first humans into space were better off when they were a backwards feudal monarchy.

And today, among the English-speaking online left, any time somebody comes along and argues “You know what, maybe we shouldn’t stick the entire history of the USSR or the PRC into a furnace. There are some valuable lessons in here.” they get derided as a Tankie by some vote blue no matter who sicko. Lots of people throwing the word “authoritarian” around who have never had to confront the sharp end of the US state once in their lives.