Maybe that's the first test. See how much abuse you'll put up with lol.

Honestly, there's a reason hype has died down. The site has all the same problems as other alternatives.

After the initial hype, it's only as big as a reasonably large individual subreddit. In fact, here are the top weekly posts of lemmy's federation partners and T_D's exodus site. The latter edges out the former slightly in upvotes and much more substantially in comments, and it's just a single community. Even in the fairly small category of "biggest extant reddit alternative", lemmy doesn't take first prize.

Same content problem as all the others: roughly half of the posts are politics of a uniform orientation, and the other half are reposted facebook memes.

Reddit's killer app is the presence of a sizable community for every little niche thing, and that's not there. Unless your only interests are politics (within roughly .3 standard deviations of the median Huffpo writer) or Facebook memes, it's not a viable alternative.

Competition: Sure, it's federated in theory, but the block-happy, drama-centric culture means that, if an alternative were to pop up with the userbase of 2012 Reddit (or even 2018 Reddit), it'd get defederated almost immediately. Open federation solves the "dozens of sites competing for the same thousand-or-so people" problem. Closed federation just pretends to do so.

This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It's so dumb. "Lemmy isn't as good as Reddit because everyone isn't there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks." /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there's not enough people.

It took me way too long to figure out what was actually going on in this picture.

That's what defund the police is about. It's about shifting the funding to other sources, social workers and such, that can handle calls like these. It relieves police of having to deal with stuff like this, too.

Republicans are insane right now. They're going full fascist. I don't know what else you call it when they so blatantly ignore the rule of law to disrupt the peaceful transition of power to stay in power.

In what way did he not do an insurrection? They're just trying to get laws and rulings to apply to Democrats but not Republicans now?

Does anyone know if there's a way to identify nearby unionized stores? I'd like to only go to my unionized Starbucks or unionized Trader Joe's, if there's any of those close to me.

I need to read that book again. It was scary, but I finished it utterly confused. I clearly missed a ton from the appendices.

I think the point is the mix of weird, nonsensical lyrics with intense, serious political points lol

Is Graphene OS good? Any downsides? I need to get a new phone soon.

Wow that's incredible. We're still making such incredible discoveries despite Mars being so close to home.

Those two things seem like they'd be connected...

Yay! Love to see Lemmy promoted.

Another good reason why every company shouldn't be bought by the same big companies over and over again.

Godamn you got me lol

I mean, you can use that same logic on the US government, even Democrat run ones, which have supported genocides in the past and even current ongoing ones, and have tried to stomp out left movements, been racist, sexist, and homophobic. But people have still supported the US and the Democratic party and called themselves leftist. The point is, I assume as I'm not a CCP Stan myself or anything, is to give critical support to back an actual socialist project and give a counterweight to a pure single superpower world (esp. When that superpower has destroyed or undermined almost every left project it can in the world). Critical support meaning you pick out the good from the bad, supporting the good and criticizing the bad. China actually puts a leash on its billionaires = good. But they seem to be forcing some cultural integration of Uyghurs = bad. But they're providing lots of housing and cheap EV's = good. But they can have bad working conditions = bad. But they're helping support economies and infrastructure in the global South with the Belt and Road project = good. But they keep doing that shit with territory in the south seas = bad. But they seem to have a long-term plan for implementing communism that they are actually following = good. And so on. I do think some people go too far in being CCP supportive, but I also think some people on Lemmy go too far the other direction, and think everyone that gives the slightest critical support to China or analyzes some US propaganda on China a bit before swallowing it is a CCP troll.

In the end, it's a mixed bag, but I do think there is some worth to not having a single hegemonic superpower in the world, so other leftist countries or colonized global south ones have alternative access to allies, trade, and support without bowing down to the US and their often reactionary policies. Cuba for example was doing pretty good until the Soviet Union fell and basically the only market became the western, US-controlled one that they had been mostly sanctioned the hell out of. I wish it was a better country than China, but hopefully they improve their social issues as they improve economically, which tends to be the pattern. I just wish they'd stop doing the aggressive maneuvers near the Philippines and Vietnam.

Stilll helps factory workers have better commutes. Everyone who wants to work from home should be able to, because it helps the people who want to go in or have to.

What a strange comment. They're being genocided. I'm imagining someone in WW2 being like "well now you suddenly care about Jews when you find out the holocaust is happening", as if that was a bad thing.

These tech companies bring a lot of money to California but also produce some of the worst people in it lol

Anonymity is important for various reasons. You can't predict everything bad a government will try to do to stifle freedom that a person may want to avoid. Off the top of my head, I could see someone trying to pay for an abortion or something like that in a southern state where it's illegal, for health reasons to save their own life.