With spez ascending the last few remaining levels of becoming an absolute wanker, it’s about time I got more active and I have been wondering how should I be using Lemmy efficiently? Like many I migrated from Reddit and I was primarly using Apollo to browse through my subscribed subreddits.

Over here on Lemmy.one, I have subscribed to communities and I scroll through my feed by sorting “All > Top Day” because sorting “All > Hot” means I end up seeing the same threads.

Then earlier today I discovered https://beehaw.org/communities where I found many communities I would love to subscribe to but then I got confused because I am also subscribed to more or less similar communities on lemmy.one.

I think I am sort of struggling to wrap my head around how lemmy really works and where I should be hanging out. It was easier on reddit in the sense that if I wanted to go LOTRmemes, there was only subreddit but here on Lemmy, there seem to be multiple instances of the same community :D

To top it off, it is proving hard to login to beehaw [probably the server is under stress] with the same details I use to login into Lemmy.one.

Not to forget there’s also Kbin which I haven’t even begun exploring. Phew.

ps - my apologies if I am sounding slightly incoherent as this is all new to me. If there is anyone out there who has this all figured out, I’d appreciate any help here.

  • Kichae
    4•1 year ago

    1. The Lemmy project maintainers are communists, and quite possibly Marxist-Leninists, but I’ve never seen them make any statements denying genocide. They’re been fairly explicitly against genocide, and have made statements directly to that effect. Meanwhile, the actual software has seen contributions from many people from all over the political spectrum. Because that’s how the open source development community works.

    2. Reddit’s seen significant investment from Tencent, a Chinese company with well-known ties to the Chinese government and the CCP. Whether the people running the company believe China has committed genocide or not, those continued ties are implicit support for the government’s actions (made even stronger by the Chinese government set to take ownership over a significant chunk of the company). They’ve been invested in Reddit for years, but that hasn’t stopped basically anyone playing the “evil communist” card against the Lemmy devs from using Reddit. In fact, it’s been used for a while now to try and convince people not to leave Reddit.

    3. Reddit’s also seen investment from white supremacist and actual fascist Peter Thiel. He invested almost a decade ago. Once again, no one seems to have any issue with the politics of the people backing Reddit.

    4. The politics of the Lemmy devs can be separated from the usage of the software. The software is free, contains no ads, and usage of it does not directly financially support the Lemmy developers at all. Meanwhile, Reddit investors who implicitly deny or actively support genocide both in China and in North America stand to make considerable money off of farming our content out to chatbot developers and/or selling their stake in the business to greater fools.

    5. Beehaw defederated from like 3 Lemmy instances. Most of us on the fediverse still have unfettered access to their communities. All it takes to not be disinvited from their party is to not shit all over their rugs.

      • Kichae
        2•1 year ago

        Ah, I see. This is a common blind spot with respect to genocide. The word gets tied to the Holocaust and the massacres of Cortez, that it gives people an out when confronted by acts and attitudes that are very much genocide, but which do joy generate literal mounds of dead bodies.

        And it doesn’t change the dynamic with respect to service or product usage, because I can all but promise you that spez, and basically the entire staff of Reddit deny the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples in North and South America, the ongoing genocide of the Roma in Europe, and perhaos - even probably - the historical genocides of these groups (with the possible exception of the Aztec).

        I don’t mean to come off as if I’m playing with whataboutism. I’m not. Genocides done here do not excuse genocides perpetrated by foreign cultures or regimes. It’s just that if we apply the same standards to people who deny genocides being perpetrated by our own peoples and institutions, then we basically can’t go anywhere or do anything ever. The only difference with that particular Lemmy dev is that they’re playing rhetorical games about a genocide that most of us probably never would have heard of if not for the US playing politics with China.