Compare this:

Tell me why Armistice Day was more important than Veteran’s Day is.

I aim to engage thoughtfully with this topic while noting that the relative importance of these observances can vary based on personal and cultural perspectives.

Armistice Day, established to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, held unique significance as it marked humanity’s hope that WWI would truly be “the war to end all wars.” The original spirit was focused specifically on peace and the prevention of future wars. When the armistice was signed, there was a profound sense of collective relief and determination to ensure such devastating conflict would never happen again…

To this:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

I find the second one more entertaining, more pleasant to read. If you want to call it that. I know translation is different from coming up with new text. But look again at the lyrics and the language in the second one.

I’m not trying to tell you that you’re wrong for wanting to read things that aren’t in English, or that there isn’t a place for machine translation so the information can get conveyed. I’m just saying that passing anything of value through this filter, and then presenting it as something for people consumption, is a bad idea compared with the other way.

It’s not enough to be able to put the words in the right order.

You have to know why they need to be said. Otherwise, it’s a big waste. Just throw the book in the bin and go spend some time outside instead.

Mastodon is your coworker who’s honestly well-meaning and kind, but seems to have fits of upset for seemingly no reason at all and random beefs and drama with people that arise from nothing at all. She’s not very good at her job, but she can get it done, and she seems like a sincerely good person, which is enough that people like her.

Misskey is the employee who’s incredibly efficient, but has her own system that no one else can make sense of or follow. You have to just let her do things the way she wants to do them, but it all works. She does not hang around with anyone, just comes in and does her thing.

Bluesky is the guy who is always talking buddy-buddy while either wasting time or asking people for things, blows coke in the bathroom, is constantly hyping himself up. He seems to be very qualified, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is an act, and he’s also clearly a huge piece of shit. For some reason he is wildly popular with everyone.

You didn’t ask, but Bonfire is the IT guy who seems to live in his windowless office, wears T-shirts to work, speaks to no one, and is personally responsible for about 40% of the company’s products and services. Most people have no idea who he is.

All sounds reasonable. I think I just had an instant eye-roll reaction to the crack about “shitty admins” as the reason for your unusual configuration and making me do extra work to talk with you, and decided not to bother. But sure, if you want to talk with me I’ve got nothing against it.

Borg borg borg

You can combine it with a FUSE mount of the Google Drive, I’m not sure if that works but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

How long did you wait? Sometimes it takes some time for things to get federated.

As long as someone is subscribed to it from your home instance, it should get there, though.

Edit: A word

A lot of Lemmy mods, especially on Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world, see themselves as arbiters of what people are and aren’t allowed to say.

It’s very weird. It is the Reddit model that they’ve inherited, and you can avoid it to a certain extent by just avoiding those communities and instances that tend to do things that way. But I think at the end of the day that this model of moderation is simply always going to have this failure mode attached to it. It’s a silly thing for anyone to agree to who is an adult who can speak their mind unmonitored by a chaperone who is approving or banning each message like some sort of schoolmarm overseeing the class discussion and ordering someone out if they get out of line. We only put up with it because most mods are fine, the damage is slight most of the time, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

I wrote more on the topic in this exact community a while back if you want to read. I plan to write up a part 2 which includes some guesses for what could be done about it. If you want, I can send you a note when it’s written.

They’re not allowed to be collaborating with people who work for certain Russian companies. It’s not a question of security, it’s a question of US law requiring US entities to punish through non-cooperation certain companies that are assisting in the war effort or whatever.

It might or might not be fair, but it isn’t up to the kernel developers, it’s a legal requirement for them.

Hey guys we’re going to blow up the maternity hospital and shell the nuclear plant: I sleep

You can’t work on your software project anymore: REAL SHIT

Any man who must say, “I am hilarious,” is no true hilarious.

Preemptive defederation, along the same lines as, “You can’t fire me, I quit!”?

I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. I’m was asking because another of their communities is coming up for posting in my community tool. Thanks for the link.

We’re not federated because it’s just too much drama and not enough reward. There are too many instances, many of them inactive, lots of people uploading sketchy shit which federates across, it’s impossible to keep tabs on everything and lots of resources go into hosting that bloat which nobody here would care about. Fediverse politics are also cancer and every shitty admin thinks they’re important somehow.

I’m not opposed to federating selectively, with your instance for example. I mostly care about knowing that you actively admin it and I don’t have to worry about dodgy content making its way across here - if that’s the case and you’re keen, let me know.

My God.

