Liberalism has an actual definition, and it is not the colloquial definition used in mass-media to refer to “the left half of what is acceptable.”

Liberalism is an idealist (another word which has a very specific definition) political philosophy which champions private property, constitutionalism, republicanism, rule of law, and free trade. It has a philosophical canon, flowing through writers like Locke, Montesquieu, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Paine, etc. Further economic works, like Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” are built on this philosophical underpinning.

Marxists are materialists. This is in contrast with the idealism of Liberals. While Liberals believe ideas are the force which drives change in the material world, Marxists understand that ideas are just a reflection of the material conditions they emerge from.

Liberals find themselves banging their heads against the walls of the institutions time and time again, because from their perspective, these institutions are just a reflection of ideas, and as long as the justification for an institution on paper is sound, there is no reason to think it cannot be reformed. An institution like the US Congress, or the Executive Branch is never at fault. It is simply a good institution simply being run by bad people. Marxists (and Anarchists) reject this quite simply, by looking at the material incentives involved, and the long ghastly history surrounding these institutions.

“Combating liberalism” does not mean being a piece of shit to anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders or Jeromy Corbin. There is a genuine struggle to ensure the new crop of social media platforms don’t simply end up defending the legitimacy of the established institutions at the expense of genuine radicals who find themselves at odds with the actual longstanding policy and practices of these institutions. To avoid situations like when mastodon.lol banned CODEPINK, a prominent anti-war organization, for being “Tankies.” This is Liberalism, and it should be combated.

On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).

You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).

In summary, Discord is strictly a service. Matrix is a tool you can apply however you see fit.

You should be aware that the people over at Raddle have a massive grudge against Lemmy and they post shit like this all the time.

It is true. You can host an image somewhere (i.e. actually run the web server) paste a link to it, and if anybody clicks on it they will show up in your web server’s access log. Typically this will include an IP address and a user agent string (indicating OS, browser version, etc.). To mitigate this, Lemmy would need store copies of any media which gets linked here and serve those instead of allowing hot-links. Mastodon does this, but for the same reason it requires hundreds of gigabytes of storage to run a small instance.

Federation is managed at an instance level, by the administrators of that instance. Instances can take either an accept-list approach or a block-list approach. As an end user, you choose to de-federate from it by choosing an instance which de-federates from it (or by running your own instance). The moderation / personal block tools on Lemmy aren’t as sophisticated right now as they are on Mastodon, but ideally you should also be able to personally block instances from accessing your account as well.

A lot of third party communication occurs on the Fediverse though. If a community is hosted on server A, you come from server B, and another user comes from server C, it is reasonable to ask if server A will just hand server B’s content (replies, votes, etc.) to server C. On Mastodon, this is the default behavior, unless an instance enables the “Authorized Fetch” option. I am not sure how this works on Lemmy.

For the meantime though, Threads is focused on the microblogging format of social media, and compatibility with Mastodon in particular. Lemmy is probably less at risk. But you should still treat every public post like it is truly public. People run scrapers. People run bots. People can take snapshots on archive.org. Federated platforms are no different in this regard.

Step one: Post

Post cool / funny / poignant shit which isn’t just pictures of your lunch. Lunchposters are the bottom of the barrel. At least post pictures of your cat. Same goes for Free Software. Free Software is great, but when you’re joining a Free Software social network, you don’t want to be the millionth guy posting about ArchLinux or Emacs every day. This is the quickest path of turning free social networks into ham radio (which is also great), where a bunch of boomers get on the radio and talk to each other about their radios.

Step two: Network

Find cool people. This is more difficult without an AlGoRiThM, but try out different hashtags (which you can also follow), dive into the local/federated feeds and try to find one or two people to follow at a time.

Step three: Engage

If you have a good bit or meme (or insight, even) that’s relevant, engage. Don’t be a reply-guy though. Don’t fall into the trap of just showing up in the mentions of the same 5 people every day. Never stop posting your own shit, even if it gets little engagement initially. No one will follow you when they are guaranteed to see your dogshit posts below the person they actually care about anyway. Follow back the people who follow you. When one of your posts really takes off and gets a lot of likes, look for the people who scrolled your profile and liked the shit you actually care about instead of whatever random meme that you got trending. Those people are your most powerful allies.

You get likes (and discovery) from making insightful replies, but you will only get follows if you are posting interesting stuff of your own.

The only reason Threads has 30 million users right off the bat is because they leveraged their monopoly position with Instagram to push their users to Threads. It is absolutely no different from how Microsoft leveraged their monopoly position with Windows to push their users to Internet Explorer in the 90s.

