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?

Things like North Korean parents feeding their children mud, or Kim Jong-un personally executing an orchestra conductor in front of a crowd.

North Korea is not a complete black box. Americans are banned from the country, but most Europeans can visit on guided tours.

Millions of North Koreans work abroad in China. If anyone actually wanted to know what life was like in North Korea, you could just ask them. But no-one with the money to hire a translator and head to Beijing is really interested in the very boring truth; that North Korea is a poor, imperfect country where the vast majority of people live normal lives.

The documentary “Loyal Citizens of Pyeongyang in Seoul” has a few interviews with North Korean citizens who went to the South for better economic opportunities before having their passports seized and prevented from going home to the North.

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).

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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.

This isn’t possible, but it’s an interesting feature suggestion

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).

Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.

This is my read on the situation, but my view is different - if BeeHaw want to have what is functionally just a private Reddit-like forum, let them. But we should stop acting like BeeHaw is a part of the Fediverse with the same goals as Lemmy-at-large.

Of course, lemmygrad.ml is my home instance and I’m pretty sure BeeHaw has never federated with us so I’m not really missing anything.

Most of the complaints seem to come from people who assumed BeeHaw was just like any other Lemmy instance and have sort of made it, or a community on it, their home; or tried to join and almost bounced off Lemmy because they assumed BeeHaw was just what Lemmy was like.

I think the best move going forward would be to either de-list BeeHaw from Lemmy directories or make sure it is properly signposted what kind of server it is. I think this will all naturally become less of an issue once big, generic instances like Lemmy.world blow up and become the defaults, and traffic to BeeHaw slows down.

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.

No no no… it’s video games’ fault that people are mad about the government shooting a kid. Without video games, we would calmly accept it.

Agreed. Working Class people must vote for a Working Class party. A party that tells everyone from the Professional/Managerial Class to Small Business Owners to the super-rich: fuck off, we don’t want your votes and we don’t want your money.

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)

I have a hard time believing stats like these ever since I learned about “ghost jobs”.

A full 2/3rds of jobs posted to hiring boards are “ghost jobs”, i.e. postings where the employer does not actually intend to ever hire an applicant.

Why do they do this? To appease overworked employees in understaffed departments. They can say “We’re looking for someone, but no-one wants to work these days!”, when the reality is they’re keeping the department short-staffed to maximize profits.

This happens in the department where I work. My direct supervisor would always complain that HR “wasn’t really looking” for people to fill vacancies and the only way I, and everyone else, in the department got hired is because she recruited us manually.

The issue is if these lists end up being blindly copied based on trust, and instances that don’t deserve to be banned end up being banned by dozens of instances just because they’re copying lists.

Something similar happened with Twitter banlists. A lot of the accounts were trolls and fascists and whatnot, but oftentimes someone with progressive views who is just a little controversial ends up on a banlist and banned by half of Twitter because one guy decided to stick him on a widely used banlist.

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.