As far as I’m aware Lemmygrad has been federated with lemmy.world at least since the Reddit flood.

On the other hand, the “attack” seemed to just be mostly harmless griefing and it’s good for these sorts of vulnerabilities to be found early.

Elon Musk runs the whole of Twitter like the jealous, power-drunk moderator of a small 5,000-member Discord server.

One of the best parts of this - especially if the trend continues - is that it makes the “Extinguish” part of a possible “Embrace, Expand, Extinguish” attack by Meta’s Threads more difficult.

Cutting off access to a bunch of tiny self-hosted private instances won’t even ping on their radar. But cutting off federation with official government platforms? That’s different.

Literally the first thing I did after getting into Lemmy was blocking all of the 196 communities. Literally brain-rotting

Keep in mind one of the biggest parts of Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is funding Charter Schools (a type of private school). The foundation is so large they functionally set the curriculum in our school system (since schools that don’t follow their curriculum don’t get funding).

It’s not about charity, it’s about privatization and control.

Turned the screen upside down with the keyboard shortcut (whatever it is)

A friend of mine just opened up the Spanish teacher’s tower while she was out of the room and stole her RAM. He was in IT and was the student assigned to try and fix it too, which was hilarious.

I think this, especially the second issue, is something the Fediverse (Lemmy in particular) will have to work through at some point.

If Reddit bans a subreddit on a controversial subject, it’s banned, it’s gone. But if a Lemmy instance defederates with another instance for hosting controversial content, you just find another instance that doesn’t.

I think the real issue is with federation in general and the creation of bubbles: there is a certain subset of users who just want full federation and full visibility, including sites that host lolicon, fascism, and other problematic content. Even if they aren’t, say, fascists themselves, but just free-speech absolutists. The issue is that any instance that doesn’t defederate with, say, Fascist instances, is tainted, either by association (“this instance refused to defederate from fascist instances, so we’re defederating from them too”) or because problem users are attracted to it (“people in our comment sections from this instance have been defending fascism, so we’re defederating to keep them out”).

And there really isn’t a good solution to the issue, aside from hosting your own tiny client-only server.

You don’t have to qualify your opinion that Threads should be defederated by bringing up the lolicon instance. They are two completely separate instances and the questions to defederate from either are completely separate.

Burggit, Exploding-Heads, and Threads each have their own reasons for defederation (lolicon, nazism, corporate influence) and it doesn’t make any sense to bring up one when discussing the other.

I think the best we can hope for in the long-term is an email-like adoption.

Individuals self-hosting major servers on donation money is not sustainable. This sucks for the people for whom this is “what Lemmy is”, but it’s the truth. There will come a time when Lemmy-at-large gets so big that Lemmy.world has to close (or de-federate), as users and content will outgrow voluntary revenue.

What we can hope for is that Lemmy is not taken over by one huge corporate instance, but instead 3-4 competing, inter-federated corporate instances. A Meta instance, a Google instance, and a Bytedance instance, for example. In addition to these, smaller (non-social-media) companies and institutions (game companies, universities, political organizations, etc.) would run their own Lemmy instances for the benefit of their members and users.

I agree with the sentiment but with a caveat:

Just like with email, I think the future of the Fediverse will involve institutions and companies running their own instances for discussion related to their niche.

For example, universities might run their own servers for campus-related discussion, and game companies (Paradox Interactive comes to mind) might run a server for discussion around their games and by their members.

Running a server is expensive, and in the long run I think the sustainable future will be for established institutions with large budgets to put a tiny part of that forward for instance hosting, rather than individuals self-hosting instances that actually lose money even when buffered by user donations.

This isn’t possible, but it’s an interesting feature suggestion

I don’t think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.

Liberals really can’t write a single post without sliding in a “China Bad”, can they?

Xi is a bad actor. He actively removes opponents, like his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who sat right fucking next to him and was publicly removed.

This is a bad conspiracy theory. Hu Jintao was allowed to sit at the table because he is an important historical figure. He’s in his 80s and has Alzheimer’s. He was having an episode at the table and was escorted out. The idea that he was publicly removed from building and disappeared is tabloid-level misinformation.

Under Xi, China is asserting ownership of international waters in the South China Sea that have historically been either international waters or even owned by smaller nations.

Nations fight over territorial waters all the time, whether it’s Turkey or Kenya or China. There are EEZ disputes in the North Sea between Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the UK. Why should I care whether China or the Philippines own the Spratly Islands? What does it have to do with China being Marxist or not? I really don’t understand why you even brought it up.

Under Xi, the Uyghers’ and Mongolians’ culture is actively being erased by outlawing local religious and cultural customs.

Neither their local religion nor cultural customs are being infringed upon. If anything, the re-education programs in Xinjiang seek to remove recent (90s-now) religious influence from Arabian missionaries, who have spread Modernist interpretations of Islam that are what is endangering local Traditionalist Islam in Xinjiang.

