And when it became clear that there were no nuclear weapons, it became a dishonest equivocation about weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, there was also loads of dishonest communication about Iraq’s coordination with terrorist groups.

The prison escape in the first Deus Ex, when you learn where you really are. I guess for some people this was easy to figure out beforehand, but when I first played it at age 15 it was a shock to me.

And it uses Chromium.

If you absolutely have to use a Chromium project, then Vivaldi is the one, but at the end of the day it is still unfortunately Chromium.

They got sold to a Chinese firm and it appears that much of the core development team abandoned the project and restarted under the name Vivaldi.

I also think the website is exceptionally good, and has a unique distinction of being equally good on desktop and mobile. Feel that the website is so good on mobile that I don’t need to use a mobile app, and I sure as heck can’t say that about Reddit.

Right, and to some people of a certain temperament, being aware of, and concerned about a vast range of entirely different issues, all of which can be engaged with on a number of levels that build on your knowledge and understanding, all of that is just an “echo chamber”.

The echo chamber argument doesn’t account for the fact that people can have shared fundamental values and nevertheless have constructive valuable informative conversations that engage in nuanced analysis. Being concerned about climate change, for instance, you can have all kinds of productive conversations about new research showing how hot September was, or how to make cities more walkable, or any number of things, and those are valuable conversations where describing them as echo chambers is silly. They’re actually good conversations where we gain something from having them. If your primary test of a community is whether it does or doesn’t have echo chambers, it doesn’t have meaningful things to say about cases like this.

And to that commenter’s point I can’t tell which side you’re on, although “authoritarian dick sucking” seems to have prompted you to self-identify.

not sure why you are facepalming, I live in a neighboring country to Ukraine and a lot of people here according to polls think that Ukraine should just give up Crimea and accept peace.

That’s the frying pan saying “at least I’m not as bad as the fire!”

I agree with the other guy, you’re wording it in a way that is attributing all the agency to Ukraine and none to Russia. It probably would lead to much more needless death in the long run, because it sets the stage for additional aggression. Which of course would be staged from a much more consolidated position that would be much harder to roll back than if Ukraine just rolls it back now.

I was wondering what it might look like to get an r/nba started over here. Private message a bunch of users, repost some things, maybe get some volunteers to get weekly threads going?

I don’t think it’s possible, or desirable, to try to create rules around how people use their preference buttons.

I also don’t think it’s possible to actually end mean-spirited disagreement in internet comment sections, but it’s a valuable thing to strive for as a value and emphasize, like you did in this post.

I think the same can be said for group-downvoting and stalking threads to downvote people based on what side they take without engaging with the substance of what is said. Minority viewpoints that add information are probably the most needed thing, and if anything I would say group downvoting is worse here than reddit on certain topics, unfortunately.

I think the attention spans are better here, and many/most things are better here but this is a sore spot.

You have to take it up a level: triplethink.

Thank you for the time and effort you put into patiently explaining what is basically an embrace/extend/extinguish strategy by Google.

These kinds of convos are frustrating, because a one-browser monopoly over the web should be so obviously bad that you don’t need to explain it. But, the golden rule of the internet is that you will always find someone who wants to die on the most ridiculous hill, for no coherent reason.

I think I explained why I think you can call this successful without having similar numbers to reddit.

Widespread user adoption is important, but that is being achieved. I don’t think I agree that the specific criteria of “being more used than Reddit by FOSS enthusiasts” is a make or break criteria that decides whether this is a success.

I think Lemmy is functional, usable on its own terms, and aside from not quite doing enough to ban trolls it’s valuable in its present form.

I would distinguish it from, say, diaspora, which I don’t believe has reached a critical mass of users and frankly just isn’t designed well enough to really get off the ground.

I was wondering what the point of lemmy was

What was great in the early days of Mastodon is that, for those who could remember, it recaptured the feel of the “early” internet. You could feel distinct and interesting voices, patience and willingness to get into deepdives, where the payoff was from one to one interactions with personalities deeply interested in interaction itself and passion projects.

That made it have a value in and of itself that didn’t depend on competing platforms.

That said, you can feel echoes of typical internet culture all throughout the fediverse now. I don’ think you should measure success or failure on replacing reddit, but its great to have a place ready and waiting to absorb communities that become (say) disenchanted with bad mods.

So the model for replacements I think would be looking at how facebook replaced myspace, and how reddit replaced digg. In both cases, there was widespread user disenchantment at substandard designs and redesigns that disregarded interests of users. I think that kind of catastrophic incompetence and disregard for users was unique to a particular era, and there probably have emerged some industry standards and best practices to stop that from happening in our current internet, for better or for worse.

I think with reddits redesign, it has become increasingly frustrating to the user base, and there is a prospect that user disenchantment with reddit could lead to something, but I think its a long shot. The important thing to remember about reddit is that they caught a wave of exponential growth by not fucking things up, and staying more or less consistent with their product.

I think the best thing Lemmy can do is be consistent and keep doing what it is doing, and not try and reinvent itself. I actually think the website’s functionality on mobile is truly fantastic, the best I’ve experienced from using a website in place of a dedicated app, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I think so much of Lemmy is right in its current for, and 99% of the issue with fediverse products is that the ui/design is being terrible, and it took Mastodon to kind of teach people that it mattered. So yeah, I think the main thing is to not mess with success.

Maybe propublica? I think there are areas of gray and there are areas that are clear, and we can respect the former and take action on the latter without putting on joker makeup and descending into sophomoric relativism about the fundamental impossibility of ever knowing “the truth.”