Between 2 and n “hexbears” (understood to mean “humans afflicted with hexbear mind virus using other servers”) are behaving in some coordinated way. You were pretty clearly implying that it’s some conspiracy rather than simply other users disagreeing with you.

Lol what are you on about? People who use hexbear (i.e. hexbears) share similar traits, interests, and behaviors. They use hexbear because they fit in on hexbear, and in order to fit in on hexbear you need to pass an extensive series of ideological purity tests, which result in the homogeneity and cult-like behavior that occurs.

Hexbear is quite explicit about this, they don't want anyone with any sort of divergent political views on their server. They clearly revel in "dunking on libs" by chain downvoting and harassing people when they say things that the hexbear hive mind disagrees with. And yet always claim innocence when their obvious brigading is called out, as you are currently doing.

It is a real problem for everyone who's not a hexbear, because it means that we can't have sane, civil conversations about certain political issues on Lemmy, because CCP apologists and edgelord larping teenage "leftists" constantly butt in and derail the discussion with their potent combination of ignorance and self righteousness.

I never asserted that "anyone downvoting must be a hexbear alt". There you go again, misrepresenting my point just to feel like you're winning.

I'm quite sure that non-hexbears are downvoting OP also. But that wasn't what you said, was it? You could have said that originally, but instead you decided to mock OP and act like he's crazy and there's no way he is getting downvoted by hexbear users, which is disingenous and lame.

You know what you're doing, I don't need to explain your own bad faith tactics to you.

It's possible to turn off local community creation, image uploads, etc.

Lemmy.myserv.one doesn't host any local content but you can easily browse the rest of the fediverse. Having a diversity of server sizes and formats is definitely a benefit of Lemmy that we should be trying to take advantage of.

Lemmy, famous for not allowing alt accounts 😅

This is why people don't like hexbear, because they consistently try to gaslight and use disingenous arguments such as this. How are you disputing the fact that OP is getting downvoted by hexbears right now? That's insane.

You don't need those commas in that sentence. It makes you sound like Christopher Walken 😅

That sub is trash also. I think the whole conspiracy theorist subculture has been taken over by the alt right and is highly politicized at this point.

For cost per user, it's only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.

The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.

Rage against him when he does evil things, by all means. But when you start raging against him 24/7 for no particular reason, it serves no purpose. In fact, it lessens your ability to actually call him out when he does bad stuff, because you sound like the boy who cried wolf.

And more importantly, it also affects the quality of discussion on Lemmy. One major advantage we have over reddit is that people tend to actually read the articles and make insightful comments that add to the discussion. "Hurr Durr Muskrat bad" is the opposite of that, it's a reddit style pandering comment that ultimately has no substance or meaning. When these circlejerky comments become more common than good comments, the value of this site as a forum for legitimate discussion falls off a cliff.

It's baffling how people on Lemmy hate Musk so much and yet can't stop mentioning him in every random, unrelated thread.

The starlink was privately bought as per the article, it wasn't officially procured using federal funds. So the comment I responded to doesn't really make any sense in the context of this post.

But it gets 50 upvotes because Musk is very bad man. I guess that answers my own question about why people can't stop mentioning him on Lemmy: it's free upvotes to shit on him. That's fine I guess, but it can be annoying when it clogs up the discussion in unrelated threads.

What dude are you referring to? I'm confused how your comment relates to the article.

A few things.

• Admins can and do ban accounts that downvote rampantly

• Obvious bot brigading is obvious. It became harder to tell on reddit when they started fuzzing the vote numbers, but could frequently still be figured out. It's easier on Lemmy, someone just has to report some unusual voting pattern to the admin and they can check if the voting accounts look like bots.

• I was once told that the algorithm is less weighted towards upvoted comments and more weighted towards recent comments on Lemmy, when compared with reddit. I am not sure if this is true, but I have noticed that recent comments tend to rise above the top upvoted comments in threads when viewing by Hot.

• Without any way for bad content to be filtered out, you just end up with an endless stream of undifferentiated noise. The voting system actually protects the platform from the encroachment of bots and the ignorant mob, because it helps filter them out from the users who have something of value that they want to contribute.

Lemmy is highly sensitive about transgender topics. We have a very high percentage of trans people, and thus mods tend to be quite zealous when protecting this space from transphobia. They may sometimes be overzealous, but that's not the worst thing in the world.

I don't think a permaban was necessary based on your comments. But I also don't think you would be happy about making other Lemmings uncomfortable or driving them away from the platform because they feel unwelcome. Is it more important that we all perfectly agree on various semantic definitions, or that people feel welcome and able to connect and communicate with others on Lemmy?

I'm not criticizing you or anything like that because I don't think you were trying to hurt anyone and I think the ban was excessive. But I'm just trying to help you see the situation from the other side and maybe approach the topic with a little more delicacy in the future.

