law enforcement officials who support the law say that the boards subject their officers to unwanted scrutiny.

Exactly. The thugs, thieves, murderers and rapists are uncomfortable with the fact that the public is becoming aware of the fact that they’re thugs, thieves, murderers and rapists, and they want to go back to being able to beat, steal, murder and rape with impunity, and that requires eliminating oversight. So they’re actively moving to eliminate meaningful oversight.

It really is just that simple.

How deliciously ironic that this is paywalled.

I don’t think we can gatekeep it either.

But we can, or not, encourage it. I’d rather not. I’ve never - not even once in more than 30 years online - seen a forum get notably popular without it also, and obviously as a direct result, going to shit.

The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer.

If the masses discover the fediverse and move here, that’s not going to remain the case, guaranteed.

They’ll bitch and moan because content isn’t centralized (we’ve already seen that), and the rent-seeking fuckwads will, one way or another, rearrange things so that it is centralized, and specifically so that they can then squat on top of it and suck profit out of it, and it’ll end up just another facebook/twitter/instagram/reddit.

Count on it.

Why on Earth would we want to do that?

The last thing in the world the fediverse needs is a bunch of idiots blundering around in it.

Everybody else doing it.

Good luck convincing cats of that.

Mmm… yes and no.

College towns are more lively and interesting, and notably more likely to have cultural things that similar-sized other towns don’t have - bookstores, galleries, music venues, museums and the like. That’s appealing.

But there’s a downside to living in a college town as a non-student. The town is mostly geared toward serving the students, and that can get tiresome, since it’s near certain that some significant number of the students are going to be… well… assholes.

Someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned tourist towns and their similar appeal, and I’d agree. But with the exact same proviso.

Yeah - it’s undoubtedly a good thing that Israel doesn’t execute people for being gay.

Since with the way they do things, they wouldn’t just execute gay people. They’d execute anyone who happens to live anywhere in the vicinity of a gay person. And then blame it on the gay person.

And you’d defend them.

Bluntly?

This is the dumbest variation I’ve ever seen on the already dumb idea of trying to compensate for a perceived lack of content on Lemmy by just cribbing stiff from Reddit.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Reddit, Lemmy or anywhere else - if the username checks out, then the username checks out, and that’s an amusing tidbit worth mentioning.

And this is definitely a case in which the username checks out.

And I stand by everything I said there.

And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.

And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.

And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”

If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

SOS Pads and Scotch Tape

Mark Sandman

I suppose one could. I have no idea why anyone but an emotionally disturbed moron would though.

It seems sort of like condemning punching yourself in the nose while punching yourself in the eye - it’s like you somehow managed to both get the point and miss it completely, at the same time.

No - anarchism, by definition, is the complete absence of institutionalized authority.

Those around here who are calling for the destruction of institutions have no intention of creating a society free from the hierarchy of authority - they want to destroy the current authority merely so that they can replace it with their own.

Again, they’re about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists. They’re as authoritarian as fascists - they just have a different set of norms they want to forcibly impose, and a different set of people they’re eager to oppress and murder along the way.

I haven’t seen a single anarchist on Lemmy. Not even one.

The most obvious group, and the one this thread is about, is about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists.

Who’s this “we?”

I love the taste of coffee. That’s why I drink it.

Wow… Maher on Rogan.

That’s such a mass of overconfidence bias in one place that it seems like they should’ve collapsed into some sort of Dunning-Kruger singularity.

Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?

I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go.

The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.