Literally the entire point of my comment is “we don’t know”. Don’t put words in other people’s mouths, and understand that it’s bad form to attempt to make straw man arguments when you have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

The major flaw in your reasoning is that you’re assuming that there’s less pain on the other side. It could be better, but it could be much much worse, especially if you’re carrying the regret of unfinished business left behind.

You have a couple of decades worth of life left to deal with. You’ve got an eternity to be dead, and it could suck worse. Plus, if you’re a Buddhist or Hindu you’re probably gonna have to go through it all again. Might as well see this ride through to the end of the line.

O my sweet summer child… dictatorships don’t have expiration dates. This will not end with an election. It will end with a revolution.

Sounds like Rocky Raccoon moved to Ohio…

If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have posted this comic.

Don’t fuck with the professional skeptics, kid. There is no limit to raw existential skepticism. All of your intentions are suspect…

Or are they? And what is suspected?

And am I talking to you or the audience? Why would I be talking to you when I don’t even know if you’re a real person or a bot? Is the audience listening? Am I listening? Am I real person? I think, therefore I am, but what happens when I’m not thinking?

The why (ICE) is pretty clear. I was really more interested in where - how widespread is this?

Because honestly, the silence is chilling. It feels like the day is being smothered in this blanket of lukewarm fear.

Salute from the old skool! And oh my brother, does the internet archive have a treat for you…

There’s also an astroturfing campaign against it as well over there - I’ve noticed a lot of bot comments and bullshit when I post links to here from there.

Shit, you triggered my reddit PTSD. I’m having flashbacks…

Lemmy the software’s reputation has become conflated with the reputation of lemmy.ml, which promotes an authoritarian center-left viewpoint that regularly denies documented genocides. This is unpalatable to many end-users.

As such, unless the two are separated clearly and lemmy the organization disavows its involvement lemmy.ml, the overall reputation of the software will degrade, resulting in less use, less money for the developers, and the eventual collapse of the lemmy infrastructure.

Voat is an example of a great software package that became completely tainted by the (developer moderated) site to the point where you can’t mention it in polite discourse any more. Not exactly the same circumstance, and in that case it was taken over by right-wing racists, but the dynamics are very similar.

Your reading is correct, and in my experience, it makes both the mods and devs happier when their roles are entirely separated. It insulates the dev team from getting distracted and having their time consumed by the social dynamics of site drama, and it keeps the mod team from getting bogged down in technical issues, allowing them to focus on the audience, not the technology.

lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.

In general, it’s considered bad practice to use a live site for testing dev updates, but I can see the value in having this available in this case. However, if they want to use a live site as a test bed for new features using a large audience, then they should ensure their moderation team doesn’t allow the reputation of the instance to become what lemmy.ml’s has. The fact of the matter is that it’s become toxic branding to the overall Lemmy effort, and is actively undermining the dev team’s efforts by impacting them financially.

The only way I can see to do this is at this point is by ceding their involvement in lemmy.ml to another team and rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement.

So all the discourse around lemmy.ml has made it clear to me that Lemmy’s primary org has fallen prey to a key problem I’ve experienced running multiple social media sites and seen in my professional life as well.

And it boils down to this:

The tech guys are trying to be moderators. These are two entirely separate jobs that need completely different types of people to successfully execute the role.

Tech folk are brilliant in their subject, but often terrible at understanding people, social dynamics, and the limits of acceptable discourse. Their profession requires them to spend enormous amounts of time alone, which limits their real world experience, often to a crippling degree.

Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL. They understand the multiple layers of subcontext that can be derived from an innocent sounding statement, and they have an innate sense of social dynamics and what is of interest to their audience. They also know how to speak to their audience and promote good content.

Most importantly, they understand that they are the gatekeepers of the publication’s reputation, and safeguard it by being as impartial and fair as possible… a lesson the moderators of lemmy.ml have clearly failed to learn.

The only way to solve this dilemma in Lemmy.org’s case is this:

1. Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev

2. Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team - the fact that the instance is run by members of the dev team taints the reputation of the entire project and infrastructure. I do believe in free speech, but in this case, the reputational damage lemmy.ml has caused to the financial state of the dev team is too great to ignore.

3. Lemmy.org needs to clearly state this delineation and prevent the official dev team from running instances officially attached to lemmy.org.

If this doesn’t happen, I think that donations will continue to decrease until the project starves. There is great value in what the dev team has done, but unless they abandon lemmy.ml and focus entirely on development, I think this project will fail financially unless another dev team with a better rep takes their place.

At first I was like:

…then I saw this:

And began to realize that things were about to get bad…

I didn’t realize the drama, the pathos:

The good times:

…and the bad:

After much contemplation, I realized there was only one meme I could post in defense:

Either that or you need to stop drinking gasoline…

Haven’t done it myself yet, but here’s the docker install guide… seeing what your username is and all…