Facebook has a long history of buying out any firm which poses the threat of competition. Peter Theil, the literal fucking vampire who sits on their board, has made very blunt remarks about this. They bought out Instagram and WhatsApp for this very reason. Make no mistake. To Facebook, the Fediverse is competition. Every minute spent on Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and other AGPL federated platforms is a minute lost from the commercial attention economy. Every user who makes the switch is a user which isn’t feeding them a steady stream of marketing data. Every user who makes the switch is lost ad revenue.

Facebook cannot buy the Fediverse the same way they bought Instagram. Instead, they will join it and apply incredible pressure to influence it in directions which are not harmful to their bottom line, and once the threat is neutralized, they will drop it like a hot turd. It could’t be any more obvious what their intentions are, but a lot of the tech bro dipshits still think a “wait and see” approach is warranted, including Eugen (initial creator of Mastodon) himself.

This guy made a blog post this morning saying that Mastodon is different from XMPP. XMPP was only used by a bunch of nerds and that’s why it died. It had nothing to do with Google employing the classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy. Meanwhile like 75% of people on Mastodon have their fucking Linux distro in their bio (gentoo gang, btw).

We might have gotten lucky with a handful of these “Benevolent Dictators For Life,” but only WE can create a network which is liberating and empowering. Nobody is going to deliver it for us.

Eugen’s naïveté is going to destroy this whole platform.

Nothing eliminates more nuance than viewing some of the broadest and most substantial social upheavals in world history through the lens of Great Man Theory. To write off the struggles and sacrifice of millions of people, their successes and their failures, and lay them at the feet of one man. To treat history like this is to believe that the vast majority of its participants are unthinking, uncritical beats of burden with a predisposition to subservience. (The same applies to contemporary “hate the government, not the people” discourse, in which we are to assume the majority of Chinese citizens are helpless, brainwashed victims of totalitarianism)

When you treat history like this, you open up a lot of convenient shortcuts for yourself. You can claim that the October revolution was a much needed intervention, but then drop it immediately after the honeymoon period is over with some hamstrung claim that Stalin was too stupid or too selfish to understand what Lenin was trying to accomplish, or maybe Lenin himself was too stupid to understand Marx and the whole project was doomed. Or that we would be living in fully automated luxury communism right now if Trotsky had taken power.

None of this discourse delves into the actual social or economic conditions involved, nor the theory and practices which emerged from the crucible of revolution. Most importantly, it never makes any attempt to LEARN from this history, so previous mistakes can be avoided, and so proven effective strategies can be developed further and incorporated into contemporary struggles. It is navel gazing bullshit which conveniently discards the whole thing. The only lesson you learn from this treatment of history is that revolution leads to dystopia and that we shouldn’t even bother. The takeaway we end up with is that the people who disintegrated the Third Reich and put the first humans into space were better off when they were a backwards feudal monarchy.

And today, among the English-speaking online left, any time somebody comes along and argues “You know what, maybe we shouldn’t stick the entire history of the USSR or the PRC into a furnace. There are some valuable lessons in here.” they get derided as a Tankie by some vote blue no matter who sicko. Lots of people throwing the word “authoritarian” around who have never had to confront the sharp end of the US state once in their lives.

Firefox

let them fight

Have fun putting words in people’s mouths and spreading rumors on Reddit.

If you ask a liberal what “tankie” means you will get a response that sounds a lot like if you ask a conservative what “woke” means. The two main developers are communists, trying to collectivize social media. It is very shocking. 🙄 They develop the software transparently, out in the open, along with many other contributors. They also operate lemmy.ml, the very first Lemmy instance. Dessalines has a collection of essays he’s written on Github. If you are concerned about his beliefs, I would go straight to the source rather then taking third hand rumors on face value. As for the rest of the network, each instance (such as lemmy.world) is operated independently. The whole point of federation is to decentralize control over the network.

Some Fediverse platforms (e.g. Mastodon) allow you to migrate your account from one server to another. By doing this, you keep your account details, post history, subscriptions, etc. and your followers get redirected to your new account. Lemmy does not currently support this, but it may someday.

As somebody who’s generally interested in science and technology, HN also sufferers from terminal libertarian VC-brain. It’s a club for wannabe founders of unicorn tech companies who view themselves as enlightened ubermench. This doesn’t always bubble to the surface, but at times of controversy it is quite glaring. Most recently, when the founder of CashApp got murdered they were practically calling to liquidate the homeless, even though the incident - predictably - was the result of a personal dispute with somebody he knew.

Even if the subject matter scratches an itch, the community is not for me.

There’s nothing they can do. Both the firm and the platform are completely infiltrated by intelligence assets.