I think the best we can hope for in the long-term is an email-like adoption.

Individuals self-hosting major servers on donation money is not sustainable. This sucks for the people for whom this is “what Lemmy is”, but it’s the truth. There will come a time when Lemmy-at-large gets so big that Lemmy.world has to close (or de-federate), as users and content will outgrow voluntary revenue.

What we can hope for is that Lemmy is not taken over by one huge corporate instance, but instead 3-4 competing, inter-federated corporate instances. A Meta instance, a Google instance, and a Bytedance instance, for example. In addition to these, smaller (non-social-media) companies and institutions (game companies, universities, political organizations, etc.) would run their own Lemmy instances for the benefit of their members and users.

When you rotate an image in your phone or on your computer (by right-clicking or going into the image options and selecting “Rotate Right” or w/e), the device is not editing the image to rotate it 90 degrees. It’s just adding a little metadata tag that tells devices loading the image “display this, but rotate it 90 degrees”.

Lemmy scrapes off metadata as a privacy concern, since this also holds personal and location data. There have been a few medium-profile events of internet stalkers getting location data off of women’s selfies and going straight to their homes.

I’m not sure if there’s a simpler solution, but opening the image in an image editor and saving it again should remove the metadata tag and save it as an actual, upright image. However, this is a problem that the devs should fix - platforms like Discord also shave off metadata, but know enough to leave the orientation data intact.

I agree with the sentiment but with a caveat:

Just like with email, I think the future of the Fediverse will involve institutions and companies running their own instances for discussion related to their niche.

For example, universities might run their own servers for campus-related discussion, and game companies (Paradox Interactive comes to mind) might run a server for discussion around their games and by their members.

Running a server is expensive, and in the long run I think the sustainable future will be for established institutions with large budgets to put a tiny part of that forward for instance hosting, rather than individuals self-hosting instances that actually lose money even when buffered by user donations.

I thought I read somewhere that other local users can also see your comments?

I wonder if that applies to other federated instances as well. Like if my home instance (lemmygrad.ml) is federated with lemmy.ml, and I make a post on BeeHaw (which is not federated with either), could lemmy.ml users see my comment?

I’m counting the days until all of the “Major” servers (sh.itjust.works, beehaw, lemmy.world, etc.) have a struggle session over whether to defederate from “tankie” instances (lemmygrad.ml, and ironically since the devs are MLs the dev instance lemmy.ml).

There are far easier, more secure ways for people sharing, say, child porn to do so than hosting a Lemmy instance. The only real benefit of a Lemmy instance would be the ease of use.

A Lemmy instance is just a website, possibly running on someone’s basement server rack. There’s no way for any authority to stop them from hosting child porn on that server, unless that authority is (1). Their ISP or (2). The police.

Lemmy (or, rather, ActivityPub) is just an internet protocol, like Email. You can’t stop someone from hosting child porn on a Lemmy instance just like you can’t stop someone from sending child porn over email. This is not a reason that Lemmy should not exist in the same way it’s not a reason for secure, encrypted email to not exist. Enforcement falls to traditional, (supposedly) accountable authorities, which is much better than it falling to administrators of a private company.

Have to say I don’t see why this is a bad thing. You don’t want your impression of an app misled by 5 million Indians saying “The Hindi translation is garbage 🤬”. Or if you’re downloading an ebook reader on a tablet, you don’t want reviews from smartphone users saying “The mobile version is unusable, the buttons are too small!”

Xi is a bad actor. He actively removes opponents, like his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who sat right fucking next to him and was publicly removed.

This is a bad conspiracy theory. Hu Jintao was allowed to sit at the table because he is an important historical figure. He’s in his 80s and has Alzheimer’s. He was having an episode at the table and was escorted out. The idea that he was publicly removed from building and disappeared is tabloid-level misinformation.

Under Xi, China is asserting ownership of international waters in the South China Sea that have historically been either international waters or even owned by smaller nations.

Nations fight over territorial waters all the time, whether it’s Turkey or Kenya or China. There are EEZ disputes in the North Sea between Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the UK. Why should I care whether China or the Philippines own the Spratly Islands? What does it have to do with China being Marxist or not? I really don’t understand why you even brought it up.

Under Xi, the Uyghers’ and Mongolians’ culture is actively being erased by outlawing local religious and cultural customs.

Neither their local religion nor cultural customs are being infringed upon. If anything, the re-education programs in Xinjiang seek to remove recent (90s-now) religious influence from Arabian missionaries, who have spread Modernist interpretations of Islam that are what is endangering local Traditionalist Islam in Xinjiang.

The one thing I would actually agree is an issue is language - the biggest sticking point in Mongolia is that recently public schools have been mandated to teach in Mandarin. However, nothing is being done to prevent locals from speaking Mongolian at home; the goal is just to guarantee that all people in China are fluent in Chinese, while a Mongolian-language school system means some amount of people are just never learning Chinese. Cultural assimilation isn’t even really the goal; not knowing Chinese is correlated with worse career prospects for indigenous people in China.

And of course, most countries in the world, including the U.S., mandate that public schools teach in the official language. This is nothing new nor unique to China.

There is a similar problem in Tibet, where in addition to the above issues, boarding schools are being mandated for rural children because it’s less expensive to have a large, centrally located boarding school in low-density areas than managing a public school in every remote Tibetan village (China recently outlawed private schools, which I think is a big plus for equality of opportunity).

You actually can’t just move to North Korea lol.

If there was an English-speaking Socialist country with a liberal immigration policy, I honestly think we’d see a lot of Americans and Brits moving to it.