The one thing I would actually agree is an issue is language - the biggest sticking point in Mongolia is that recently public schools have been mandated to teach in Mandarin. However, nothing is being done to prevent locals from speaking Mongolian at home; the goal is just to guarantee that all people in China are fluent in Chinese, while a Mongolian-language school system means some amount of people are just never learning Chinese. Cultural assimilation isn’t even really the goal; not knowing Chinese is correlated with worse career prospects for indigenous people in China.

And of course, most countries in the world, including the U.S., mandate that public schools teach in the official language. This is nothing new nor unique to China.

There is a similar problem in Tibet, where in addition to the above issues, boarding schools are being mandated for rural children because it’s less expensive to have a large, centrally located boarding school in low-density areas than managing a public school in every remote Tibetan village (China recently outlawed private schools, which I think is a big plus for equality of opportunity).

Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.

This is my read on the situation, but my view is different - if BeeHaw want to have what is functionally just a private Reddit-like forum, let them. But we should stop acting like BeeHaw is a part of the Fediverse with the same goals as Lemmy-at-large.

Of course, lemmygrad.ml is my home instance and I’m pretty sure BeeHaw has never federated with us so I’m not really missing anything.

Most of the complaints seem to come from people who assumed BeeHaw was just like any other Lemmy instance and have sort of made it, or a community on it, their home; or tried to join and almost bounced off Lemmy because they assumed BeeHaw was just what Lemmy was like.

I think the best move going forward would be to either de-list BeeHaw from Lemmy directories or make sure it is properly signposted what kind of server it is. I think this will all naturally become less of an issue once big, generic instances like Lemmy.world blow up and become the defaults, and traffic to BeeHaw slows down.

Isn’t claiming to be a Marxist state while still maintaining power within a small group of people (the inner party, a political version of the bourgeois) worse?

The Chinese system isn’t perfect but I think questions like these put the cart before the horse. Is the Chinese system set up in such a way that, if bad actors got their way to the top, they would wield an immense amount of power? Yes, definitely. This question is separate from whether or not the people at the top right now are bad actors. And I think, like in any country, it’s a mixed bag; there are oligarchs and business-industry plants and corrupt officials, but there’s also well-meaning bureaucrats (Xi Jinping broadly fits into this category) and ideologically-driven Marxists.

The idea that Xi Jinping is a power-hungry dictator is an overblown trope. He is a fat, old, boring bureaucrat who got into office because he is an agreeable political moderate; a compromise between the ideological Marxist wing of the party and the pro-business Dengist wing.

As we saw in the Soviet Union, unrestricted Freedom of Speech is the downfall of Marxism. Home-grown Liberals are only the first issue; the United States government spends literally billions of dollars propping up anti-government organizations, whether that’s Uyghur terrorist groups, the Falun Gong, Tibetan Independence movements, or “LGBTQ+ Rights” organizations who always seem to spend more time arguing for political liberalization than they do actual LGBTQ+ Rights (and, before you strawman me, I want to make my point here clear: LGBTQ+ Rights are good, but many such organizations in China are funded by foreign actors in order to disrupt Chinese politics. The bad things about them are not their LGBTQ+ Rights advocacy, but their advocacy for other forms of Liberalization that undermine Communism in China. If an LGBTQ+ Rights organization in China calls for the downfall of the CPC, they do not deserve to exist)

Being “unbiased” is not a virtue. I am a Marxist. I judge people, governments, and ideas based off of a Marxist framework. That is my bias.

I give China the benefit of the doubt because they are, at least, claiming to be a Marxist state. This on its own puts them above any non-Marxist state.

I just don’t think framing the issue as “Us, the first-world middle class vs. Them, impoverished third-worlders” is a helpful one. We are both victims of Imperialism. Nationalism can be important for these third-world countries but I think it’s counterproductive in America as it exists.

As I’ve gotten older I find myself being more of a conservative in the true definition of the term: a preference for slow and steady change, caution towards new ideas, and some amount of reverence for tradition.

The issue is that the Republican party is not a Conservative Party. Joe Biden is a Conservative. The Republican party is a party for Reaction and Neoliberalism.

Agreed. There is too much false equivalence of “Tankies” and fascists.

Fascists want to enslave your sisters and daughters and stick your trans friends in psych wards until they “decide” to stop being trans. They’re fine with Blacks wallowing in poverty as second-class citizens and having militarized police on every streetcorner.

“Tankies” (Marxist-Leninists) believe in all the same progressive things other (so-called) Socialists do but have different views on historical figures and foreign policy, something that does not matter a bit in the here and now.

Here is the difference between Fascists and “Tankies”: if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that China was trying to exterminate the Ughyr people through mass execution, 95% of the “Tankies” out there, myself included, would disown China and denounce the genocide (this will not happen, because it isn’t a genocide except in the broadest and most meaningless of terms). If it was proven beyond a doubt that the Holocaust happened (which it more or less has), the majority of Neo-Nazis would still say it was good.