For what it’s worth, I’m very familiar with that feeling too, despite excelling academically and a high score on IQ tests. Ignorance is not a lack of intelligence, it’s more likely a lack of experience. And every culture, job and hobby will have their own terminology and assumed knowledge, so not even the Einsteins could pretend to already know it all.

I listen to music all the time, I’ve composed amateur music myself, and enjoy occasionally reading wikipedia for trivia of music theory, but if two musicians start talking about basic stuff like major and minor chords I’m already out of my depth. Do I do the smart thing and ask them to explain? Or do I just nod until they talk about something I know, or tell myself I don’t actually care about music theory?

You’re welcome :)

I just had another look at the settings options, and it looks like we can import/export account settings, including subscribed communities, blocks and saved posts. (I haven’t tested this, but I can see them in the exported data file)

subreddits

We ain’t in Kansas anymore! They’re officially called communities or comms for short over here.

It usually helps to subscribe to more than one, especially if it’s something simple like Apple comms, but you don’t need to sign up for a new account just to subscribe to communities on other instances. Also no point in subscribing to all the dead ones with no posts in months, but I’m subscribed to some technology comms on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and they both get posts. (There might even be some users who are only able to see one of those comms because their instance blocked another instance, so that’s a reason why one of those comms might not become the only one everyone is using.)

There are a few exceptions like /c/196 or politics subs where different ones have different-enough rules and moderation where it might actually matter which one you subscribe too, but for general interests, might as well just sub to them all because the worst case is they just don’t add any extra posts to your feed.

Generally agreeing with Cowbee’s reply. I joined lemmy.ml years ago when it was explicitly “leftist” (as in socialist) but that’s not written in the instance description anymore, and I am interested in FOSS discussion but you don’t have to care about that to use the instance. This was the first instance, which was created by the two core developers who are both communists. I wanted an instance that was socialist-leaning, stable and isn’t trigger-happy with defederating or regularly getting defederated, so this one is great for me.

I have mixed feelings on Hexbear, I like dropping in sometimes and some of their comms are nice, but I see them as prone to mod powertripping and the culture is (overall, not always) a bit low-effort for my liking and prone to idealism/sloganism/dogmatism. So I’m usually only using a couple of specific comms or laughing at /c/slop.

I haven’t kept up with Lemmy software updates so I don’t know where it’s at with migrating an account. I’ve had a couple of different accounts simultaneously (one on an instance which died years ago, one on an interest-themed instance) rather than just having one main account. And like they said, there’s little downside to abandoning an account beyond inconvenience. There’s no ‘karma’ score shown by default, and you can re-use your username on the other accounts if your name had a reputation you want to keep.

On that note: cache

Not the user you asked, but my impression is they’re tolerant (or undermoderating, I’m not sure) of the kind of behaviors many of us left reddit to avoid, like flame trolling, bigotry, propaganda levels of US-centrism (and labeling anti-US-government or anti-Democrat-Party attitudes as Russian bots), anti-socialism and straight-up platforming US reactionary users like Trump/Musk supporters.

The instance takes a general lax liberalist position, and as a result, allow a sizable amount of toxic users who we don’t tolerate in our communities. So some people take the easy option and just block the whole instance, unfortunately blocking a decent amount of good considerate users too.

There’s also a bit of bad reputation due to the staff being far stricter on deleting support for Luigi Mangeoni, like anyone suggesting what they did was positive or appreciated. Lots of people left reddit because there were banned for the same reason. Whereas my instance (and the one this thread is on) allows me to say that, while I believe history shows PotD assassinations are not the right strategy to solve this problem and there must be a social movement surrounding direct actions, the shooter’s assassination was cathartic, Brian Thompson deserved to die early and quickly, the owner-class mass media’s widespread failed attempt to demonize the assassination as immoral showed clearly their values lie in opposition to the worker class (regardless of electoral alignment), and the fact that healthcare CEOs were terrorized by the event was a benefit, however small, to humanity. You would probably get a warning for saying that on lemmy.world’s communities.

It’s unfortunate that such a big diverse instance goes on the block list. A huge amount of people get blocked just because the platform tolerates enough reactionary jerks that people begin associating it with the instance. And to be clear, I’m blaming the overly-liberalist position of their administration, not you or the typical user.

Sympathy as a lemmy.ml user. There’s usually a few people in these threads saying “just ban .ml” for various reasons.

Classic example are the few people who go around flaming inter-community drama in comments, then someone else replies showing that poster had recently been banned from that community and clearly deserved it. Modlog ftw.

