Yes. I vote for a preemptive defederation lol.

I’ve seen their brigading on lemmy communities before. They will also serial downvote anything they don’t like.

Personally, I would vote to defederate from both Hexbear and lemmygrad. Kbin is nice because it feels like the majority of people are posting, commenting, and overall discussing in good faith. It’s a nice culture. Neither of those two instances fit with it.

Right? I never quite understood who it was actually for, either. I mean, notepad makes sense, but wordpad just seemed like a worse version of MS Word.

I guess it could have been for those who needed something more sophisticated than notepad but didn’t want to spend money to get Word?

Idk, that’s the only reason I can think of right now lol.

Here is an example from today:

Artemis.camp: https://artemis.camp/m/Neoliberal@kbin.social/t/50419/Donald-Trump-Says-He-Would-Prefer-Being-Abroad-Than-in
At the time of writing: 11 upvotes, 2 comments, 6 boosts

Kbin.social: https://kbin.social/m/Neoliberal/t/325935/Donald-Trump-Says-He-Would-Prefer-Being-Abroad-Than-in
At the time of writing: 35 upvotes, 9 comments, 6 boosts

Lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/2975647
At the time of writing: 36 upvotes, 9 comments

Yeah, same. It’s uncomfortable seeing that type of stuff pop up in the feed.

I am sure he will get to it, but for the moment my solution has just been to block the users when I see them, their community/magazine and sometimes the domain.

Well, keep fighting the good fight then! Tankies are gonna tank lol.

Their rhetoric is absolutely exhausting. I gave up years ago and decided I was gonna focus on the topics and issues that could actually generate productive conversations. Their arguments just go in circles and its like talking to a brick wall lol

I am not sure you can from Lemmy, but you can from kbin. You would have to search @username@mastodon.social, and the user should come up.

I don't know if this capability has been added to the Artemis app yet for kbin - it's still in beta.

Seriously - the kid lost his hand, and they’re fined just over a grand?

I’m pretty sure some smart phones cost more than that. This might as well be pennies to the owner.

Checks out. The most stressful part of my cat's day is deciding which of her favorite spots is the most comfortable place to sit lol.

It's a tough life, being a house cat.

I would recommend blocking the OP - I don’t think they are going to argue in good faith. It doesn’t matter what facts we present because they will only believe theirs to be correct, and claim ours to be fabricated by the all-knowing, all-powerful, and simultaneously weak CIA/US.

First off, this app is awesome!

Second, is artemis.camp going to be a permanent instance for /kbin, or is it only for the duration of the beta? I ask because I have actually taken a liking to it! If it remains a default instance for Artemis, I can really see it becoming one of the dominant instances for /kbin.

While I think plenty of people have been standing up to him, it’s good to see someone like Jack Smith put a name to what Trump has been doing.

Trump’s strategy is to conflate the legal battles and the political battles, all the while having them reinforce each other. I wonder what a gag order would do to this strategy?

I feel like on average their conversation quality is higher than the other alternatives. However, as you said, it is not very diverse.

Tildes also feels very “primp & proper” so to speak. While the conversations are generally very civil and of good quality, I also feel like the place is ruled with an iron fist; step a little bit out of line, and you’re pretty much gone. This is then coupled with the fact that you’re not able to make custom communities.

In the end, its good for civil discussion within the bounds of what is already considered acceptable by the admin. I almost feel like it has the opposite problem Reddit does - whereas conversations on Reddit are largely driven by bots and the hivemind, Tildes is controlled by Deimos and whoever Deimos approves of.

I sure hope not.

I am not sure about others, but I am not comfortable with ANY possibility of Trump winning back he White House. Any support for him is dangerous and reckless.

Supporting him is only going to fuel the conspiracy theories he endorsed & started. These lies have shaken the trust in US institutions, especially with his base. His first loss resulted in him lying and causing instability. They actually stormed the capitol! That did not even happen during the US Civil War! If he loses again it will be no different.

Furthermore, any continued support is legitimizing his claims that he is being “unfairly targeted” or that the left is engaging in a “witch hunt” against him. What will his supporters do if he is jailed? What happens if he wins from jail!? Will there be violence? Probably.

And if he actually wins the White House again, what will happen? Now there is an actual traitor to the nation in the White House! I would be shocked if that didn’t also cause violence and instability! The amount hopelessness that would cause would surely create instability and a serious lack of trust in the United States and its institutions.

