God, this is tangential to your point, but car and housing aesthetics have gotten terrible. Everything is BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. People need to buy huge fucking hulked out monster trucks now for their suburban ass lives so they can make sure to fit their entire home when they commute an hour to work in soul crushing traffic. And they absolutely NEED their giant ass monstrous mcmansions. How can they survive without the extra dozen rooms that they can fill with more cheap bullshit? And don't get me started on color. Houses are all beige, grey, monotone terrible. Cars are silver, white, grey, black. There's no color anymore. It just feels like what's the point? Why bother trying when this is what success looks like. We have this beautiful planet and this is the shit we fill it with. I'm sorry. /endrant
Gray
Really going for the Les Miserables Javert strategy of criminalizing desperate, starving people.
I think they were just making a Lord of the Rings joke because the movies were filmed in New Zealand. I don't think they really believe that New Zealand prisons are bad.
The primary reason to have an account with Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastodon as opposed to each other really just comes down to UI preference more than anything else. Which design feels the most clean to you. What special features have the devs built into the platform. That's really it. Though it's also worth mentioning that they're emulating different types of social media. Lemmy and Kbin are emulating the same type - the forum style we recognize from Reddit. Mastodon is emulating the Twitter "microblog" type of social media. Frendica is emulating Facebook. PeerTube is emulating video sharing services like YouTube and so on. So reading Mastodon data in Lemmy would be like trying to read tweets as Reddit threads. It doesn't transfer very well. As far as I've heard, Kbin is trying to create a better way of reading Mastodon style data within their platform. In the long term I'm willing to bet many of these platforms will implement similar cross-functionality for the different "versions" of social media.
I tried digging around for you, but I didn't have too much luck. I see their moderation log, but the most promising thing I could find for an instance list is:
Statistics -> General -> Below the statistic listing the total number of posts, there's a triangle Fediverse symbol on the left side of the screen. Clicking on that drops down an empty menu titled "Instances". I suspect that that's where you'd find the list if it were there. Perhaps Kbin hasn't implemented it yet.
That's valid. The news worries me in terms of Lemmy's growth and success, but simultaneously it's exactly what the Fediverse was designed for. Communities are able to determine what their boundaries are. I guess my issue is that Beehaw had the largest communities for many different topics and now they've cut the second largest instance off from those communities. In the long run what that means is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are probably going to recreate those communities themselves. Since those are going to end up invariably being larger communities, it means beehaw's versions of those communities are probably going to empty out and become ghost towns comparatively.
I wonder how separating logins from instances would work from a programming standpoint. People's accounts need to be hosted on servers somewhere, so it raises some really interesting questions when the topic of defederation and drama like this comes up. For example, the Beehaw admins are running a server somewhere. If we decouple accounts from instances, then my assumption is that we're randomly assigning accounts to servers. So that leads to the possibility of the Beehaw admins hosting an avowed fascist on their server by the design of Lemmy as a whole. I'm sure they would probably take issue with that. Beyond that, who has the control to ban spam/abusive/illegal accounts from the platform as a whole? If someone is going around posting child porn or something else illegal, surely we need to have a way to remove them from all of Lemmy. If it's the server owner where the account was assigned then that raises some really weird questions about their control.
Another theoretical structure for this would be having two types of servers - user servers and community servers. Then users can still choose their server admin, but it would be divorced from any restrictions a community server puts up against other servers. But then what happens when an avowed fascist creates their own user server and won't ban troubling accounts? Then that raises questions of whether a community can ban a user server, which kind of brings us back to square one...
Yes! Modlog is also a really useful link. It has opened my eyes to the moderating habits of different instances. I learned to keep away from lemmy.ml (all the allegations of tankies seem to be true there), but lemmy.ca (which I see you're also a member of) seems really solid. I trust /u/smorks.
Yes! If you look at the bottom of any instance, there's an "Instances" button that will show you which instances are allowed/blocked. You shouldn't need to create your own server if you can find an instance federated to all the ones you'd like. Defederation seems to be the exception to the rule, though beehaw.org has a larger blocked list than I've seen on other instances. In their defense, some of the sites they've blocked look pretty horrible...
As for making your own instance, I'm afraid I don't know what the process is to federate with other instances...
Worth noting though that if this causes a migration away from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works it'll just lead to another instance growing to the size that beehaw.org seems ready to defederate from. It seems their primary issue is those instances not requiring any kind of moderation for signups and I would argue that's one of the factors that creates larger instances.
This is something that concerns me about the recent excessive self-diagnosing of ADHD I've been seeing people do in the US. I think our late capitalist system has us convinced that we need to be constantly focused and productive. Distraction is a disease. I worry that when our expectations of how a person should function begin to look unnatural and based on how humans function on something like Adderall, then we slowly begin to act like there's something wrong with just being a normal person that takes their time living a more naturally paced life.