Yeah, probably. The other side of “this is so badly needed why haven’t you done it for us” is “if this is so badly needed why haven’t any of the server admins or mods implemented it yet.”

I feel like this is an example of how the core dev team running on an instance that basically just has 3 of the admins do more or less all the moderation for the entire site is not ideal. This type of feature is probably one of the most-requested pain points for most people who run most servers, but my guess is that it’s basically completely invisible to the .ml team why it would even be needed, because their model works fine for them, so why would they.

Of course they’ve got a right to work or not work on whatever they want, but if their goal is success and good moderation for most servers this type of scalability and teamwork enabling thing is super important.

Google bought Waze, so at this point you’re probably not making any Israeli spies money if you make use of it. On the other hand, you’re making Google money, which is almost as bad.

No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.

• Librewolf is also quite a good browser
• Piefed seems like it’s shaping up to be better than Lemmy in a few different ways and it’s compatible with all the Lemmy people

Agreed. I have such a distrust at this point of any media that fits a particular format and style, and that whole instance checked a bunch of the boxes.

Like, as far as I know, “Drop Site News” and “In These Times” have not done a thing wrong, and still every time I see them I instantly think “What the fuck! Are you guys Russian? What are you up to?”

The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.

I 100% agree with this. I was actually confused for a long time by how people on Lemmy.ml are so universal about using the same types of bad thought patterns and arguments… they came across as genuine, individual people, not like some of the propaganda accounts that all employ the same lazy dishonest methods because they are literally just reading from the same handbook. But certain ways of looking at things and flaws in their critical thinking, all the .ml people just happen to share (or it happens to be really common for users there). It was really odd and I couldn’t understand it.

I have reached a tentative conclusion that maybe they just tend to be young or be really unfamiliar with reading critically or being rigorous about judging an argument… and that is why they are still comfortable on .ml. I think it is self-selecting. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t taken in by certain types of failed logic, because that is the logic that is enforced from above over there.

I’m still not 100% sure but it kind of seems to me like that is what is going on.

Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report.

Completely agree with this also. I don’t think deleting or blocking this stuff is the answer, because that will always be a temporary solution. I think vigorously pushing back on it is the answer for exactly the reason that you said.

Lies in public discourse isn’t anywhere near a new problem, and humans do have methods to deal with it. It just takes time and it takes a sensible community where some of the tools that can give traction to the truth can get some leverage.

So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.

Yeah. Even Trump voters, I don’t really think are “the enemy.” Self defense is fine, they can be deadly dangerous in the short run. But in the long run they are more than anything victims of that same powerful machine, and the way to save ourselves will be to save them from it, too, so we can all survive together.

But then where will I deploy my AI moderator?

Yeah. I’ve started to get suspicious of people who go out of their way to tell you that they are bold leftist media, and they’re bringing a needed perspective that is super-vital and not just all propaganda and lies like everything else is. It sort of reminds me of those bank billboards that say, “To us, you’re more than just a number.”

Update: It looks to me at least pretty likely that !altmedia@altmedia.house is also Russian propaganda. Maybe they just wanted to post this thing, and are short of any of the critical thinking skills that would let them evaluate my argument that MPN is Russian when I told them it was. Mostly they seem to be posting pro-Palestinian stuff from reliable sources. But, the sidebar is super sus to me.

Until January 2nd, 2025 the 'WorldNews` subreddit, with 40 million users automatically subscribed, had an ‘Israel at War’ livethread constantly at the top.

This community was founded to dissent from this forced perspective, and present the Palestinian and anti-establishment position in general.

Fine. I actually completely agree with this, I took a quick look at some of the pinned /r/worldnews threads about Israel’s wars and “wars” and they’re completely full of pro-Israel bullshit. My initial assumption is that the inherent corruptibility of the Reddit / Lemmy moderation model has rendered /r/worldnews subject to propaganda from Israel, but who knows. But yes it’s some bullshit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1h3nk2e/rworldnews_live_thread_israel_at_war_thread_79/

It’s a little bit weird that they are pretending that anything on Lemmy needs to have this pro-Palestinian iconoclasty brought to bear, when everyone on Lemmy is pro-Palestinian anyway, but sure, whatever. Anyway, reading further:

This community is ‘AltMedia’ in the Mearsheimer and Walt sense. Not the Richard Spencer sense.

Not sure why those are the only two options…

And then below that is where it goes off the rails.

