OpenStars

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/14326001 (so please comment there rather than here?)

It's only ~5 minutes long, and very worth a watch imho.

@4:31: "liberal democracy has been marked by its emphasis on procedures, not outcomes - we honor the process, even when we dislike the outcome; the drive to quickly get what we want even at the cost of bypassing procedures and undermining institutions is deeply dangerous"

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/14326001 (so please comment there rather than here?)

It's only ~5 minutes long, and very worth a watch imho.

@4:31: "liberal democracy has been marked by its emphasis on procedures, not outcomes - we honor the process, even when we dislike the outcome; the drive to quickly get what we want even at the cost of bypassing procedures and undermining institutions is deeply dangerous"

It's only ~5 minutes long, and very worth a watch imho.

@4:31: "liberal democracy has been marked by its emphasis on procedures, not outcomes - we honor the process, even when we dislike the outcome; the drive to quickly get what we want even at the cost of bypassing procedures and undermining institutions is deeply dangerous"

As to the second: daily, more or less.

Personally I prefer a good dark roast, and if it's a good blend (also for medium or light roast) I want it black.

Outside of dedicated coffeehouses though, most coffee out & about isn't what I consider "good" (I guess I'm a snob?:-P), so I usually add sugar & creamer.

(Pro-Tip: combine black coffee with a pastry for the ultimate snack, i.e. the sugar doesn't need to be poured directly into the liquid! The juxtaposition of the bitter and sweet really works well.:-)

I can't stand Starbucks coffee regardless though, so if needed I'll get a mocha. I'd sooner trust a McDonald's coffee though - seriously: b/c Lavazza is great!

It's such a personal choice though - what do you like?

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/20339542

Got a burning question you want to ask someone from the US like "Why is the imperial system superior" or "Why is Texas"? Join us over at !AskUSA@discuss.online (!AskUSA@discuss.online for the mbin users) and find out the definitive answer. You can also just chat if you don't have questions, because this is the land of the free and there are no laws 🇺🇸🦅 (there are actually, please be nice)

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/14195662

This is in regards to the brand-new !AskUSA@discuss.online community.

And by more serious discussions I mean e.g. the legality of the recent jury nullification issue, which I don't want to allow if I were a moderator in it.

If you say yes you will be granted the community "ownership" as the sole moderator. I've only been a mod myself on Lemmy for less than a day but we'll figure out how to transfer it to you. You can ofc always add new mods and change it however you like after that. The advantage here is chiefly that you get the community "name" AskUSA, whereupon I could later create e.g. a CasualUSA but you would have the privileges of that specific name, to match the style of e.g. AskUK or AskLemmy (or AskScience or AskMen or AskElectronics or AskAndroid etc. - there are so many here using that style:-).

I don't want to be involved in something that is going to constantly be depressing to me, though I do recognize the need for such and am offering the community "name" if someone else wants to pick up that mantle.

While if nobody says yes then I suppose I'll just keep it going in the more CasualUSA light-hearted style, until such time as someone does. Either way I'll offer to help grow it by posting and commenting to it regularly - unless you want me to stop b/c I tend to be really bad at guessing what people want to see (e.g. personally I love John Oliver and also got involved in the Reddit protests, so why people are downvoting sexy pics of JO on Lemmy of all places... I seriously have no clue).

The community also needs moderators to help in general - so even if you don't want to take it over, would you like to help moderate it if it were to remain a more casual, light-hearted community?

This is in regards to the brand-new !AskUSA@discuss.online community.

And by more serious discussions I mean e.g. the legality of the recent jury nullification issue, which I don't want to allow if I were a moderator in it.

If you say yes you will be granted the community "ownership" as the sole moderator. I've only been a mod myself on Lemmy for less than a day but we'll figure out how to transfer it to you. You can ofc always add new mods and change it however you like after that. The advantage here is chiefly that you get the community "name" AskUSA, whereupon I could later create e.g. a CasualUSA but you would have the privileges of that specific name, to match the style of e.g. AskUK or AskLemmy (or AskScience or AskMen or AskElectronics or AskAndroid etc. - there are so many here using that style:-).

