Gray

Zelda: Twilight Princess is probably my all time favorite. Midna's theme is so delightfully haunting in its several variations.

Today I tried Googling something about following kbin magazines on lemmy and got 0 relevant results to the software on the first page. Then I entered the same search on DuckDuckGo and the first few results were all relevant to my search. Finally I decided to make the permanent switch to DuckDuckGo. Google has been undergoing enshitification for a long time now. Ever since I started needing to include Reddit at the end of all my searches. Since I no longer want to include Reddit in my searches, I need to find a better search engine in general and hopefully DDG can be that.

I wonder if it was a hypnic jerk. Brains are weird so maybe your brain made it feel like instead of just jerking in bed (that's what she said) you had fallen and the sense of hitting the cushions was you landing. I know I get hypnic jerks every few months and they always startle me.

I tried Mastodon and really didn't care for it. It didn't translate quite as cleanly into the decentralized structure I felt. If I wanted to look up a famous person I had to know their instance, which felt like a really messy structure. Still, I have hope for it's future when they clean up a few of the less user friendly elements. Lemmy, I've loved. I think forums like this work way better in this decentralized way. Part of that comes from the fact that forums are anonymous anyways, unlike Twitter-esque social media platforms.

I don't oppose China's right to exist as a power. I do disagree with the US doing things like banning China from the ISS. I also am not blind to the IMF scheme and what it has done to the non-western world and I oppose that. I am quite opposed to the way that Israel has been handled and there clearly needs to be some kind of compromise with Palestine. I'm not even going to try to touch that issue in terms of the way right way for it to be handled, but clearly the solution isn't what they currently have. I am pro-NATO in how they've handled the war in Ukraine. I am pro-NATO in the sense that it prevents attacks on its member nations, which Ukraine in my eyes has been very clear evidence of the need for.

Like I said before, I think checking all the boxes in one political ideology more often than not leads to some shitty, lazy stances, so maybe labeling myself as pro-NATO was a mistake. It's fair to say that the world doesn't need one superpower. In terms of China, more than anything I just wish they allowed for more debate and opposition within their political structure. Again, democracy and censorship are my pet issues. I worry for any world where the mechanisms that allow us to express ourselves and correct our flaws are stifled. The US hasn't been some gold standard for the right way to do it, but I don't see anyone better stepping up to the plate yet.

In terms of my original comment that triggered this conversation, at the end of the day I think it is wrong to ban anyone for posting opinions that a moderator disagrees with. That's political censorship and it's shitty. If lemmy.ml had clear rules about their political stances and what's allowed, then that would be different. But as it is, I think they're misrepresenting what their community is if they're going to censor such content. "Orientalism" in their context implies that any conversations about another country not from within that country should be taken down. Should non-US articles about the US also be removed? Is anyone not from China allowed to talk about China?

As for my original comment about "anti-NATO bullshit", I confess that was a personal opinion that probably didn't belong next to my more objective opposition to politcal censorship. I personally wouldn't join lemmy.ml for their political stances. I objectively would recommend people not join that instance because of their political censorship.

I don't even think it's an approach so much as an inevitability that certain communities will grow and develop into the de facto ones for their respective subjects. Especially because people are attracted to communities where they can find more discussions. But yeah, I really hope the communities don't all just end up pooling in the largest instance. Hopefully they grow and develop across many smaller instances.

I generally align with the left most of the time, but I hate making one label the basis for your entire political opinion. I am very against censorship. My greatest pet issues have to do with censorship and democratic principles. In terms of American politics, I will never vote Republican. If I feel a Democrat has let me down in a big way, I would consider voting third party, but 99% of the time I would vote Democratic. Centrist Democrats piss me off more than leftist ones. My foreign policy stances are probably the least in line with the further left. I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn't perfect. I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

China and Russia. Thus censoring legitimate western media articles about China. There's also a lot of anti-NATO bullshit. Here's the Axios article they banned a user for posting.

All I know is that you should avoid lemmy.ml. In their /c/WorldNews community, an admin gave a four day ban to a user for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of "Orientalism". Those guys are tankie shills. In my experience, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.one seem solid. Obviously I personally went with lemmy.ca. But you should check out the admin profiles before you join any instance. That will tell you most of what you need to know. That and the modlogs (found at the bottom of the page) that will tell you what posts have been taken down and what people have been banned by mods on various communities.

BuT tHe FrEe MaRkEt WiLl HoLd BuSiNeSsEs AcCoUnTaBlE!

The brilliance of ActivityPub. Reddit alternatives don't need to be rivals anymore.

True. It does look like Peertube has some instances with videos hosted on them. But yeah, storage and bandwidth costs would be much tougher problems to solve than for lemmy as soon as it started to scale up.