Do people think that the more specific labels and variations are the reason for the hate? Because as someone who only actually started looking up terminology and familiarising myself with the people late in life, and has walked amongst closed minded conservative people, they don’t know or care about anything outside of ‘gay’ or ‘trans’. Even non-binary is an alien concept to most.

It doesn’t matter what the label is or what the colours are, people who hate anything out of the norm are going to hate anything out of the norm regardless. Especially when they’ve been raised in a religion that teaches them from childhood that anyone out of the norm is going to burn and suffer for eternity. They don’t do research so that they know what they’re talking about and they don’t bother to ever actually get to know any of the people they claim to hate. They just like to hate.

If they weren’t going after trans people right now, they would be going after gay people. And you can bet that’s next anyway. Have people already forgotten how gay people were treated before trans people were the target?

The way I see it, is that the rules and aim of the instance are all written out pretty fucking clearly and people on a platform dominated by longform text don’t really have an excuse for not being able to comprehend it. Like seriously, I had been using Lemmy for two days when I checked out Blåhaj, and I feel like I understood then already because it’s not hard and English is my native language.

So that said, when I see people complaining about it, I think they’re either fucking stupid, or they’re probably these ‘free speech’ people that want the right to go around insulting everyone without consequences (while doing the most epic pearl clutching the moment anyone insults them).

As far as I’m concerned, moderators and admins doing exactly what is clearly fucking written in the description and rules is not power abuse.

Mozilla have been slowly but steadily turning to shit for years now. Long ago already, they became the kind of company that lays off workers in order to pay the CEO an unreasonable amount.

I think that the moment people should’ve seen as a turning point where Mozilla stopped giving a shit about the users was when they did all of those unpopular UI changes a while back (like removing compact mode). They used telemetry to justify these changes, while I’m sure they must’ve been aware that their “privacy focused browser” schtick probably attracts a lot of people who switch telemetry off. And even if they were that stupid, the over all reaction online to the changes should’ve been enough of a clue for them. But they still did it anyway.

UI changes might be small in the greater scheme of things but the UI is also what 90% of users base their experience on. So it just means that they do not give a flying fuck about the user base. And they’re going to be slowly but surely enshitifying the browser whether anyone likes it or not.

I’ve been playing around with Facebook for the last couple of weeks and the censorship is so crazy these days is isn’t funny. But only if you post anti Trump and Elon content, even as a non American. I’ve already had a couple of posts flagged for ‘misinformation’ since after Zuckerberg made this announcement and I’ve seen it happening to other actual Americans too. These ‘free speech’ people are all fucking jokes and liars and the biggest pearl clutchers whenever someone exercises their free speech to speak against them.

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.

I dual boot and still use Windows 10. And everything I’ve seen from Windows 11 just seems like trash to me. My mother got a new laptop about a year ago and I came along to help her set it up. With her previous laptop, I opted to not do the free update to Windows 10 because people were complaining about it at the time (and I was still on Windows 7), so she ended up stuck with Windows 8.1 for years. So this time I did opt for the free update to Windows 11 and it feels like a huge mistake so far.

Her machine is now slow and struggles to get things up and running. And every single fucking time she tries to use it, it decides to run virus scans and download and install updates all at the same time. And these updates often seem to take an entire day. The last update took two days where she could barely do anything on her laptop because it was slowing things up so much.

And that all makes the frustration add up when you come across the other fucking stupid things they’ve done. So now when you right click on the desktop there’s a few seconds where Windows needs to get its shit together to show you the new useless menu that’s been slapped on top of the old useful menu. Then you need to click ‘show more options’ for the actual useful menu. Then another few seconds for Windows to get its shit together to load that menu.

And I don’t want to load a bunch of stuff like classic shell or winaero tweaker because she’s old and just wants to play hidden object games and solitaire. So I’m going to have to come running every time something happens that she doesn’t understand. So I prefer leaving it vanilla.

But fuck Windows 11. It’s absolute fucking garbage based on my experience so far. I was going to hold out for the inevitable Windows 12 because Microsoft seem to love using their paying customers as beta testers with every second OS they release but now I’m not so sure. Hoping there will be some sort of hack to keep enterprise updates coming or something.

drastic realignment of the Democrat party

Once again, just want to make clear that I’m an outsider looking at news articles and memes, so forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn here. But based on what I’ve seen so far, this seems unlikely to me. All I’ve seen from the Democrats at this point is how they’re getting annoyed with progressives for pushing them to actually do their jobs. And all indications look like they’re more interested in attracting ‘reasonable’ right wingers and fence sitting centrists that weigh up the pros and cons of human rights vs egg prices, than actually trying to attract left wing voters.