I don't want to be involved in something that is going to constantly be depressing to me, though I do recognize the need for such and am offering the community "name" if someone else wants to pick up that mantle.

While if nobody says yes then I suppose I'll just keep it going in the more CasualUSA light-hearted style, until such time as someone does. Either way I'll offer to help grow it by posting and commenting to it regularly - unless you want me to stop b/c I tend to be really bad at guessing what people want to see (e.g. personally I love John Oliver and also got involved in the Reddit protests, so why people are downvoting sexy pics of JO on Lemmy of all places... I seriously have no clue).

The community also needs moderators to help in general - so even if you don't want to take it over, would you like to help moderate it if it were to remain a more casual, light-hearted community?

And since this meme comes from Reddit, I made 100% certain (adjustment for inside the USA: 120%) to not research it in the slightest, just putting out here all confidently-like without a care in the world for anything other than how it makes us feel.

Mostly - though if you were banned from Reddit for toxicity, while you may be welcomed elsewhere on Lemmy with open arms it will not be on this instance.

But if you, like so many of us, are simply so very done with all the corporate enshittification, then yes enjoy breathing the free air here!:-) (though to be clear, "free" does not mean absence of any and all consequences, so much as it means that here, our efforts can be truly rewarded without having to fight the current of Reddit trying to maximize "engagement" e.g. making you angry as much as possible)

We are mainly liberal- to centrist-minded people here, with people espousing the Alt-Right platforms generally speaking not accepted (though it's far less what you believe and far more how you treat others that is the deciding factor - why should we care what you personally believe, if you are engaging with us in good faith? again, this isn't Reddit, we don't aim to maximize "engagement" here, we just try to enjoy ourselves). We offer a strong focus on kindness - as in, why bother talking to one another here (as opposed to there) if all we are going to do is spew toxicity in the general direction of one another (or with bots)? Shouldn't it be like... "fun", or something?

Speaking of, I highly recommend reading this essay: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb - it's not mine (though it's wordy like me!), and it's long, but it really helped me to decide to leave Reddit, since all their enshittification tactics were designed to maximize their profits but at the expense of our mental health, and that essay lays bare how and why and what. Meh, suit yourself:-).

Btw there is a community here specifically dedicated to !reddit@lemmy.world. Otherwise we tend to mostly just try to forget the sordid past that so many of us came here to get away from:-P. Personally I post pictures from Reddit here all the time, and I've done that with articles/posts as well - I usually get tens to hundreds of upvotes, along with a couple of comments chiding me for mentioning Reddit, so decide for yourself if that is a trade-off that you want to make:-D. Some people even mention continuing to use both Reddit and Lemmy - mostly that's okay, b/c that's like, your choice, so who are we to judge? (though perhaps be wary of mentioning that in the Linux forums, b/c they can be more than a little preachy here:-)

Reddit the corporation kinda became evil, but Reddit the idea of many interconnected forums where we could all just enjoy talking with one another was fantastic, and I think we can take the good while leaving the bad behind. Anyway, yes, I want YOU to feel welcomed here! (so long as you offer the same respect to us in kind)

Answer: I mean... just don't get us banned, m'kay? :-P

I mean... duh. :-D

Wisdom, intelligence, humility, bravery - he is the embodiment of all values that we hold most dear in this great nation.

