For myself, Lemmy (for now) is as good as it gets because no matter where you go you’ll always get people who disagree with you, but at least here it’s usually not structured, and not done to serve some third-party narrative (though we did see some of that this weekend). I take the trouble to adjust my comments to be suitable for the community I’m in, but beyond that mostly I either leave toxic threads or if it’s bad, stay offline.

It’s a fact that in online spaces, you will encounter censorship of some sort, but in the Fediverse at least you can absolutely minimize that and still express yourself freely, I think. YMMV, of course. But please note that when I speak for myself, as I have been with you, self-awareness does not equal self-censorship, and obeying the rules as posted is the trade I make for being in a tolerable online space. When it doesn’t work out that way, I leave and find somewhere else, and I recommend the same strategy to you.

any place that’s apparently truly uncensored is slandered as just being where Nazis hang out

Lol, too true. Remember Voat? It really was a Nazi space, among other things. But that’s the paradox of tolerance at work: any decent place is going to have some modicum of moderation (or, as some consider it, censorship), or you end up with Voat, where it really was just a cesspit.

So to me it’s not a matter of avoiding all moderation, it’s a matter of picking the instance that matches your own needs and preferences, and then – above all else – taking the time and trouble to curate your own feed, blocking communities and users that don’t suit. To me, to take your example, I don’t mind learning about other worldviews, so the Marxist/communist/anarchist doesn’t bother me at all, but if they did I’d block them.

It does take work and some maintenance, but it’s very doable, I think.

Understand that this is not happening in a vacuum and that attempts to convert your democracy into authoritarianism are coming for you too; in the UK it’s the Reform party, and they’re using the same old tired canard of demon immigrants to gain power. Keeping authoritarianism and fascism out of your own country, wherever it may be, helps us all.

By yourself you can’t change the world (yet), but you CAN immunize yourself and prepare yourself, so that when your turn comes (may it never, but here we are) you can readily act in your own community.

First, educate yourself: get your news from multiple sources, preferably from multiple continents, so that no one voice or group of voices can manipulate your worldview. Be an armchair expert on British history basics so that you know the bullshit when you see it online. Familiarize yourself with your own constitutional rights and how they are codified, so that you know when they are in danger.

Especially, be aware that corporate-owned, centralized social media is artificially manipulated, and instead of thinking you can’t be drawn in, be aware of the power of even seeing a headline that is worded a certain way to shape how you mentally frame a subject, for example. It’s subtle but it’s real. So tread carefully, or limit your time altogether.

Understand also that over time, social media teaches us how to self-censor and encourages us to value the opinions of others as highly as our own, giving oversized power to group pushback, when in fact it’s all just an artificial space where nothing is real and our natural instincts get very blunted over time, making us ever more intellectually malleable by tiny increments. By way of strong contrast, there is an absolute amount of power inherent in speaking your own truth, uncensored, full of the passion you feel about your subject: stick to online spaces that foster this, and limit your time to whatever lets you feel healthy and whole and still participate.

Secondly, get to know your own community in person, as much as you can. Is there already some kind of protest or direct action going on near you, like an effort to clean up a local waterway or stop an unwanted corporate building project? That’s a great place to get to know people. Even just doing little things like this you learn that just showing up has so much power. Just showing up. You don’t have to save the world. You can just be one person among many, and getting to know your local neighbors and community is the way to do it.

And that’s it. That’s how you start. Educating yourself (and protecting your mind), and getting to know your own community. That is all that Minneapolis has done, but look at how well they are resisting intense provocation and bringing world censure to the wrong that is happening to their town. That’s community working together, just doing what they can do.

You’re doing both of these things, educating yourself and getting to know your neighbors, because change does not come from “speaking truth to power” or strongly worded letters; it comes from simply knowing your neighbors, and amassing with them in large groups when the time comes. If more is ever necessary, then from that place of mutual agreement the best path for that time and that place is formed, but even that all starts with knowing your neighbors and knowing a basic level of truth about whatever you’re facing. It is far, far easier to do this if you’ve already done it before, and it helps when you already know from personal relationships that what you hate for your neighborhood, your neighbors hate too.

Your power comes from being one of many. You have something you can say or do that, in combination with many others, absolutely can make it incredibly difficult for evil to win.

That’s what you’re seeing in Minnesota, and why you’re drawn to help. Ignore the people who would tell you that none of what I just wrote matters, and look instead at Minneapolis: what you’re seeing is exactly this. They learned from the George Floyd protests, got to know their neighbors, and are relying on personal networks to do everything they are doing. The media isn’t talking much about it but ICE has been having to go farther and farther into the rural areas because neighborhood networks, made of people just like you, are making it insanely difficult to get to anyone anymore, and meanwhile relentlessly documenting all their excesses. That’s what’s winning this war: just regular people, like you, like me, doing whatever little tiny thing we each can do.

Also, thank you for your kind and supportive words. Here in the US we are relentlessly firehosed with propaganda from every direction, and to stand against this horrible thing can feel very isolating and alone. When we protest, it is consistently either undercounted or ignored altogether by mainstream media. So hearing you say that you are standing with us in spirit is very heartening, and I know that you’ve protested our insane president before, in many ways and at multiple times: it really means a lot.

Apologies for the wall of text, and thank you again for caring enough to ask the question. Hope it helps.

That’s extraordinarily insulting to Canada: our neighbor to the north does not rely on the US in any way for its sovereignty. If anything, it’s the other way around (looking at you, 1812).

The feds are trying. Minneapolis isn’t taking the bait.

Walz is refusing to hand over Minnesota voter lists, among other things.