Since they’ve decided I’m a shitty admin, I’ve instructed the community posting tool to skip over their stuff, and I consider the matter closed. I wish them luck.

That’s what I’m doing, although anyone else who happens to know what’s going on is free to answer as well. I don’t feel like making an alt just to dodge around whatever they’re doing.

Yes. The question I’m asking is, why?

Hey, thank you! I appreciate it. I like to put down these thoughts, I have been thinking about it since tinkering around with my own little corner of the operation.

Personally, I like the idea of a $1/month fee paid to the server operators. Something Awful does something like that, and it works like gangbusters apparently. Right now, the entitlement of free access without even a laughably nominal fee creates a not-ideal set of expectations of both sides, both users and admins.

It’s probably a total nonstarter of an idea, because the user culture on Lemmy right now is so entitled that it would be seen as some kind of grave insult to the users, in their position as free demanders of whatever service level they’ve come to expect and they will yell if they don’t get it. Which is precisely the problem. Community and volunteerism are wonderful things. Even as it is, it’s much better than the commercial model. But it can definitely be improved from here.

Like I said, I thought of a few different ways of trying to redress the balance, but nothing that was convincing. I think, in complete seriousness, that just starting fresh in some other corner of the fediverse might be a better way. I have a whole host of other types of thoughts about that and what this all means, from the point of view of my involvement in the whole operation, which will have to wait for me to have time for a whole separate essay for anyone who wants to hear it.

https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

A conversation I had over there was the inspiration for me to finally polish this writing up and post it here.

The point is not that the mods are power tripping, but that the whole structure which allows toxic users to flood the zone in uncontrolled numbers, and depends on volunteer moderators to deal with them all in order to keep things vaguely on the rails, is the fundamental problem. If that deeper issue could get fixed, I think any complaints anyone might have about mod behavior would instantly evaporate.

I prefer that old way, to be honest. It seems like the moderators are trying to be “evenhanded” now, which I can understand being necessary as things grow, but what you are saying is part of what I am saying.

There’s a culture on the commercial internet that you can always have a free account just because you want one, and that’s led to entitlement on the part of the users and exploitation on the part of the service providers. That culture carried over into fediverse servers, where really something more like the old BBS model would be more appropriate to me. The sysop took responsibility for the system being good, and yes you can come, but a pretty small amount of douchebaggery meant you could get the hell off my hardware and no apologies.

I think it’s possible you’re thinking of Fidonet or something similar. I’m not trying to argue with you, I’m just saying I was around on Usenet and some of the national BBS culture at the time as well, and well into the mid-90s, they were two separate cultures.

What you’re saying about BBS culture is absolutely true. Usenet was different. I think the first Usenet-to-BBS gateway that even existed was UFGATE, from 1988 or some similar time. 1986 was before even the alt. hierarchy, when the people that put together the system were uncomfortable with the idea of even unregulated newsgroups existing. I don’t know how many nodes there were in the system back then, but I know in 1984, there were less than a thousand sites in the world even connected to Usenet. I don’t think BBSes were in the picture back then. I can’t swear it never happened, from single sites with forward-thinking sysops of some kind, but I would be surprised if you can go back in any kind of Usenet archive and find even a single message from someone pre-1990 who isn’t identified by their full real name, and some tech or research institution as their place of entry. Maybe Kibo.

The influx of people from AOL or Delphi in the mid-90s, and the alarm and despair it caused as it damaged the existing Usenet culture of the time, is very well-documented. I’m not saying you’re wrong. For all I know you were on Usenet and witnessed the occasional troll back then. I’m just trying to say that the type of interactions on Usenet back then were very, very different than on the modern internet, and 1994 was when the old Usenet culture died, as people got widespread access to it.

I think I made a mistake by bringing in the concept of power tripping mods. I do think that exists, although as @[email protected] says, it’s often an invention of someone who is being moderated for good reason.

The whole point I was trying to make was that because there is no strong social contract, anyone who is a moderator is getting put in an unreasonable position. They have to keep coming back to herd 500 feral cats in their free time for no paycheck, and that’s not a fair thing to ask a whole contingent of people to do, as the backbone of a good social network. It’s fine that they want to do it and have signed up to do so, so that things can work and we can have this nice thing, but it’s not the way.

It is true that sometimes they become unreasonable as a result of being in that position, but that wasn’t the point. It is that we need to fix the users, instead of trying to have volunteer mods always backstopping the user behavior once it passes a certain absurdly toxic threshold.