I dunno man. How can you be sure the comments you're seeing on reddit are from bots? There are some bots, but there are also a lot of ignorant mfers on that site.

I would also say that Lemmy is much better moderated, partially because it's still small enough that the mods and admins can stay on top of everything. Reddit is so chaotic that absolutely horrific comments and threads tend to slip through the cracks quite regularly nowadays.

Well... some people still are. Just not nearly as many on Lemmy compared to Reddit

Congratulations on your eleventy-first birthday, Mister Baggins!

I don't think anybody is expecting women to do administrative work on behalf of men's rights. It's more that women tend to react with outright hostility when men advocate for other men.

It's actually the feminists who frequently argue that men need to be fighting for women's issues. I haven't seen the reverse from male advocates, partially because it's quite obvious that such a request would be summarily denied. Men generally just want:

• funding for men's shelters

• sympathy & aid for male victims of domestic violence and sexual assault

• solutions for the growing educational achievement gap

• a discussion about various legal discrepancies when it comes to conscription, marriage, and parental rights and responsibilities.

None of this requires women to assist or flex their institutional power. But when men are systematically denied access and funding for various forms of governmental aid, it seems like certain women are flexing some of their institutional power to prevent men from having access to the same kind of social safety net that women enjoy.

It’s emergency airplane crash logic. Put your own supply of air on before you help the person next to you.

This is a faulty analogy, because men's issues are women's issues and vice versa. It's impossible for women to actually solve their own problems without also solving men's problems. How are women ever going to keep their oxygen masks on if they are surrounded by men who are suffocating and trying to rip the mask from their face? In order to help anyone, you need to help everyone.

To be fair, the men's rights movement is absolutely characterized as alt-right by the mainstream media. People tend to assume all sorts of things about you when you bring up any kind of men's issue. Most people (including other men) have difficulty empathizing with grown men, and thus they subconsciously expect that men's advocates are motivated by something else, such as misogyny. It's hard to move past our biological and cultural tendencies and view men as vulnerable and in need of support.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Trump, Biden, and Bernie are all too old. They could all die at any time, and thus it's not an effective political argument for either side.

The reason why Biden is being attacked from that angle more effectively is because he is showing signs of dementia. That's a whole other issue aside from the likelihood of death.

Uhh, I just explained why. People can argue whatever they want, but the actual behavior and performance of the candidate supercedes their biological age as a barometer for electability.

Also I never said it wouldn't matter, in fact I specifically acknowledged that it would be a talking point, then explained why that wasn't the most important factor at play.

You do realize that age is not a perfect proxy for mental competence? A good number of people remain mentally sharp well into their 90s, while others experience rapid dementia as early as their 60s.

I'm not saying his age wouldn't be a talking point, but I'm damn sure Bernie could express his platform with more clarity and vitality than Biden at this point. Unfortunately I dont think it's a real possibility, but it's stupid to act like the the actual birth date matters. It's the signs of cognitive decline that are problematic.

I dunno what that guy was thinking, but it seems obvious to me that nuclear fusion is the long term solution for energy generation.

Nuclear fission not so much, but it's definitely debatable which has more fundamental flaws between fission and wind/hydro/solar. All renewable energy sources ultimately depend on natural processes which are not reliable or permanent. And they also tend to disrupt the environment to some extent.

Nuclear fission has no such limitations, but instead trades long term risk for short term stability. Basically renewable sources are and always will be somewhat unreliable, and Nuclear fission is the least bad reliable energy source to pair with the renewables. So in the medium term, fission makes a lot more sense than fossil fuels, and in the long term we should be looking to fusion.

Your tone is perfectly fine and you made very good points, thank you for the information.

Wow. This is amazing. 0.19.5 feels much cleaner and snappier.

Still getting used to the changed location of upvotes on comments in Lemmy UI, but I'll adjust

I'm not insulting anybody. I'm simply stating the fact that it's smart to wear a helmet, because if you hit your head on the ground, you could die. That's all.

Walking down the stairs is less dangerous than biking and you know it.

You make some good points.

I still wear one, but I don’t judge people who choose not to.

I don't wear one and I judge myself for not doing so 🤷

Complicated issue.

Could be even lower if they wore helmets though. I don't even wear a helmet myself, but it's objectively smart to do so.

My friend got something caught in his front wheel and went over the handlebars at 20mph. Could have been turned into a vegetable if he wasn't wearing a helmet.

Not really. Lemmy is filled with skeptics, rebels, and independent thinkers, and there are only like 50,000 monthly active users.

You know what's a much better target for propaganda? Reddit or any corporate social media site. The users are simpleminded and easily manipulated and you don't even have to worry about moderators, you can just pay to run ads.

