I was actually thinking of coming back to this and asking if you’d heard anything. Thanks for the update! Pretty weird that it’s just seemingly running like a zombie there.

I haven’t seen any of the porn communities in the three non porn instances I’ve tried here personally. So out of the big ones, world seems to already de-federated at least.

Fake it. Smile and wave when people reveal their politics or weird shit (that we all have) that doesn’t vibe with you. Keep it shallow and surface level, like talk about music and movies and shit. Indulge in conversations about this restaurant or that brand of tea or some shit but never show them who you really are. And they won’t even notice that they don’t really know you and it’s all good being an alien. Maybe everyone does this on some level.

And I’m protecting insanely here in case you couldn’t tell (but that’s because I relate) but instead of saying “go to therapy”, I’m gonna say do yourself a favour and spend some time lurking in some mental health related communities / spaces and see if you relate to any of the things that people say there. And how much of it you relate to. And look up “autistic burnout” too.

As I say (just making double clear), I’m giving you this advice based on my own life so far. So maybe your story is different. But I related a lot to a lot of what you said here.

Based on a couple of arguments I’ve now had, they actually sound a lot like manosphere, anti woke people. Just a bit more intelligent and well read. But even the “trans ideology” phrase that they like to use is just their version of “woke agenda”.

I think that it is a sect of feminism that has been created and seeded by the same right wing christian nationalist types that are also behind the manosphere and MAGA. The Peter Thiel and Elon Musk types. They realised in the '90s that calling everything “satanic” wasn’t working, so they started coming up with new terminology to pull people in.

First it was “SJWs”, then “woke” but it all attracts the same kind of people. And “trans ideology” was the term they came up with for women that read and aren’t completely dense. So they’re all behaving like reborn christians and going around stomping out anything the norm. But they also sincerely believe they’re right.

But honestly, based on the conversations I’ve had so far, all alt right people have the same talking points, which TERFs definitely are a part of. They’re just, as I say, not as clearly dumb as other alt right types.

From what I’ve heard, admins can’t really do anything about repeat offenders / downvote trolls because of something about scanning through databases or something. But then I also saw a post yesterday about how Friendica reveals the usernames of people who upvote and downvote, so it seems like that information is accessible in the API or framework of the Fediverse.

I don’t really obsess about framerates myself and I’ve never had the kind of budget to have the latest and greatest parts but from what I’ve seen, somewhere around 30fps is fine.

And even though you didn’t ask, the last setting that I ever sacrifice is draw distance. I’ll turn down textures and shadows and reflections and everything else before I sacrifice draw distance. I don’t need realistic graphics to be able to immerse myself and have a good time. But things popping in and out of existence in front of your eyes are the ultimate immersion breaker for me.

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As a South African, I’m willing to bet that not a single farmer was amongst these people (and I’m not saying there aren’t racist farmers, I’m saying they’re more economically literate than these clowns, so they know relocating to the USA would be a bad idea). These are literal trailer trash that had their asses wiped for them by black people all their lives, who now have to live with the ‘horror’ of not being put on a pedestal for existing anymore. Whether it was apartheid days or now post apartheid days, the only thing that these useless inbred fucking hillbillies ever contributed to society was hate.

I wouldn’t wish them on America but I do wish that they would just fuck off somewhere else or die already.

I used to go to internet cafes to look for cheats for video games. Pretty much all I ever used the internet for back then. Don’t remember many other sites but I do remember a website where you slaughtered the teletubbies in various ways, like dismembering them or slicing them in half with meat saws.

After that, my first social uses of the internet were MySpace, a forum for metal and alternative music called MakeSomeNoise (named after a magazine that came out in my country) and the chat rooms on The Offspring’s website.

I get that these kids were brainwashed a little but what bothers me is that it was never any secret what was happening to women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights but they went for it anyway. It wasn’t some secret plot or trick, these people told us all exactly what they’re about.

Even if they don’t care about queer people, they happily sold out the rights of their own mothers because the word of some ex reality TV star meat head was more important to them. I feel like even if I was that age being bombarded by propaganda, I would’ve woken the fuck up the moment they started going after my mother and my sisters.

