Yeah, I agree. Stallman's philosophy has some obvious blind spots (e.g. usability) but a number of his values continue to be proven correct as technology keeps advancing.

As I quipped about earlier, based on what a lot of people are saying in here it's kinda bullshit that we de-federated lemmygrad then. But to your point we just need a short list of things that sh.it will defed over so that policy can be applied consistently.

These big discussion threads on the main community here have actually had a lot of healthy discussion in them which is encouraging. All of these things are just initial growing pains that the broader lemmysphere is going through right now to find its footing. Things will even out.

I'm sympathetic to what you listed, and it would be nice to see those things come to pass. I'm just cynical about anything that starts to sound like "regime change" after watching the US campaigns in the middle east these past couple decades.

Even though Tiananmen was a long time ago, there have been more recent cracks in the facade like the unrest over lingering COVID zero policies. It's encouraging to know that people do have limits, but I don't know how popular those sentiments are across the broader population.

Yup, the flip side of the coin is that reddit really has a hate boner for China. The anti-CCP side has its own collection of nutty people, with a lot of the talking points tracing back to the ~~cult~~ nice people that send out all those Shen Yun flyers.

Shit's complicated. That said, banning all criticism of the Chinese government isn't the answer. We need to be smarter about the information that we digest.

Maybe not mourn but I did have an "oh shit" moment today over a couple smaller communities where I don't know where people might scatter to. It finally sank in.