Good luck with the upgrade and thanks for your hard work!

Why not provide it to everyone else?

Anytime I see a trash post that’s where it comes from 9/10.

It's 40% of the whole Lemmy userbase and activity. They've got their fair share of trolls but come on, the worst? Have you forgotten about redditors?

It's hard to be the biggest, and I think their admins are doing a pretty good job.

I saw a fellow mod outright nazi-ing about ( not “saying things I disagree with” but actual nazi fanboy-ing)

A claim like this typically requires evidence.

What a time to be alive

If you ran afoul of a moderator, sure, you could create another subreddit with a name like r/xyz_2 or r/xyzAnarchy. But it would only ever be an alternative, it could never replace the original community, partially because the name was already reserved.

More importantly, if you ran afoul if an admin, there was nowhere to go. The reddit admins exercise absolute control over the content that is allowed on that site. On Lemmy, people will just leave the server if the admins pull a spez.

You just have to choose the right instance. Federation does address those problems.

Right now our options remain limited because its still early days and the platform isn’t large enough yet. But in the long run, whichever servers do a good job of limiting extremism without being overly authoritarian in moderation will continue to thrive and grow, and servers where the admins are petty and/or politically biased will slowly die.

NYC is a bad example because it's an extreme outlier in terms of size and density. But the metropolitan area is actually much larger than the urban area; here's a map of all the counties within the NYC metropolitan area.

It covers 8,200 square miles, just slightly less than the area of New Jersey.

Metropolitan areas are quite large and typically include the core city along with the entire surrounding area that is economically and culturally heavily linked with the core city.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

Here is a map of all the metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. Micropolitan areas are essentially defined the same way, except the core urban area of a micropolitan area is <50,000 population, while a metropolitan area has a core city of >50,000 population.

You can see that metropolitan areas include vast areas that are not even remotely urban. Beyond that, there is also a category called the Combined Statistical Area, which often combine multiple metropolitan areas.

Here is a map of LA where the red areas are urban areas, the beige counties are part of the Metropolitan Area, and the yellow counties are part of the CSA.

Greater LA

The CSA for LA is a whopping 34,000 square miles, or slightly larger than the island of Ireland or the state of South Carolina. However, it only contains about 2,300 square miles of urban area. Estimating the urban area is even more of an imperfect science than the metropolitan area, so I'm not sure how they calculated that number.

When people say Greater Boston or Greater Toronto, they are usually referring to the MSA, but might also be referring to the CSA. So the short answer to OP's question is that "Greater" and "Metropolitan" are roughly synonymous. FWIW, I think that metropolitan areas used to be significantly smaller and more urbanized, but they had to modify the definition over time due to trends of suburbanization and decentralization in American city development.

I've spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities. Most people who have been using Lemmy for a while understand that it's way less of an issue than it sounds like, because there has to be a major reason for a defederation between servers and it doesn't usually happen out of nowhere.

But in the case of Beehaw, it actually did happen quite abruptly, and it involved 3 of the largest servers at the time. We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it's impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it's safe to say that the number wasn't zero.

The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.

The removal of downvotes is not something that I have any particular problem with, although I wouldn't choose it for myself. I'm just pointing out that in this specific situation of wanting to mitigate tankie posts, the downvote is self-evidently an effective tool.

I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.

Can't it be both? If certain moderation tools existed then you could use them to solve the problem. But they don't exist, so other instances are currently using the strategies that I have mentioned in order to deal with the problem as best they can.

Sh.itjust.works does have open signups.

I totally understand and respect your perspective as a beehaw user, even as I obviously have a completely different perspective as someone who has never been a part of the beehaw community but instead has been observing from a distance.

Thanks for the response. I didn't realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that's good to hear. I'm familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.

I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don't mean to say you're responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it's helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.

For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don't have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.

However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.

Might as well take this opportunity to point out that beehaw is still defederated from sh.itjust.works. I thought it was a bizarre decision at the time and the fact that it hasn't been reassessed after all this time is even more baffling. Beehaw and SJW are two of the best moderated instances on Lemmy, and yet we aren't federated with each other.

You can view the original announcement from beehaw here and the reaction from SJW here. You'll also note that beehaw has since refederated with lemmy.world.

I have been informed that beehaw is still defederated from lemmy.world, my mistake.

Nearly a year later, it's obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole. The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.

The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it's federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn't like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers. But because beehaw doesn't allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW), you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

I don't mean this to be an attack on the beehaw admins, because I think they have done a number of great things for Lemmy and the fediverse and I believe that our objectives are generally aligned. But I feel that I must express these frustrations, because as I have just explained, the actions of the beehaw admins also have direct consequences on fediverse users from other servers.

I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase. This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.

Too soon.