I actually saw a story on Reddit shortly after the election, that’s a double whammy in this regard. It was a divorced woman who is currently in a relationship with another woman, telling the story of how her own son visited her and fessed up to voting for Trump and happily said out loud “I don’t agree with gay people.” Based on the reactions she described afterwards, this dumb piece of shit kid only realised that the people he was hating included his own mother, after it was already too late.

It’s all fucked. I forgive these kids to an extent but I know that when I was that age, I did in fact have a sense of morality and could in fact use my own brains to figure things out for myself.

“Stop discriminating against me and judging me and saying bad things about me! Also, you’re going to burn and suffer for all eternity in hell because of who you’re attracted to.”

Good point. Done.

Judging this guy by the rest of the company he’s in as far as these Cybertrucks go, I wonder how “open to differences” he is towards other people.

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Russian colon

Yeah well these news publications are starting to blatantly insult everyone’s intelligence now. If it was really unexpected, there wouldn’t be a bunch of comments here saying “Unexpected? Really?”

Bad Religion - I Love My Computer

Ah, thank you for the correction. I was under the assumption that both the Observer and the Guardian were sold but looking again, seems to be just the Observer. I’ll edit my first post to direct people to your comment.

won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up

Yeah, when I first started out here, my experience was like this:

• I went to the join Lemmy page, then clicked to show all servers. Then waited. And waited. Then I went to bed.

• By the next morning, the list of servers had managed to load. I spotted one that was advertised as “recommended for users to join to reduce load on the Fediverse”, which seemed like a good idea after seeing how even the join page was battling to load.

• Found out that the server I joined seemed to have all sorts of issues loading content. And was apparently de-federated from a bunch of instances that align with my interests. So search results were showing me little to nothing in regards to queer communities for example, only dead communities.

• Signed up on world instead and encountered multiple posts that said they had comments but loaded nothing. Found out that there were no languages selected in my settings. So I selected ‘undefined’, scrolled down, selected ‘English’, then saved.

• I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that ‘undefined’ was deselected again. That’s when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.

• Finally success! 3 or 4 days later. And now I’m here.

I would love to recommend Lemmy to the few people I know who use Reddit. But I can’t see any of them trying without just giving up and going back to the place where all you need to do is sign up and hey presto, content to look at and interact with.

I have a feeling that even the process of choosing an instance would probably put them off. I could give advice but there’s only so much I could do or explain without being there in person helping them. If they have to read walls of text explaining how to get started, it would probably end there.

I’m not sure what the solution is though, or if there even is one. It might just be a little bit like trying to recommend Linux to people who just want to be able to push a button and go. Which is the majority, based on what I’ve seen.

Also just one last thing and something that has been discussed to death. There’s just not enough content here yet for the average person to see any reason to switch over from the place with all the content.

And on that note, recommending this place to people that I know in real life would be too risky right now that they would see my account and figure out who I am. Because there isn’t a crowd of a million people to slip into and disappear here. And this isn’t Facebook. I don’t want people to know about the very personal things I sometimes say on anonymous social media.

Edit: I was a bit mistaken. It was in fact the Observer that was sold by the Guardian group. Still seems like there’s smoke which indicates fire but I was not entirely correct here. See one of the replies to my comment for more information.

Based on what I can find, The Guardian was actually sold to a company called Tortoise Media two months ago in December 2024. And according to Wikipedia:

Guardian and Observer journalists voted to strike on 4 and 5 December 2024 in protest over a sale that they said would betray the commitment of the Scott Trust—owner of the Guardian Media Group—to the Observer.

So not even the journalists wanted this company in control. And funnily enough, there was a Guardian article in 2018 that specifically mentioned Tortoise Media while talking about the “increased involvement of private wealth in the journalism industry” and how that is a bad thing. So from what I can tell, it can no longer be trusted.

Wikipedia article on Tortoise Media here.

Mulder documentaries? Like the X-Files?