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I have used both tankie and vatnik (ватник?) directly and unironically, both face-to-face and online.

There is a quote by Arthur Ashe that I refer to often because in the face of overwhelming personal adversity it keeps my head on the right track, and I think it may help you as well:

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

I don’t reply to your content often, but every time I see your handle pop up I wish you well, just because I am unfortunately so personally familiar with the trauma-creating circumstances you’re dealing with. I wish you could see you as I see you: someone with something so completely different from their banal, cruel family of origin that they have no knowledge of what a truly gifted person they are just to be able to survive and even see past that shit. Good luck to you, and I mean that.

Maybe, but speaking for myself, my revulsion to the way they are currently trying to use AI is nothing short of visceral. No headline has a chance. It is such an intrusion to personal privacy, and toward incredibly bad ends all around, that I don’t give a shit what they say at all.

To get past that, they’d have to stop trying to data farm everything that crosses someone’s monitor, stop using AI to support and further large-scale national operations like genocide, and not use every word that anyone’s ever written that they can get their hands on to train their LLMs. Oh, and something more than a “You’re overreacting!” when it is pointed out that AI output is not at all neutral, but shaped to deliver their own chosen narratives, which its devotees tend to accept without question. They could even – and I know this is a novel concept – pay authors and artists for all the work they used without consent and without compensation.

It’ll never happen. And I will never not hate AI, for all of these reasons and more (like how they took my fucking em-dash and made it unnatural, so now I’m taking it back).

TL;DR: I hate AI so much and so deeply it’s automatic, there’s literally nothing they can say I would care about, and the more they try the more repulsed I am. Fuck 'em all.

What is this “we all” and “we’ve” shit? Your tapeworms have become sentient.

In the meantime, ICE is insecurity and frailty wreathed in weapons. They need to know just how very fucking much we hate them, not just corporately but individually. Each one of them.

Our guy here (“our” being American, as opposed to the “we” of you + your tapeworms) is doing his share. He saw something he could do, and he’s doing it. He’s showing up.

By way of contrast, you’re just mocking his effort because that’s all you have, and you have made it clear in other posts as well as your instance you’re not even doing it from the same hemisphere.

That, and our guy with the flag isn’t wrong. Inequality is exactly where all this began.

But back to you, your own favorite subject. You have such a problem with this one person doing his part that you actually have to mock it twice, but as far as I can see he’s doing far more for the common good than you.

Turns out that a lot of little efforts are adding up to great things, like getting the National guard kicked out of LA and Chicago and Portland, but you’re not interested in that.

Going by your other posts you just want to see other people fight, like all the Trump voters I know. They love that shit. I’m certain they’d love that for you too if they only knew.

So off to some other safe space with you, like Truth Social, lest another guy showing up for his community and country in his own individual way offend your politically delicate tapeworms to the point of mockery again.

No, you’re right. It’s a problem. Someone in another thread said, “Hey, I’m considering moving to Linux from Windows, what do you think of these distros?” and got downvoted to hell just for asking, because apparently one of the distros they mentioned is disliked by others.

It’s a problem, generated by some of the exact same people who loudly wonder why more people aren’t on Linux without ever considering how having their own noob question thrown back in their own face by someone who has made their OS their identity would turn them wayyyyy the fuck off Linux as well.

For myself I will always be grateful for the many others who have generously and graciously answered my stupid Linux noob questions.

Yep, same here. Mojave on an old MacBook with a complete CS5 suite lets me continue to use what I paid for.

I didn’t have a still-running copy like you did, so instead I disabled all network access and used my existing install media/licensing to activate offline, then before restoring network I went through and blocked every single executable at the firewall, esp anything having to do with updates or the licensing module. Now it doesn’t matter whether there is internet access or not, everything is stable and it doesn’t phone home.

The blocking was a pain in the ass, no lie, but I can restore the firewall settings from time machine if ever needed, and meanwhile I have a working, unshittified CS5 that is not constantly trying to move my data up to the cloud or give itself legal rights to my IP. It’s lacking some newer features probably, but it does what I need.

I’m going to pass your instructions along to a friend still using CS5 on the same Mac he installed it on, though. It’s a great strategy.

South Carolina has entered the chat

You can use the yt-dlp executable in the Youtube-DLG GUI interface. The interface is fine, the only thing wrong with it was that the executable behind it couldn’t keep up with YT fuckery. They may have fixed it since then, but once I started manually updating it with yt-dlp I never stopped, so I don’t even know anymore. And I’m sure there are better alternatives, I just got used to using this one.

So if you want the GUI front end, it’s profoundly easy. Download Youtube-DLG, rename yt-dlp.exe to youtube-dl.exe, and then put it into the appropriate folder (%appdata%/youtube-dl/ on Windows). Overwrite or just delete the existing youtube-dl.exe because it doesn’t work anyway.

If you are installing Youtube-DLG for the first time you may have to manually install ffmpeg as well, if memory serves.

The sole drawback is that, for obvious reasons, updates are now manual. Every so often YT breaks it again and I just go download yt-dlp again, rename it, and put the new one in the Youtube-DLG folder. Job done.

I don’t doubt you, but where are you getting that figure?

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I’d give to find an instance where votes are already public.

EDITED TO ADD: I mean, not hidden by the interface. I am already aware that federated votes are accessible via lemvotes.org.

Trust Lemmy to answer the question I very specifically did not ask and to provide an answer that is essentially a regurge of the OP, lol.

EDITED TO ADD: but I found the answer I was looking for anyway, so there is that.

Are there any instances where votes are public? In other words, where it shows on the post or comment who up/down voted? I know there are some, or were, but I don’t know the current status.