Love this

It's a general-purpose instance that leans Libertarian.

Take a look at their community list. Besides the sorts of general-purpose communities that every instance has: Gaming, NonCredibleDefense (started as a shitposting spinoff of CredibleDefense, a subreddit about military discussion. Nowadays the community is basically a NATO circlejerk), AI shit, and "MeanwhileOnGrad", the community dedicated to posting our w's to get mad at.

(And after checking, it turns out the guy in the screenshot is the sole moderator of /c/MeanwhileOnGrad who makes basically all of their posts lol. Talk about living rent free)

The owner of sh.itjust.works is also a weird free-speech-absolutist Libertarian guy. He made a big stink about the community forcing him to defederate from exploding-heads, the Nazi instance, because he believed in "free speech". Users pointed out that sh.itjust.works had been defederated from Lemmygrad since it was created, and the admin confessed that that was because of "personal opinions" (that apparently did not apply to literal Nazis).

Average sh.itjust.works user

Good, I'm a Tankie too.

We are living through what I think might be a software revolution as more people get fed up with data harvesting and proprietary services

I think the issue is that a lot of people, especially younger kids and older boomers, are not so much "choosing" a social media app as getting addicted to it. No one would "choose" an app like tik-tok just based on how much they enjoy it or how it affects their lives. They get addicted to it because it is an app designed to be addictive.

Because there is no profit motive, open-source, decentralized apps tend to be designed for ethics rather than addiction. But I fear that because these apps are not designed to be addictive, they cannot truly compete with corporate social media for the mass audience.

As nice as it feels to fight back, I don't feel as if anything can compete with the profit motive in a Capitalist system.

Lemmy is an internet protocol, like Email. Just like anyone can start their own email server, anyone can start their own Lemmy "Instance".

An "Instance" is a website. It is wholly controlled by the people who run (or rent) the servers. "Lemmygrad.ml" is an instance. So is "Lemmy.world" and "Lemmy.ml"

Instances have Communities, which are like subreddits. But Instances can also "Federate" with each other, so you can see and comment on posts from your home instance on federated instances. This is why, when you're browsing Lemmygrad's front page with browsing set to "All" (instead of "Local" or "Subscribed"), you'll see posts from "asklemmy@lemmy.ml" or "Fediverse@lemmy.world".

The developers of the Lemmy protocol are Marxists. They run their own instance, lemmy.ml, but it is not an explicitly ideological instance like lemmygrad.ml. There is a Nazi instance, exploding-heads. Most major instances do not federate with them, except the shitty "free speech" ones. There is no way to prevent Nazis from using Lemmy, because no-one owns Lemmy. It would be like trying to prevent Nazis from using Email.

Lemmygrad federates with most instances, except porn instances and fascist instances. Many instances choose not to federate with Lemmygrad due to "Tankie" hysteria.

I have a hard time believing stats like these ever since I learned about "ghost jobs".

A full 2/3rds of jobs posted to hiring boards are "ghost jobs", i.e. postings where the employer does not actually intend to ever hire an applicant.

Why do they do this? To appease overworked employees in understaffed departments. They can say "We're looking for someone, but no-one wants to work these days!", when the reality is they're keeping the department short-staffed to maximize profits.

This happens in the department where I work. My direct supervisor would always complain that HR "wasn't really looking" for people to fill vacancies and the only way I, and everyone else, in the department got hired is because she recruited us manually.

The issue is if these lists end up being blindly copied based on trust, and instances that don't deserve to be banned end up being banned by dozens of instances just because they're copying lists.

Something similar happened with Twitter banlists. A lot of the accounts were trolls and fascists and whatnot, but oftentimes someone with progressive views who is just a little controversial ends up on a banlist and banned by half of Twitter because one guy decided to stick him on a widely used banlist.

As funny as it seems to say, I feel that "Conservativism" is unfairly maligned. Most of the bad things about what is called "Conservativism" are not really parts of Conservativism at all but are ideologies associated with Conservativism - "Rugged Individualism", Neoliberalism in general, religious fundamentalism.

We'll probably disagree on this point (and that's okay), but you can look at China. China is a very conservative country, with strong cultural values regarding family, social conformism, and civic nationalism. It is Conservativism without Capitalism, Individualism, or Religion.

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.

If you really care that much about "Authoritarians" and "Tankies", maybe you should just move to exploding-heads.

The Holocaust happened. The Armenian Genocide happened. Manifest Destiny happened.

The Ughyr detention centers, whatever you think of them, do not constitute a genocide. The Ukrainian Famine was a tragic loss of life, and perhaps the Bolsheviks could have done more to prevent it, but it was not an attempted extermination of the Ukrainian people. And don't even get me started on Rwanda.

And Liberals routinely deny genocide in Palestine and Kashmir because it is politically expedient.

A blanket reproachment of "Genocide Denial" ignores the fact that sometimes, a genocide is claimed where one does not exist. I'm sure you accept that "White Genocide", especially wrt South Africa, is a conspiracy theory with no legitimacy. Why do you not give the same benefit of the doubt to China, or the USSR?

I think the big problem with Libertarianism is that they have good ideas and bad ideas, but the powers that be use them to get the bad bits passed while blocking the good bits because they hurt shareholder profits.

I think the "billions on relief in poor countries while we can't afford helping Americans at home" bit is a false dichotomy. The money spent on other countries isn't to help their people, it's to curry favor with foreign governments and advance American empire.

Really, the people who are stealing our rightful wealth are not poor people in other countries (or "welfare queens" at home) but the rich and powerful who aren't paying their fair share.

I appreciate your point of view, where you didn't do the common thing of strawmanning the left, especially on gun rights, in an effort to put yourself "in the middle".

I believe in all those things you do (for a certain definition of "less government"), as well as gun ownership, but I consider myself a Marxist. There's something really admirable about "old-school libertarians".

I think things like Right to Repair and Net Neutrality are the line between Libertarians who are good at heart, and the nut jobs. To an Anarcho-Capitalist, a company has the right to license their products under whatever conditions they want; an ISP can give preferential bandwidth to big companies. But a real Libertarian believes that not even companies and contracts can limit a person's freedoms.

Marxist-Leninist. I'm a believer in Socialist philosophy and the Marxist Material Dialectic, as explained by Marx, Engles, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

While I am not a believer in Dengism, I believe that the Communist Party of China is ideologically Marxist and has made great strides in building China's productive forces and improving the lives of the Chinese people.

China is a large country, with many Chinese.

I oppose Western Imperialism and offer critical support to non-Socialist countries that oppose it.

For what it's worth, I also believe in racial and gender equality and gay/trans rights, but these battles are secondary to the class war.

I have to say I agree with point 1.

"Read Theory" is "Google It" for Communists. It's annoying and a little arrogant. Of course reading theory is good. But they're here for the social aspect. If you were sitting down with a friend for lunch, or talking to a coworker at work, and they asked a question about socialism, you wouldn't tell them to go to the library and rent a book, would you?