cacheson

It gets weird when we talk about this stuff on only one axis (left-right) rather than two (left-right/libertarian-authoritarian, though that's still a simplification). Specifically, I'm an anarchist, which means I'm part of the "far left". Anarchists, along with "ultra"-communists, are seen as being to the left of Lenin/Stalin-style communists. Saying that the problem with the lemmy devs is that they're "far left" implies that people like me are the same as tankies, and we kind of resent that.

How It's Made: Tanks

While lots of people are suggesting creating communities for your niche interests, I think it's even more important to to find niche communities that others have created and contribute to them. Obviously you can do both, but if you've got limited time to post it may be better to focus your efforts, and be the "first follower" rather than the leader.

I've been doing this for /m/Animemes and /m/anime_irl, just making one post per day in each. There hasn't been a ton of other activity yet, but the subscriber counts have been growing steadily, so we'll get there.

I've also been wanting to build up /m/Bitcoin in the same way, but I don't feel like I've got much to contribute right now, so I'm focusing on the anime communities.

I think part of it is that leftists (myself included) don't like being lumped in with tankies. I didn't downvote though.

The lead devs of lemmy are tankies, basically meaning authoritarian communists of the genocide-apologist variety. They also run the lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml instances.

This is also why I signed up on kbin instead of on lemmy. The other lemmy instances are fine, but I don't want to contribute to the influence of the lemmy devs any more than necessary. Hopefully they try to pull something stupid and get forked off the project.

Just so everyone's aware, upvotes and downvotes are also public, due to how federation works.

This isn't true. Posts and comments are sorted by upvotes, downvotes, and age. The place where wires got crossed with regard to upvotes and boosts is "reputation" on your profile. Boosts are supposed to be like retweets.

This one was great, highly recommend it.

Maybe it's worth having that security hole then. I think it's a bit crazy that terrorists or child abusers can plan their crimes using WhatsApp without the police being able to intercept their messages.

Encryption exists. Terrorists and child abusers will use it whether WhatsApp or Apple or whoever implement it or not. Stopping those implementations is just denying privacy to regular users.

Also, if we're able to contact our banks over the internet securely (and obviously the bank can still see everything about our accounts if they want, while criminals hopefully won't be able to), then surely an equivalent should be possible for things like WhatsApp.

Law enforcement can't eavesdrop on your encrypted connection to your bank. If they need to know about your banking activity, they rely on the bank reporting it to them.

I'm in favor of communism in principle, but not in practice. I'd love to live in a commune, but I don't think I'd want to live in a communist country.

You might be interested in anarcho-communism. I'm not one myself, but they're the only kind of communists that I'm okay with.

Triscuits and guacamole. Make sure to increase your fiber intake slowly, otherwise you'll make things worse.

I liked this bit a lot:

As Robert Caro wrote:

"We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do."

I think there is value in having both generalist and specialized instances, and the big landing spots for new users should probably strive to be more generalist. As you point out though, there are limits to how broad of an audience one can practically cater to.