Reddit official mobile app, and New Reddit in general, is just awful for a certain kind of user. Everything is in huge bubbles, tons of wasted space, ads everywhere. I literally cannot bring myself to use it.

I was an RES desktop/RiF mobile user. I’ve decided that I can get most of what I liked out of Reddit out of Lemmy. The content volume is less than what I’m used to, but it’s enough to hold my attention through my lunch break at work.

The only thing I still use Reddit for is porn - none of the nsfw Lemmy instances I’ve found have really been what I’m looking for.

I think the way Lemmy works (wrt federations) makes this less of an issue. Eventually people who like the way things used to be will primarily use oldhead instances that only federate with other oldhead instances. Lemmy.world will end up feeling just like Reddit (more or less) but there will always be spaces for other communities.

Isn’t claiming to be a Marxist state while still maintaining power within a small group of people (the inner party, a political version of the bourgeois) worse?

The Chinese system isn’t perfect but I think questions like these put the cart before the horse. Is the Chinese system set up in such a way that, if bad actors got their way to the top, they would wield an immense amount of power? Yes, definitely. This question is separate from whether or not the people at the top right now are bad actors. And I think, like in any country, it’s a mixed bag; there are oligarchs and business-industry plants and corrupt officials, but there’s also well-meaning bureaucrats (Xi Jinping broadly fits into this category) and ideologically-driven Marxists.

The idea that Xi Jinping is a power-hungry dictator is an overblown trope. He is a fat, old, boring bureaucrat who got into office because he is an agreeable political moderate; a compromise between the ideological Marxist wing of the party and the pro-business Dengist wing.

As we saw in the Soviet Union, unrestricted Freedom of Speech is the downfall of Marxism. Home-grown Liberals are only the first issue; the United States government spends literally billions of dollars propping up anti-government organizations, whether that’s Uyghur terrorist groups, the Falun Gong, Tibetan Independence movements, or “LGBTQ+ Rights” organizations who always seem to spend more time arguing for political liberalization than they do actual LGBTQ+ Rights (and, before you strawman me, I want to make my point here clear: LGBTQ+ Rights are good, but many such organizations in China are funded by foreign actors in order to disrupt Chinese politics. The bad things about them are not their LGBTQ+ Rights advocacy, but their advocacy for other forms of Liberalization that undermine Communism in China. If an LGBTQ+ Rights organization in China calls for the downfall of the CPC, they do not deserve to exist)

As funny as it seems to say, I feel that “Conservativism” is unfairly maligned. Most of the bad things about what is called “Conservativism” are not really parts of Conservativism at all but are ideologies associated with Conservativism - “Rugged Individualism”, Neoliberalism in general, religious fundamentalism.

We’ll probably disagree on this point (and that’s okay), but you can look at China. China is a very conservative country, with strong cultural values regarding family, social conformism, and civic nationalism. It is Conservativism without Capitalism, Individualism, or Religion.

Being “unbiased” is not a virtue. I am a Marxist. I judge people, governments, and ideas based off of a Marxist framework. That is my bias.

I give China the benefit of the doubt because they are, at least, claiming to be a Marxist state. This on its own puts them above any non-Marxist state.

I just don’t think framing the issue as “Us, the first-world middle class vs. Them, impoverished third-worlders” is a helpful one. We are both victims of Imperialism. Nationalism can be important for these third-world countries but I think it’s counterproductive in America as it exists.

As I’ve gotten older I find myself being more of a conservative in the true definition of the term: a preference for slow and steady change, caution towards new ideas, and some amount of reverence for tradition.

The issue is that the Republican party is not a Conservative Party. Joe Biden is a Conservative. The Republican party is a party for Reaction and Neoliberalism.

Agreed. There is too much false equivalence of “Tankies” and fascists.

Fascists want to enslave your sisters and daughters and stick your trans friends in psych wards until they “decide” to stop being trans. They’re fine with Blacks wallowing in poverty as second-class citizens and having militarized police on every streetcorner.

“Tankies” (Marxist-Leninists) believe in all the same progressive things other (so-called) Socialists do but have different views on historical figures and foreign policy, something that does not matter a bit in the here and now.

Here is the difference between Fascists and “Tankies”: if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that China was trying to exterminate the Ughyr people through mass execution, 95% of the “Tankies” out there, myself included, would disown China and denounce the genocide (this will not happen, because it isn’t a genocide except in the broadest and most meaningless of terms). If it was proven beyond a doubt that the Holocaust happened (which it more or less has), the majority of Neo-Nazis would still say it was good.

If you really care that much about “Authoritarians” and “Tankies”, maybe you should just move to exploding-heads.

I agree completely. Reagan passed the first gun control legislation in American history, after the Black Panthers armed themselves in California.

The status quo of gun control being a local issue benefits Reactionaries. Communities of color (and other left-leaning urban communities) elect Democrat governments who limit firearms. Republican communities elect Republicans who do not. The end result is effectively minorities and liberals voting to disarm themselves while Republicans do not face the same restrictions.

The Holocaust happened. The Armenian Genocide happened. Manifest Destiny happened.

The Ughyr detention centers, whatever you think of them, do not constitute a genocide. The Ukrainian Famine was a tragic loss of life, and perhaps the Bolsheviks could have done more to prevent it, but it was not an attempted extermination of the Ukrainian people. And don’t even get me started on Rwanda.

And Liberals routinely deny genocide in Palestine and Kashmir because it is politically expedient.

A blanket reproachment of “Genocide Denial” ignores the fact that sometimes, a genocide is claimed where one does not exist. I’m sure you accept that “White Genocide”, especially wrt South Africa, is a conspiracy theory with no legitimacy. Why do you not give the same benefit of the doubt to China, or the USSR?