(Question: Is this okay to ask a "leading question" in this community? Answer: since this is mainly a test post meant to get us started, I will ask a counter-question: why da fuq not!?:-P)

I am not sure where to post this - most of us on this instance probably use it as a "general-purpose" one to launch ourselves into the wider Fediverse, with only a few communities being here locally. @jgrim@discuss.online @lazyguru@discuss.online

I would like for Discuss.Online to defederate from the troll instance hexbear.net, to protect new users (who don't understand how communities work, local and remote) from being exposed to their toxicity and therefore drive people away from the Fediverse. I personally made the mistake of responding to a comment in a post in !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net and continued to receive messages from them - each one triggering my Notifications - for WEEKS afterwards (and then did the same for lemmygrad.ml as well, though iirc at least one and probably both of these occurrences likely was from my prior instance StarTrek.Website, which I moved from to here b/c of Discuss.Online's much better admin practices e.g. significantly higher uptime). I almost quit the Fediverse entirely after those incidents, though thankfully I recalled how Kbin used to be better, less toxic I mean, than Lemmy, and pushed through to figure out how to block things, especially instances (which sadly does absolutely nothing to stop this effect, when in communities not actually located on those instances, since the "instance block" is more of a "community mute"). Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here, almost like a rite of passage to learn which instances need to be avoided, and yet we don't even know how many users this is turning away from us.

Such instances and hexbear.net in particular either cannot or will not control their users, and in fact there is evidence that the admins themselves have lied to other instance admins, at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith (admittedly, the other possibility is that the admins lied to their own userbase - although is that really much better?). You can read all about this particular incident in e.g. https://discuss.online/post/13387124 (and others e.g. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6205969), although it is only the latest in a long string of such occurrences. Another good read is https://discuss.online/post/434998, which cites several examples that caused the admins of Lemmy.World to defederate from hexbear.net (much of the content has since been deleted, either by mods or by the OP, but it should be visible somewhere e.g. the modlog?). Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated from this instance - e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/4279462 and https://lemmy.ca/post/3326347 and https://feddit.org/post/41472 (I don't understand German so that's the best example I could find there).

Personally I want very badly to defederate from users on lemmy.ml for similar reasons, and also the admins there likewise are not transparent with their policies of saying one thing while doing another, in particular site-wide banning people for comments that they did not know were taboo, b/c it says so nowhere that people know how to read what topics are prohibited (e.g. in the sidebar it just says "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers", and there is a link to "What is Lemmy.ml", which is just a broken link). That one I understand may be more problematic to defederate from although I think there is a strong case to be made for it. Fwiw, it was recently discussed in https://discuss.online/post/13727946 including that incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP) (sadly, I am not anywhere close to joking or exaggerating - read it for yourself e.g. at https://hexbear.net/post/3706906/5518427 where even the unremoved comments from the mod doubles down with "nono I don't want to shoot for pointing that it's a game, I want to shoot you because...", and then later tripled down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”). To be clear, the incident occurred on hexbear.net, but the mod is from lemmy.ml - those instances are often intertwined, along with lemmygrad.ml.

But regardless of what happens with lemmy.ml, the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?

Tangentially, @Blaze@feddit.org does great work in enticing mainstream Redditors to come to Lemmy, and is looking for an instance to recommend that new users to come to, though the current federation with hexbear.net is a dealbreaker. I don't know if you would even want to see a large influx of new more mainstream users from there, and to be clear I think that Discuss.Online should defederate from hexbear.net (and possibly lemmy.ml) either way, but I wanted to point out how defederation is not necessarily a bad thing i.e. in terms of decreasing available content, as doing so would open up new possibilities to be more welcoming to an audience that gets turned away by such toxicity and political extremism as is constantly flooding over here from those sources, i.e. increasing content overall.

Discuss.Online is such a welcoming instance, I feel, and you are doing a fantastic job of being admins, e.g. as evidenced by the uptime stats, and upgrade timeliness, etc. The only downside is being willing to host such toxic content on this instance that derives from other sources that are not nearly so welcoming and friendly - and yet are presented side-by-side here along with all other content as being equally worthy of attention (especially when browsing by All, which I note is the default behavior, rather than Subscribed). We can do nothing to control others, only ourselves, but deciding to remain federated with them is a choice that reflects poorly on us imho (even if most of us have already blocked or otherwise avoid those communities personally, being more tech-savvy than your average mainstream Redditor), so I hope you will give strong consideration to these points, regardless of whatever the outcome may end up being. And thank you in advance for that!:-)