@Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com This highlights the problem with using relative terms like ‘left’ and ‘center’ and ‘far’. They’re subjective, and in my opinion, shouldn’t be used.

I don’t know what country or society you’re in. “Left” can often mean anything from centrist liberalism (Democrat Party) to nothing less than socialism (socialists often consider liberalism to be in the center). Then you get literal Fascists (as in, Mussolini and Mosley types, unlike Nazi fascists) who throw a stone in the whole thing: their heritage comes from both the traditional left (namely syndicalism) and the right (ultranationalism), and don’t neatly fit into progressive or regressive (BUF notably gained many women supporters for their pro-suffrage policies, progressive at the time).

One can avoid arguments like in the OP just by learning the proper terms for political views and ideologies. Are you a progressive liberalist? Are you a social democrat? Are you a democratic socialist? (yes unfortunately those two get confusing)

For more information about the political compass and examples of why it’s not a useful tool, I recommend this video.

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Well, you’ll be glad to learn there is no 4chan in that image at all, unlike almost every single post on /c/greentext.

On one hand, I initially thought it was odd and insincere to contrast (what I assume is) state-made propaganda with commercial ads. In my state, the state-funded media channels are infamous for being far more progressive than commercial channels. The state-made stuff has an official authority to it.

But on the other hand, commercial ads are far more pervasive than state-made propaganda in my society. State-made stuff are basically just announcements, with occasional social campaigns about drink-driving, smoking and domestic violence, or maybe the military giving STEM ads aimed at women. The state channels can barely compete with ads and capital news, so perhaps it is fair to treat them as the primary face of media under capitalism.

It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

Agreed. To say ‘we are revisionists because we revise’ is ultimately a semantic gotcha which ignores the history and context of an established term. Of course we revise, how else would we add all these other names onto “Marxism-” in the first place!

For me “left” is just a relative term

Not just for you, it literally is a relative term. It means nothing without context.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

wow the /c/greentext community has posts that remind you of 4chan

:0

The reputational damage is a good point, its extent is kind of lost on me as I’m not very involved in the wiki circles but obviously this is gonna hurt it and isn’t easy to scrub off as the vandal banned ProleWiki users like you, Forte and OP, doing so as a supposed authority of Leftypedia.

Since Aussig and Parabola are banned, I doubt Leftypedia would stand up again.

Aussig, apart from whatever they did on the discord, was pretty irrelevant to the actual wiki. Account created April 30, made a dozen edits, then for whatever reason RedParabola promoted them. I don’t know if they’re a sockpuppet, or friends or negotiated something on discord, whatever, but they’re a “literally who?” before today.

As for Parabola, they made a bunch of contributions but the wiki won’t be much different without them, just a bit slower. It’s not like they were critical to the site. Like you and that admin said, probably Wisconcom anyway.

In my month staying in there, it is a gold mine of bullshit

I believe that. An archivism project I was in a while back was victim to petty discord drama causing two different coups and ending up getting the whole thing nuked. I can’t help but see it as a drama site for any project-based chat, attracting people who just want to climb to the top and become lords of tiny fiefs.

For what its worth, the leftypedia staff have just removed the discord server from their site, as being “no longer affiliated with Leftypedia users”. I’m not sure what to make of that since I stay away from discord like plague.

Looks like the site staff have banned Aussig and made an update post: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub

edit: And disavowed the Discord server.

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

>do community service

>get sentenced to community service

Great system.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

For me, it was the palmy beach.

And I’ll have you know that I’m still under 30 and do regular back extension exercises!

Relevant: the Black Peoples Union position on the referendum (interview on ABC).

An aggregation of written statements collected from socialist, anarchist and radical Indigenous groups, showing the diversity of thought on the matter: http://old.reddit.com/r/AustralianSocialism/comments/161r8r1/megathread_of_leftist_statements_on_the_voice/

(PS: don’t just take all the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ summaries in that list at face value, a couple of them are misinterpretations or oversimplications)