TL DR: Any support for Trump is going to cause instability, violence, and a constitutional crisis! I understand the Democrats think they can beat him again - and hopefully they can - but I would sleep a little better knowing he was completely off the table.

Agreed. I am finding there are more magazines federating every day.

I have also noticed that pinned posts from mods are not always translating over from kbin.social to artemis.camp - if they end up federating, they are not always automatically at the top.

I think things will start to really come together once the full API is released and the full Artemis app is released on iOS and Android. If artemis.camp remains one of the default instances for the app, it could easily become one of the larger instances.

Interesting. I do not have a mastodon account, but I wonder if this is not why boosting a comment or post might accelerate federation? I have noticed that (some) of my own comments or posts do not show on other instances unless I boost them myself, which not something I prefer doing as upvoting/boosting my own post seems kinda weird...

Lol the Apollo theme is my go-to. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s close! RIP Apollo.

Same - although I feel like there might be some growing pains with artemis.camp. Federation seems to be slow? Idk, I don’t really know how a-lot of this stuff works.

But I love the “CAMP” next to all the usernames for anyone in the artemis.camp instance!

Just from quickly poking around, I think Boost only alters the comment order for kbin instances. Lemmy only seems affected by upvotes & downvotes. Lemmy also seems to give each post or comment an automatic upvote (or maybe that is just lemmy.world, idk), whereas kbin does not do this. I am also not sure if the automatic upvote transfers between kbin and Lemmy. This all being said, I could also just be completely wrong and misinterpreting things lol.

As a side-note, I can only seem to get my posts and comments to show if I boost my own post... I am not sure if that is just a kbin thing or something unique to my particular instance.

Darn - I was afraid this might be the case.

I was also wondering what happens if someone from a defederated instance upvotes/downvotes you or your post. Is that even possible?

I am still figuring out this fediverse stuff lol

I’ve not been to this tower, but the whole skyscraper-swaying thing totally weirded me out when I first learned about it. It all seemed so counterintuitive at first, but the fact these things are actually engineered to sway to withstand the wind loads on them is nothing short of remarkable.

Just think about it - the entire design, the architecture, the engineering, the columns, the floor plates, expansion joints (I presume), etc. are all designed to sway within a certain tolerance. These towers are so normal to see in our cities, but they really are hallmarks of human achievement.

It looks like it is possible on other instances? Beehaw apparently has a list of federated and defederated instances, but it also looks like it might be manually updated by their admins.

Does kbin have something similar?

TIL that 40.5% of the world’s rice comes from India. That’s a lot of rice that’s no longer going to be circulating in the global market.

Seems like this is also going to have the largest impact on Africa, who have also been impacted by the lack of grain exports from Ukraine since Russia invaded.

I feel like there should be a way to hold politicians like Tuberville in contempt. Not only is his cause complete bullshit, he is allowing domestic politics to get in the way of national security.

Of course, endangering national security seems to be a part of the republicans platform these days.

As someone who never really used Twitter, I find this to be kinda sad. Everything is shifting to video, and I hate it lol.

Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?

That being said, on the list of stupid ideas Musk has implemented since he bought Twitter this actually seems to be inline with what the rest of the (social media) industry seems to be pushing. TikTok is obviously the first one that comes to mind, but Instagram and Snapchat have been pushing videos for years, too. Even Reddit started promoting a videos over text-based threads - it’s a pain in the ass to get to the comments on a video post with their official app!

I’ll keep my fingers-crossed that lemmy & kbin are able to sustain themselves, because right now its one of the only places where text-based forums are not being pushed off to the side.

The Bible Belt I can believe, though I am not sure about the Rust Belt. It may have been true in 2016, but I think the 2020 election paints a different picture.

When I think of the Rust Belt, I think of places like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Of those cities, it seems only Missouri is hardcore republican (despite St. Louis’s and Kansas City’s best efforts). Michigan seems to have swung pretty left (though there are definitely still red areas), Pennsylvania voted blue and Wisconsin is on the verge of undoing a-lot of republican gerrymandering. Ohio looks like a red-leaning mixed bag, but it doesn’t strike me as a republican bastion.

Granted, most of these are major battleground states with both parties in almost equal numbers, but their conservative populations don’t seem to be anymore Trump-oriented than other states.

I actually agree with your assessment, though I was specifically referring to the debates, not the elections cycles themselves.

