On no level do most accusations of “sealioning” seem to hold up to scrutiny, in my opinion.
Agreed. While I haven’t seen many accusations of it, all the ones I’ve seen have been false. And like you said, Lemmy has sufficient moderation that I’ve never seen it happen here.
As for the title question:
Do we need more users ?
We don’t need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don’t need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”. I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.
I’m not a soulist like the user you replied to, but for another perspective, mine is that rights are imaginary constructs which mean nothing if unenforceable.
People have some rights to not be murdered; that’s not an opinion if we have a compatible definition of ‘rights’, it’s written in law, it’s ingrained into mainstream liberalist social norms and ethics. So the right exists as a social idea which sometimes manifests in real consequences. However:
The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?
I think the point is that the sea lion is feigning civility while harassing someone over a casual opinion.
My response would be that if we extend the metaphor, like you did, and substitute the absurd ‘sea lions’ for a race, then harassing the racist doesn’t bother me. Bigots don’t deserve peace. It’s absolutely harassment to stalk and interrogate someone who doesn’t want to talk, I just wouldn’t care that they’re being harassed for airing such bigotry.
(On the other hand, if we assume the original opinion is not a metaphor and replace it with a similarly absurd statement, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, then the sea lion would be acting unreasonably. If someone followed you around online and kept bringing up how you prefer pizza to be prepared, demanding a calm discussion and insisting on peer-reviewed proof that pizza tastes better a certain way, while you ask them to stop, that harassment would obviously be uncalled for. For what it’s worth, the author made a comment that it wasn’t meant to be “analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics.” - but I say it’s a though-provoking interpretation to explore regardless)
Yep. “Hmm, ‘unknown?’, let’s assume they’re all Linux!”.
Linux is doing well, no need to lie about it!
I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.
I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.
Good to know! Hope I won’t need it.
In the past 5 years I’ve only ever had minor issues*, like a power button light not being on. But as a developer, I’m aware my hardware choices are more likely to be popular with other developers who would have already noticed and fixed issues.
* excluding on niche distros, like Puppy ones.
What are some things you preferred in KDE over Cinnamon? I haven’t explored KDE much.
Not sure if you’ve already checked, but here’s how your post looks to us on Lemmy:
That’s true.
On one hand, there are often ways to change the settings to make things more like how they were on Windows,
On the other hand, sometimes there’s a good reason for it to be different, so I always try to check why it’s different before changing it. An example is some window managers putting the taskbar panel at the top of the screen or on the side instead of the bottom (top panel is more convenient with a mouse, side panel takes up less space on a wide/landscape screen).
Always good to try out a few distros before settling in for the long run. As much as I love Mint, there are always cases where one distro has issues with your hardware where another doesn’t.
Copy paste did take a while to get used to.
Which part, the highlight-middle click part or something else?
Also the default screenshot tool doesn’t automatically put the snip on the clipboard.
In Mint? You’ve made me realize that would be convenient for me so I looked into it, I believe copying straight to clipboard is a default keyboard shortcut option I didn’t know about.
You can’t just say “The USSR was bad because of communism, end of story”, for example. It was never communist, and I would argue it eas never trying to get there.
On one hand, I know you’re right that socialist rhetoric is abused. It’s vitally important to be alert to it, and fascists have a proven history of trying to exploit socialist sentiment, given their rise in response to a string of 1920s socialist uprisings in Europe.
On the other, I can’t look at the decades-worth of writings and actions of the RSDLP and Bolsheviks and conclude they weren’t honestly trying to build a vanguard party with the aim of building a communist society. I’m open to critique of whether or not Leninist theory has been shown to be right or wrong, but I struggle to see how Lenin could have been pretending to be a communist full-time for 20 years at extended self-sacrifice. An opportunist wouldn’t have chosen a path with such little opportunity. The Bolsheviks were evidently a vanguardist party trying to eventually achieve communism - a ‘communist party’.
You’re using all these fraught terms like “socialism” and “liberalism” incorrectly
I’m using them in a way consistent with political dictionaries.
Fascism is, openly, anti-liberal. This is not a contested fact, they say it openly. It’s one of the few consistent parts of fascism, along with being anti-socialist (‘socialist’, in this context, meaning in support of social ownership of the means of production - a very standard and common definition in English dictionaries and encyclopedias alike).
You accuse me of using those terms incorrectly, so what would you consider a correct usage?
The Nazis rose out of National Bolshevism, after all.
No, they didn’t.
A cursory look at the Nazi Party’s history clearly shows their utter disdain and scapegoating of Bolshevism as a grave evil. The Nazi Party founder (Anton Drexler) was an anti-Marxist. Drexler emphasised the only thing ‘socialist’ about the party was social welfare for those deemed Aryan. The Nazi Party considered nazbols to be a strand of Bolshevism and therefore part of a Jewish conspiracy.
No, fascism and communism aren’t “opposites”
I don’t believe politics is simple enough to allow opposites, but if there were such a thing, those two ideologies would be pretty close. Fascists are ideologically anti-communist and communists are always among the first they mass murder. Communists (along with anarchists) are consistently the foundation of anti-fascist action.
while communism is a highly ideological philosophy that’s never existed
“Yes, and,”
This is where terminology plays tricks:
I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers
For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.
Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!
As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives already exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful to the user or project (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.
Yep. Like many arts, gamedev is something people do for free, so it’s very difficult (or torturous) to do it for profit.
I found it fun to do amateur gamedev, for my own little enjoyment (e.g. making a super-basic FPS with a gun that shoots a thousand cubes like a shotgun, then making it shoot a thousands spheres that explode on impact like a grenade launcher). Lots of engines are accessible that you don’t need to learn much/any programming skill to make something fun. You can do plenty with free assets, I never paid for anything, but if you are willing and able to pay small amounts for premade assets, then it will be even faster and easier to make something more pretty.
I’ve also done level design (and LoC) for some open-source FOSS games. This is easier for some games than others, but it’s also rewarding. I was particularly known for making experimental or puzzle-like levels, so it was nice to get feedback from others and improve. I’ve mostly grown apart from games these days, but I don’t regret the time I enjoyed making them.
Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.
I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)
On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.
Yep. Although…
Is it safe to use the OK hand signal again?
Words and symbols cannot be divorced from context. Like @SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.de hinted at, putting a date of birth in a username is common and there are so many other meanings for these numbers so it would be ridiculous to jump down someone’s throat for simply using them, or using common gestures. Unless that friend in the story was also saying some reactionary things in their comments, I think it’s silly and careless that someone challenged them on their name.
I been told by some international friends that one of the political flags over in Australia, the Eureka flag, has a similar situation where both trade unions and white nationalists try to claim its legacy, so it’s common to see in both the pro and anti immigration rallies. Context is what makes it either a potential nationalist/racist dogwhistle or a symbol of workers’ rights.
Today (a couple of days after your post), ICE now has a verified account on Bluesky.
https://mstdn.social/@Grutjes/115907687819628134