I know that there’s a teenager advice community of some flavour floating around in the Blåhaj server. But I’m gonna take a guess that the only reason it’s there is because people who can’t just scroll past things were downvoting it. I have a feeling that if an instance or multiple communities for teenagers popped up, the users here would probably terrorize it until it all closed down.

I cannot get into Lemmy. It was just endless wars about who was federated with who.

Honestly, this gave me some trepidation when I first got here too. When you’re checking out a list of servers, you’re going by the descriptions written on the page. There’s no footnotes about the little wars and name calling that on about this.

So someone is going to sign up on ml because it says it’s focused on software dev and FOSS, then encounter people who judge them based on the fucking url after their username rather than the content of their posts. And I’m still not completely on board with the conversations and memes that perpetuate this.

When I got here and caught wind of this stuff, I actually questioned if I was even in the right place. That stuff is not attractive to new users who are just getting started up. It makes it seem like this platform is a minefield that you need to tiptoe around when you’re seeing it for the first time.

This place has a few problems IMO. Not just the UX but also a lot of the users, I’m afraid to say. For example, in my first week here I saw another new user arrive and make a post in one of the ask communities asking if there is a gen z space. And this person didn’t get an answer to their question but instead got a bunch of angry sounding snarky snark from people going “who cares about labels? I just came here and made the effort of typing this comment to show you how little I care. Because that’s how cool I am.”

And I’ve been seeing it all the time, to be honest. People here seem to struggle with the concept of just scrolling past something that doesn’t interest them and they just have to stop by to tell anyone how stupid they think their interests are. And that’s in addition to new users feeling like they need to tiptoe around instance wars. And that’s after making the effort of trying to get started on a new, confusing (at first) platform.

So I’d love to see this place grow personally. But the longer I’m here, the more I have my doubts that it will happen. Honestly if another alternative popped up using the Bluesky protocol, I’d probably check it out in hopes that there’s more women around who allowed to exist and in hopes that the general populace is a little more friendly as far as people’s interests and likes and dislikes go.

What the left truly failed to do was present the real narrative

Yeah, also a view as an outsider, your Democrat party truly does fucking suck. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, AOC and maybe Pete Buttigieg (I’ve seen people talk about how good he is but I’ve never seen him make the same splash as these other two from all the way across the ocean here), the rest of them are all fucking animated corpses mimicking basic life signs.

I guess it’s easy for me to say from all the way over here “just vote for the lesser evil” but I don’t envy you guys because it often looks like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place in that regard too.

I think that you guys maybe need to get over your fear of introducing another party. There’s always this talk about how they’ll take votes away from the main two but then less than 50% of the population even bothers to vote in the first place. Maybe if there was something worth voting for, another political party led by people who are actually alive and have energy would attract that 50% non voting population.

These politicians just don’t want to work anymore. This generation is killing the politics industry with their sheer laziness and lack of work ethic. Something something Flintstones. Avocado toast.

Literally the opposite.

After the French Revolution, parliament was arranged so that the people who supported democracy and freedom literally sat on the left hand side; and all of the freeloading, self serving, bootlicking monarchists that wanted to return to rule by a king or queen sat on the right hand side.

Far right are that but more extreme. They don’t just lick boots but also the assholes of the politicians and billionaires that they worship like gods.

Yeah, to me personally as a non-American, it looks a lot like issues like Palestine were just the excuse for certain fence sitters to support who they really wanted to support but with justifications and less guilt. In fact, Trump even suggested nuking Palestine in the months leading up to the election and I barely heard a peep about it from the Palestine crowd because they were too busy trying to convince everyone to not vote Democrat.

I think that the main reason Trump won is because his opponent was a woman who also has brown skin. Anything else is just scrambling for excuses and justifications so that they don’t have to look in the mirror and be ashamed of what they see. Because anyone that actually has at least half a brain could see from a mile away that one side was bad but the other side was much, much worse.