The democrats (and the left in general) had a propensity for hyperbole that labeled McCain and Romney as dire threats to democracy. At the time, I think thought of this as a viable tactic to win the election (in a way not too dissimilar from LBJ’s “Daisy” campaign ad against Goldwater). However, it essentially turned them into the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” when Trump came around, because huge swaths simply refused to believe them.

So, I do actually agree that democrats helped to create Trump, or at least helped to create an environment that allowed him to rise. How we stop Trump now though is beyond me.

Yeah, it is very disheartening to see. I still remember going back and watching previous debates before Trump, and they were all so civil! Even in the most heated moments, the candidates were actually discussing ideas and policy!

I cannot wait for Trump to fade away from the political scene. It’s just so sad to see how he turns everything into a debate about him.

Just based on Queens, NY, I think the republicans in NYC capitalized on some of the things Democrats “beat around the bush” or avoided talking about. The Asian American population in NY is very anti-crime, and the dems perceived inaction on Anti-Asian Hate created an opening some I think local republicans capitalized on. Even the current mayor is a former cop.

Now, how they got to be die-hard Trumpers is not something I understand. He did, after all, cause Asian Americans a-lot of grief with his whole “China Virus” BS during the pandemic..

I am pretty liberal, but I have a-lot of family members who are republican and live in the midwest and they feel like they’re in the same boat as you.

I do have to wonder where he gets all his support.

Same. I still have it installed alongside Alien Blue as part of my Reddit Graveyard. RIP.

I will absolutely be biting my nails lol.

The food and water thing is so ridiculous and just piles onto a series of laws designed to make it difficult for urban Americans to vote. Wasn’t it Texas that decided there should only be one polling center per county? I’m not sure if they’ve actually enacted it, but good luck voting in person if you live in Austin!

Just the fact they feel the need to make it more difficult to vote speaks volumes about the mindset of republican leadership. I don’t think their party is really growing, but I think the smaller they get the more underhanded they will become in their efforts to cling to power.

Idk, sometimes I really wish I could be one of those people who is blissfully unaware of politics and the world at large. They really seem to be happier in their ignorance.

I agree. I find the culture here to be significantly better than reddit, but it still needs a-lot of work before they attempt something like r/place.

I wonder how it would even work with other instances though? It seems like that might be difficult to federate…

This, I think, is pretty true. But still, its incredibly foolish. They could not control Trump the first time, why on earth do they think they could control him the second time?

Unless they are banking on him being locked up with the key being tossed, and using that to galvanize the base around a candidate they can better control? Either way though, peddling these types of lies is just so, so dangerous. They are more-or-less setting up a large chunk of the nation to believe that the democrats are stealing the election and going to install a communist dictatorship (lol) and the only way to “save the country” is to violently take it back.

And if Trump actually does win again? Well, then the other half the country is correctly convinced their has been a criminal takeover of the nation’s executive branch. How does that end? What even happens if Trump is convicted after taking office?

I wish more republicans would understand that supporting Trump is going to seriously weaken the US and create instability. Even if the democrats were “unfairly targeting him” (to be clear, I believe he is guilty) there is just no way he can unify the country and make it stronger. Half the country will hate his guts, and that alone should disqualify him.

Yeah, this is an unfortunate advantage republicans have over democrats - their constituents really do fall in line, even if they don’t like their candidate. Democrats constituents fall in love, and will refuse to vote if it is not their preferred candidate.

In fact, the only time I feel like democrats won without falling in love with their candidate was (ironically) Biden. I think he won because people were desperate for a sense of normalcy and to have new leadership because the Trump administration failed so spectacularly in their handling of the pandemic.

This time though, there is no pandemic to boost the democrats. I firmly believe that Trump probably would have won again were it bot for the pandemic, and I am worried he will win again.

Does anybody else hope (emphasis on hope lol) they’re just saying this out of spite? Perhaps they know he lost, and are just saying this because they know it will “piss off the libs?”

Maybe it’s naive, but while I am pretty liberal a-lot of my family is (unfortunately) republican and they all admit Trump lost, fair and square. They also say they’re sick of him, wish he would drop out of the race, and allow another, younger republican to be nominated. They’ve also not been contacted by any of these pollsters.

Admittedly, this is just my experience with a very narrow slice of republicans; outside my family, I don’t really interact with too many.

Thoughts? Am I just fortunate to not have to interact with the Trump cult on a daily basis? Or is the US just screwed? lol