This community likes

John Mearsheimer

Good stuff if a little bit of an odd choice for the number 1.

Edward Said, Noam Chomsky

Great stuff

Chris Hedges

Well that’s an odd choice. All I really know about the guy is some email list that gets sent to me that has his name on it which occasionally says some very bizarre stuff. For example “The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil.” He apparently used to be an extremely bold anti-Iraq War voice back in those days, which is obviously fantastic, but since then…

Hedges began hosting the television show On Contact for the Russian-government owned network RT America in June 2016. Hedges, who has claimed not to have known much about the network at the time, was approached to make a show by RT America president Mikhail “Misha” Solodovnikov, who promised him complete editorial independence.[44][57]

On Contact provided commentary on social issues, often profiling nonfiction authors and their recently published works, with Hedges aiming to follow the approach of former public television shows. On Contact was nominated for an Emmy in 2017, RT America’s first significant award nomination, but the award was won by Steve.[44]

On March 3, 2022, RT America ceased operations following the widespread deplatforming of Russian-sponsored media caused by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[44] The run of On Contact ended.

Hedges supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election.[44]

On May 27, 2020, Hedges announced that he would run as a Green Party candidate in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district for the 2020 elections. After being informed the following day that running for office would conflict with FCC fairness doctrine rules because he was at that time hosting the nationally broadcast RT America television show On Contact, Hedges decided not to pursue office in order to keep hosting the show.[63][64]

Anyway. Back to the list:

Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson

I don’t recognize all that many of the names on their list. But, the ones that they “like” that I do recognize that are in any way active in the modern day, there is a very distinct through-line (pretty much universal) about how those people feel about the invasion of Ukraine.

Anyway, YSK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGSKrC7dGcY

What the fuck

TIL. I’m so confused by this concept.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/142zr10/what_does_critical_support_mean_in_leftist_spheres/

What level in school did these guys reach that this idea needs a special word for it? Like yes, of course you are allowed to support one action or portion of something but still be critical of the bad stuff, or of that thing as a whole. That’s… that’s how it works. If you’re not some kind of “YAAAAAY MY COUNTRY hooray forever” idiot, then that should be how you look at everything. You decide whether something that’s happening is good or bad, and then you express your support or not accordingly. This whole thing where it is relevant in any respect “which side” is doing the good or bad thing, in order for it to be good or bad or whether and how we need to talk about it, is some State Department bullshit that has no place in a normal person’s brain.

Do they imagine that there are a lot of people who go around uncritically supporting Ukraine / Democrats / NATO / whatever, just because they decided to like them? And that they need to distinguish that their support for their causes is the other kind? I kind of agree with the person who said that in practice it seems to boil down to “Fuck Putin, but Ukraine should just roll over and stop fighting” more often than not. I don’t really know, but that is the only way that to read this that makes sense to me, the on-the-surface reading seems just bizarre and pointless.

There are already .ml people in here, whataboutisming hard.

Any reasoning that is mainly centered around giving people specific labels, and then making sweeping generalizations about what everyone with that label does and why it’s therefore okay to hate anyone you have chosen to apply that label to because of things some other people have done, is almost always some bullshit.

Also, yes, it’s ironic that you’re posting this under their specific meme.

Some of the most authoritarian people I come into contact with on any kind of regular basis are “leftists” on Lemmy.

The ones in real life are not like that. I feel like Reddit’s moderation model really encourages it, and some of them started really taking it to heart when they came to Lemmy which copied that same model.

My money’s on wooosh but it could be either one tbh.

Kek

See my other comment; I think the same user contingent that likes VPNs tends to also want maximum convenience, which isn’t Tor. Of course they frame convenience as the only relevant factor, instead of acknowledging that being the tradeoff they’re making.

I haven’t really played around with VPNs to make the comparison. Tor breaks for a significant number of sites, but it’s still a pretty small minority; “only works for a small number of sites” is a comical untruth.

If Tor breaks more sites than VPNs do (which I think is likely), I think it is because Tor is secure. It is easier to do malicious things behind Tor because you have, for all intents and purposes, an unbreakable shield of privacy while you are doing those malicious things. And so, site operators tend to block it more readily than they do VPNs.

Whether you want to make the tradeoff in favor of convenience or genuine privacy is, of course, up to you. It’s not surprising to me that the Lemmy userbase is more or less unanimous in favor of convenience. Of course it is fine if you want, but you don’t need to misrepresent how things are to make it the only possible choice.

Tor Browser