It’s rare, and mostly the same people, but I see it about a dozen times a year.

See https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/18452090

I remember a thread where someone had put a mining rig inside a hotel or apartment’s cleaning room and was running it off the stolen electricity.

I just don’t think a pre-packaged comeback (hilarious as many of these are!) can truly ‘destroy’ someone. It needs to be personal to the situation to really hit them deep. Unfortunately I can’t think of an example.

I disagree. I would personally find one point two zero point one to be more natural and easier to understand.

I disagree with that, because we’re dealing with a number and not a fraction. Linux kernel 4.20 is not equal to Linux kernel 4.2, we’re actually dealing with the integer 20 here. (yes, alphabetical sorting on a download server has lead me to download an outdated kernel version once)

I don’t think that’s any more precise, just more verbose (read: inefficient).

I’d say the second one is more correct

In this case, it’s not about what sounds good or personal opinion, there is a standard name for that number for a reason. If I go around calling 100 “one oh oh” or “tenty ten”, it’s clear what number I mean but I can’t honestly call it more correct, because there’s a standard English name for it.

To demonstrate a part of why it’s clearer that way, put these numbers in ascending numerical order: (e.g. 1, 2, 3, … )

• one point three
• one point twenty-nine
• one point thirty
• one point thirty-one
• one point three-thousand-and-fifty-two

Hopefully this clarifies that we’re not actually dealing with a “thirty-two” when we’re talking about 1.32 (edit: that said, when we’re talking about version numbers, e.g. Linux kernel 4.20, which is greater than Linux kernel 4.9, then we’d say “four point twenty”)

where, by law, no politician has the power to arbitrarily sentence people to death.

What does that have to do with anything? Politics isn’t just elected politicians, it’s not some entity distinct from society and the economy. And you don’t have to directly force someone’s death to cause it and be responsible for it.

Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources ^[wikipedia]

In my country, the construction union forces their employers to follow safety procedures on site which the government does not legally enforce. Deaths of these construction workers due to workplace accidents has dropped because of workers using their political power as a trade union, while the government (due to pressure from construction employers) aims to dilute this power. In your country, unions have gradually lost a lot of their historic power and the rate of fatal workplace accidents is around double or more than most European countries, and close to that of Russia and Thailand. Workplace health and safety policy is, literally, life and death politics for many people.

In both our countries, there is a housing crisis which threatens more and more people and families with homelessness. This has huge impacts on their ability to work and even survive. Government policy impacts affordability of property, how much residential property is being built, the affordability of basic needs (like food and utilities), how much employers must pay for jobs, the rights of landlords and tenants (e.g. here there is an upper limit to how much a landlord can increase prices per month), social support to homeless people or those seeking work, and the legal concerns of homelessness (e.g. anti-camping laws, jail time for seeking shelter in vehicles, food disposal policy that promotes starvation). More and more people are dying because of homelessness and its effects. Housing policy is, literally, life and death politics for many people.

Political policy in the US has infamously enabled widespread, normalized police brutality. This especially (but not exclusively!) affects minorities such as black peoples, queer people and autistic people, regularly and consistently leading to deaths from shooting, unjustified physical assault and sadistic negligence while imprisoned. Law enforcement policy is, literally, life and death politics for many people.

The 9/11 attacks killed thousands of innocent civilians. That was politics, al-Qaeda is a political organization who were responding to the direct results of US foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands more were killed overseas in the US “War on Terror”, but even for its own domestic citizens, international geopolitics is, literally, life and death politics for many people.

Those are just a few example across a range of well-known political topics, not even getting into more indirect aspects like deciding where government funding goes to (e.g. heart disease research - heart disease being the single biggest cause of death), and not even diving into non-government political organizing. Politics includes the more extreme anti-abortion activists working to make even life-saving abortions illegal. Politics includes insane mass shooters targeting minority groups. Politics includes the assassination of Brian Thompson.

I think Lemmy takes politics WAY too seriously and way too personally.

But, you must understand, to many people politics is very personal, whether they like it or not.

You are very lucky to be able to do your own thing, to have the privilege of politics being fun and not very serious. But to millions of people, this is, literally, a life and death matter.

Confound your OP magic! I was going to buy some guns!

Well, I could invest it and pocket the returns… not sure how far 1 mil will get these days.

Or, I could just https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HrmD_vIMIk

Looking back, I didn’t realize what I said could have been misinterpreted, if one isolated it from the next paragraphs. Sorry for the snappy response.