Oof. There goes that theory then lol. And yeah, I did originally get the impression based on my first couple of proper interactions here that it was an older crowd. Although honestly, it’s extremely hard to tell over text based communication. I think that often on these anonymous platforms, users just sort of assume that the person they’re speaking to is in a similar demographic to them. Because you can’t really detect age through a sentence or paragraph unless the person specifically brings up MS-DOS days or something. Our brains do a lot of filling in the gaps for us and that isn’t always reliable.

I’d actually be interested to see some sort of census or poll here that can reveal these things. Although I half expect that a lot of users here would be like “Don’t do the poll! They’re trying to track you and harvest your data for evil! - sent from my iPhone”.

What made me leave Facebook was discovering Reddit. What made me leave Reddit was getting banned lol. What made me leave Twitter (or never actually ever bother much with it) is that it seems more like a big popularity contest than ‘social’ platform to me. Besides, if it was really social, there wouldn’t be a character limit that benefits marketing speak and hashtags more than constructive conversation.

Never saw the point of places like Instagram that are based on being able to upload photos. Big deal, you can upload photos anywhere. And the only time I use YouTube is when I’m in the mood for music videos. I have less than zero interest in watching people’s crappy home videos, it’s like reality TV but even more boring and brain rotting. And I’ve got better things to spend my time watching. Oh, and I tried TikTok but noped out very quickly. I see absolutely no value in being spoonfed content by some shady algorithm as opposed to choosing and curating your own content.

Personally, I do not care if the platform that I’m on uses my data to advertise to me. I fell in with the ‘privacy’ crowd like a decade ago and did my time shaking my fists at big brother but I just don’t care anymore. None of this is new. As long as the people on the platform are the kind of people that I could get along with, I’m fine. And quite capable of using an ad blocker if I so desire. I couldn’t care less if Reddit used my posts in the Xena or She-Ra subreddits to advertise romance fantasy novels to me. There’s more important things to focus on.

Omg, I can just imagine and I’m glad that I wasn’t here. Probably wouldn’t have been able to keep my mouth shut and would probably be banned from a bunch of places by now. Especially world communities, I get the impression those moderators would’ve been very busy making sure no men’s feelings were hurt.

It makes me think that there’s a lot more teens and early 20 somethings on this platform than I thought. Because on Reddit, the majority of the “man or bear” stuff that I saw was through screenshots in feminist subs. And I got the impression that the people who were freaking out the most about it were teenagers and grown men that can’t think for themselves who treat the words of people like Rogan as gospel. And I don’t see too many Rogan fans around here.

Honestly, now that I think about it, that would make sense and explain a couple of little annoyances I’ve had here on this platform.

Also Redditors: “Hmmm I wonder why no women’s spaces are thriving on Lemmy.”

I like the sentiment of this post but let’s not forget that the buff, cool fedi users also seemingly downvoted women-oriented communities out of existence here. Not even WitchesvsPatriarchy survived. And let’s not forget that the reason downvotes are disabled on Blåhaj is because the buff, cool fedi users just couldn’t help themselves with downvote brigading there too.

I’m saying this as a simple user that just wants a platform to exist on, I don’t think most people give a shit who owns or is running the platform as long as it seems like a place where they’ll have a good time. Users make the platform, not anything else. So when people are shopping around for their next social media space, they’re looking more at what the users are posting and doing than the infrastructure or CEO.

To this day I haven’t tried Discord beyond a single conversation I was having with someone I met on Reddit at one point. But maybe women feel more at home there and maybe there’s more cool stuff for random users to look at there right now. And it’s probably just that simple.

Technical specifications aren’t going to be winning more users. Content is.

Oh yeah it’s definitely TV. But this was before the days of Netflix and shit and before I had uncapped wifi. I don’t watch standard TV anymore either and when I do see it, same reaction as you. It’s probably a bit different from country to country but I think standard TV is mostly geared towards older people now too because most under 40 have unplugged by now.

Even if this person is a troll, setting up all of these communities and making multiple posts all across the place to audience of none is pretty fucking sad. I mean, look at this:

This person actually spent time typing all of this as if they’re speaking to all of their close friends. And two days later there it still is with the one default upvote and no comments.

In fact, this is making me literally sad for this person now. They probably need professional help.

To this day, I will never ever ever touch any Mazda products. All thanks to their dumb fucking zoom zoom advertising campaign about 20 years ago that involved their adverts playing twice during every ad break. Plus they were sponsoring shit, so it was everywhere. I feel like I still have PTSD from it. Fuck Mazda.