I live around it. I know plenty of people who aren’t all the way in the deep end but could eventually go all the way into the deep end. What really helps them not make that final leap is that there is an extremely well deserved stigma against Nazi ideology, the most notorious strain of fascism. There is a gradient and there are plenty of secondary believers whose minds are primed to support a strongman on the elimination of all the bad people keeping society down but would use nicer words to describe it, but tertiary believers who have just been immersed in a deluge of contradictory information can be reasoned with. On this instance at least there is not a lot of tolerance for appeals to popular prejudices which may work out in a general crowd where there isn’t a sufficient challenge to it.

“We need to make room for misinformation on our platforms otherwise we won’t have mass appeal. A lot of people love to scapegoat populations who can’t effectively defend themselves, and leaving them out just because they’re contributing to creeping fascism and and multiple ongoing genocides is just petty.”

I will never participate in an instance which is federated with Meta or any other profit-driven instance. If profit is more important than responsibility and safety, then irresponsibility and danger can be the only consequence.

I may be biased after sticking around there for a decade, but who in the hell would ever trust Reddit?

That article was a wild ride. He said he wants to put the reddit changes to a vote. Just saying whatever I guess. If Reddit actually does that I’ll eat a hat and a crow.

It began on reddit as the general sub for the college dorm #196 at some university, one thing lead to another, and now it’s a meme sub which exists everywhere.

This is an amazing resource. Thank you for putting it together and posting it here!

Probably, but it wouldn’t be as easy since each instance has different design, admission criteria, and access to other instances. A bot would have to be based on a given instance, so a botnest instance could be cordoned off. If it becomes a bigger issue, each instance may have their own way of dealing with it so the bot would have to be capable of not only negotiating the above obstacles but also how to get around a variety of different ant-bot measures.

The first thing I’ll utilize these tools for is to finally teach me how to use Github so I can use the rest of these tools.

Like probably most reading this headline in light of why many of us are here in the first place, I cringed at the headline. That being said it’s something we must consider. These sites are not magic, they are on physical servers consuming resources to persist. Upkeep of some kind is necessary.

Is the solution a commercial business one? Maybe in some cases. The author themselves acknowledges that this is how the problem we’re fleeing began in the first place, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be so. Considering the nature of business which I am all too familiar with, involving commercial influence has a much higher potential to corrupt good intentions than we may want to believe however careful we are. There do exist small businesses who place their work above profit (I’d like to think my business included among these) and can be run putting the interests of people first. It can be frustrating to watch less ethical and more exploitative peers zoom past and leverage their resources to get more business even though their service can’t compare, but people are not rational actors unless they have been primed to be. Perception is reality in many cases.

I have heard some discussion to make this instance into a non-profit, which could also be a solution. I also recall working for a non-profit who had to depend on laundering the reputation of massive corporations for chump change because that was the only dependable source of revenue. This isn’t to say that a non-profit is inherently a bad idea, only that they have their own challenges and are uniquely vulnerable due to having to always re-invest profit and not necessarily being prepared for fluctuations in capital as a consequence. It’s a unique set of challenges.

Optimally I would like to see the instances I interact with to be run ideologically by a corps of contrubutors committed to social responsibility and positive freedom as it appears Beehaw is run now. I really like how this instance is run and the values it has demonstrated. I’ll most likely be around to discuss when changes need to be made, because the world changes and we have to change with it unavoidably.

I visited Reddit for the first time in two days and had a thought that has occurred to me constantly for years, “I hate this site.” It’s still the same alienating crap and it will never change. I glanced over my home page, made a comment about the fediverse being a better alternative in a blackout thread for one of my subs that came back, and popped back here.

I don’t care about fixing Reddit and I don’t care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don’t care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I’ve been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they’re doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it’s not a person. It’s a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There’s no mastermind, no one’s at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There’s only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.

The main reason I don’t care is that I don’t have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.

I’ve also learned this lesson the hard way through more experience than I should have contributed towards it. If someone values reason and evidence, they will probably not stay on the right. I was raised in a right-wing environment and had right-wing beliefs when I was a teenager, but I was always curious to know as much about things as I could find out. Losing my faith in right-wing ideas was inevitable in my opinion since most of it depends entirely on its adherents not investigating its claims whatsoever. I will absolutely talk to a young conservative that knows me face to face and I have had productive conversations like this, but there’s no helping the adult true believer until such a time as they seek to be helped (and even then it’s most likely a bad-faith ploy but I’ll still take the gamble even though I’ve never won). It just has to be exposed and opposed.

I see. I never made it that far because I immediately was seeing the kind of conversations planting the seeds for the inevitable conclusion you described. There was a sense of “this horrendous bigotry proves that we can say whatever we want here and that’s great,” which is what turned me off so fast. A very similar thing happened in r/politicalcompassmemes which initially was fairly balanced and interesting but soon became dominated by fascists which were foolishly tolerated. I was one of the fools and actually learned my lesson that time. No tolerance for fascism is the most it deserves.

To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted “free speech.” I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don’t like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn’t seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet, but Reddit can be pretty hostile almost everywhere other than small niche subs with consistent communities. Before posting a comment, I would always have to consider whether I was willing to fight about it with someone likely to snidely dismiss it through the most paper-thin lazy rhetoric. Sometimes the answer would be yes but too often it would be no.

I’m sure there are many like me who have not had fun on Reddit for a long time and were sticking around because they weren’t aware of a better alternative for relatively anonymous social media. I’ve been wanting to step back away from the internet monoliths for a long time and the fediverse has been pretty promising to me so far.

A one-time donation will help now, and with all the new users it seems like Beehaw needs some support now. A smaller but recurring monthly contribution would also help now and would add to a regular pool of funds which can allow Beehaw to be able to plan how to accommodate the larger community on a permanent basis. I think the community is worth having to wait through some of the strain right now, but I would like to contribute to infrastructure upgrades and maintenance so I have decided to make a recurring contribution.

I have typed the letter “o” for “old.reddit” about six or seven times today out of habit. Thanks to the Beehaw team for providing a space which is better than a simple substitute in many ways. I am simply incapable of operating any of the newer reddit interfaces, so once “old.” is history that will be it for me totally.

This is probably one of the best games available for the format. There are few joys that can reach the heights of some idiot picking a fight with you while you’re standing next to a bike rack.

My recent obsession has been getting heavily modded Bethesda games running on the deck. Currently playing a version of Oblivion that has only ever been seen by me. I couldn’t even get Oblivion running with 10 mods a decade ago but with the newer tools it’s running on linux with almost 200. It’s been fun.