[conservatives] are un-desired…ala undesirable.

No, their politics are unwanted. That’s a huge difference, it’s absurd to treat them as equal.

To clarify, and as discussed in that following paragraphs, I’m saying it’s absurd to treat someone’s politics being unwanted as equal to someone themselves being considered unwanted.

What I found so controversial was that your post misframed my position as if I thought people should be treated differently simply because their politics are different. That’s not true. My politics are different to a M-L’s, and to an anarchist, and I get along alright with them. No, my problem isn’t that people have different ideas, my problem is that bigots and the like (many call themselves ‘conservatives’) aim to have innocent people oppressed and killed through their political beliefs and actions. Politics isn’t some civil abstract philosophical discussion. Politics isn’t distinct from material reality. It’s not harmless and innocent to just have a political position. When a neo-Nazi org tries to spread their propaganda in public (yes, there are people in my city who try this. and yes, I mean “quotes the NSDAP and means it” neo-Nazi), they aren’t simply just expressing an idea, this isn’t some isolated discussion in a vacuum, they’re attempting to build a political movement that promises to get my friends, co-workers, and a whole bunch of my community killed just for how they were born. And we have a duty to protect the people we care about from being killed by fascists.

So when we “ban” that Nazi from feeling safe to express those politics in public, it’s not because we’re ‘triggered’ that they dared to have different politics, we’re responding appropriately to a credible, albeit not imminent, threat. Same with the non-nazi bigotry regularly seen among self-proclaimed “conservatives”, it’s people trying to make others excluded from society based on how they were born. That’s a threat to our safety.

So, again, like I said before, it’s absurd to equivocate people being banned for posting bigotry and reactionary ideologies, to people being considered “an undesirable”, a subhuman.

Now image a republican saying that about democrats. Imagine your outrage. LMAO

I couldn’t care less - I hope Biden and Kamala get shot alongside Trump and Vance. ¯_ (ツ)_/¯

See, […] not every republican is a Nazi.

Obviously. The US electoral system is undemocratic garbage and which party people identify with isn’t an indication of their political worldview - the Democrats are repulsive and harmful to the social justice movements they pretend to campaign for, I can’t blame anyone for opposing them. There is no good or even adequate option until you get into the minor parties, who most probably don’t know much about.

But, the party leadership has plenty of people who, for all intents and purposes, mirror the policies and tactics of the NSDAP circa 1933. They even managed to get the ultranationalism started (see Canada, Greenland). Nazi is an appropriate label for them, including Trump and Musk, to be clear.

If one wants to say all the supporters and footsoldiers aren’t Nazis because they’re too ignorant to understand what they’re supporting or think it’s the lesser evil, I say it’s pointless semantics. The minority of Germans who voted for the NSDAP pre-takeover are known to history as Nazis. The Wehrmacht who “fought for their country” instead of fighting their government are known to history as “Nazi soldiers”. Complicity is not innocent, people were hanged for “just following orders”. So, if you’re not a Nazi (and I don’t think you are one) you’re going to have to make your actions speak.

So because someones politics are different than yours

No.

Stopped reading there. If you’re just going to invent strawman arguments no-one said, instead of trying to read and reply to what I wrote, why even talk with you?

They are un-desired…ala undesirable.

No, their politics are unwanted. That’s a huge difference, it’s absurd to treat them as equal.

When I used the term ‘undesirables’, I didn’t mean literally ‘not desired’. I meant it in the context that reactionaries like NSDAP (Nazi Germany) and their modern fans use it - it referred to peoples like Slavs, Romani, Jews, black peoples, people with disabilities, homosexuals and ideological opponents, and more^[1]. People, just because of their lineage, were considered subhuman (Untermensch) and sent to be deported or exterminated. And it’s absolutely applicable to the section of modern US conservatives (including their national leaders) who are currently embracing similar oppression of selected races and conditions. That’s the allusion I was making with the borrowed term ‘undersirables’, not just a person who is being offensive, starting fights and told to leave.

Identifying politically is a choice. One can refine their political positions, or even just be diplomatic and respectful, at any time, by choice. It’s very easy.

Being identified as a race, sex, or other similar category, is not a choice. So if you feel excluded because you named your account after two racist cunts and openly identify as ‘conservative’ in an anti-racist space, that’s something you can easily choose not to do if you actually want to be included. Don’t expect us to take you seriously when you compare that to the Republic party’s form of exclusion, oppressing people for how they were born, not how they choose to act in a society.