Name a single protest taken over by an outside group. It’s not something that happens. Maybe some of the white supremacy groups whose presence alone requires people to reject them or be tainted by association, but nothing on the left. That’s not an actual problem on the left, much less one “on the left forever”.

My first protest was organized against the Iraq War, but in practice also contained more broadly anti-Bush protesters as well as groups promoting third parties, communism, and veganism. None of those were a problem or threatened to take over the protest in any way.

So something that doesn’t actually happen in the real world. No one gets to decide the one singular issue that defines a protest. There isn’t one.

Yeah, that one paragraph made this entire story worthless. We have gestapo kidnapping people and warfighters on the street facing down Americans. It’s no longer hyperbole to compare the times.

In one breath you’re saying protests have to be wide and in the next you’re complaining about groups with a specific interest joining.

.ml used to feel similar to .world in that it mostly indicated you just joined a pseudo-default, but it feels like it’s getting more ideological over time. The devs run two instances, .ml and lemmygrad, and lemmygrad was the explicitly Marxist instance, but since lemmygrad got defederated from some large instances it feels like .ml is now getting more ideological.

I wouldn’t worry too much about it impacting your experience or what people assume of you in the near term. It’s still generic enough that a .ml handle doesn’t automatically mean something. It’s more like a confirmation when someone is already posting some extreme things.

The someone he killed was himself. He blew himself up on a day that the area of the clinic nearest him wasn’t really in use and wherever the eggs are was not in range. He certainly could have killed someone, he just didn’t happen to.

Oh I’m well aware of the relationship, but if you call CNN Stormfront, you’ve completely lost the plot. Things can be problematic without everyone being a Nazi, and in a time with real Nazis out in the open doing things, crying wolf is actively harmful.

A Nazi in a bar makes it a Nazi bar. A Nazi bar in a town makes it a Nazi town. A Nazi town in a state makes it a Nazi state. A Nazi state in a country makes it a Nazi country. A Nazi country in the world makes it a Nazi world.

You can construct gradients of connection for anything, but that doesn’t make them not insane. If .world is a Nazi website, then .ml federates with them, so they’re also Nazis. And hexbear federates with .ml, so they’re also Nazis. And this all stems not from .world actually tolerating Nazis, but just being kind of center-left normies. When you’re eager to make everyone a Nazi, the accusation loses all meaning.

That’s an absurd level of connection though. It’s blown right past the mild hyperbole of calling Twitter a Nazi site because it doesn’t ban Nazis, past calling your Fox News uncle a Nazi for voting to “stop the caravan”, through labeling MSNBC a Nazi station because it buys into the “break the conservative fever” myth, and into the territory of “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is an actively organizing Nazi”.

Stormfront isn’t a site for “well meaning patsies” and calling .world a Nazi site is just making up a heroic story for why the fascist at 7/11 kicked you out because he hates communism rather than because you were being an asshole to everyone else in the store.

“Active” being a dozen posts from two years ago.

Though right now we’re probably inflating our own importance by thinking anyone at all will associate Lemmy with this guy in any meaningful way. The name was referenced by the reporter because they needed to say where the random posts came from, and talked about like it’s just a general social network rather than an organizing place for a radical ideology.

Yeah. The “it was just because they hate communism” descriptions of hexbear defederation are just making up a story of oppression to explain why it wasn’t actually their behavior that got them locked out. People don’t hate communism, they hate trolling, tankies (in the literal sense with the Ukraine invasion), and brigading (referencing their fights with the libs and then a bunch of commenters swarming).

I could take or leave the lemmygrad defederation, but hexbear absolutely made its own bed.

The defining trait of Stormfront of course being its liberal apologia. These people are not grounded in reality and just need to keep finding more extreme labels for the people that did them wrong.

They’re a huge instance most people joined by default. No one sane thinks a .world account means anything about the person posting under it, except maybe they just went along with the pseudo-default.

You guys think there’s a big rivalry and anyone who hasn’t rebelled against the unjust persecution of the tankiest instances must have cast their lot in with the enemy, but in reality no one really thinks about it at all.

You’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s the largest instance. There’s no particular stigma for users on it. Unlike there is for the more ideologically selected instances, like .ml.

So what? I don’t think we need to worry about his future posts.

In that same period, Bartkus’ rhetoric on alternative social media sites was dark.

I’m just proud they know we exist.

There’s not much reason for a trimmer guide to experience meaningful load.

Elon Musk saved them from having to confront that corporatism was the problem with Twitter. They don’t realize the whole “decentralized” slogan is just a startup in the growth phase willing to promise anything and ask for nothing in order to lock people in and if they’re lucky enough to not be bought by another billionaire fascist, they’ll just go to shit like all the others.

Or that it is Twitter 2.0 and Twitter wasn’t a good investment until Musk overpaid for it.

It’s also very much not non-profit.