I think it's very close.

Bush launched two wars where the US invaded countries in the Middle East, leading to decades of destabilization in the region and leading to millions dead. His admin coincided with the rise of Fox News and conservative punditry outside talk radio. Patriot act, tax cuts, oversaw the recession, etc.

Israel's genocide started under Biden, so I can't exactly put that on Trump even if he's supported it. This quagmire with Iran isn't as big as the invasions were.

Trump's been more damaging domestically with his scotus appointments and emboldening racists, but if you look outside just the US, then yeah I think you can definitely make the argument that Bush was worse.

This is completely unsurprising when you're aware of the reasons that motivated PieFed's development (anti communism). Features designed to limit the voice and reach of certain instances lines up with that motivation. PieFed exists to counteract communist influence in the threadiverse.

Some here who helped push it spin it as a way to make the fediverse more palatable to the average Internet user because they care more about growth than culture, but the underlying motivation has always been to try to separate the threadiverse from its communist roots.

I'll take the tankie devs over liberal devs every single time, personally. You can say what you want about them and how they personally run their instances, but I'm not aware of them developing any underhanded features like these and others in PieFed.

They will really do anything before investing in public transit

It's honestly bonkers to have a community hosted on Lemmy this hostile to Lemmy as software and the developers.

I've seen at least two "media bias" sites mark The Times of Israel as "leans left". Media Bias Fact Check and Ground News.

This isn't the first piece I've read from there that's raised my eyebrows.

"I used to have support for the Native Americans, but then a tribe massacred an outpost on the land that was slowly being carved from them by colonizers. Now I've lost all goodwill for their struggle"

The indigenous, oppressed peoples proceed to get wiped out and the colonizing states take over the entire land mass

This type of violence does not need to celebrated. It should be mourned as tragic. Its perpetrators condemned.

But so many are applying fairness or rules to a conflict that has neither.

If you create the conditions for war and terrorism, do not be surprised when war and terrorism come.

"I don't like Reddit.

Its interface is ugly as sin. There are fewer users there and they're all pretentious, extremely liberal, and anti American."

-Some Digg user circa 2008/2009 (probably)

Kbin sucks and is full of people who were mostly just scared of the Lemmy devs for being communists

Conservatives are liberals. Liberals are liberals. Libertarians are liberals. Neoliberals are liberals.

Liberalism has a storied, specific history. It is essentially support for capitalism combined with a set of other policies.

The modern, politico shorthand liberal/conservative dichotomy is an oversimplification, represents a split in opinions among liberals, and demonstrates the the narrowness of the Overton window, although "conservatives" can often lean toward fascism and democratic socialists are sometimes lumped in as "liberals" as well. Hell, right wingers call communism liberalism. That doesn't make it true.

This instance is constantly talking about the rise of fascism. However, like much of leftist thought, many believe that the ineptitude of capitalist, liberal parties and their policies, especially when they are positioned as "leftist", actually help give rise to fascism.

For example, the modern dominant strain is neoliberalism, which was actually first made popular by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Alan Greenspan. However, neoliberlism has been continued by Clinton, Obama, and Biden. See the rise and support of charter schools in Democrat led cities, NAFTA, etc.

The rise of neoliberalism has coincided with the death of unionism and the stark increase in inequality since the 70s in e the US.

Also, most liberals, like conservatives, are opposed to socialism, which is seen by leftists as the most definitive obstacle to fascism. See the 2020 Democratic primary where all but Bernie Sanders were eager and quick to reaffirm their support and belief in capitalism and attempted to smear Sanders for his socialist beliefs.

This is also a safe space for leftists, and leftists are often most frustrated with modern "liberals" as you know them (i.e. Democrats, Blairite Labour, etc) because while they should ostensibly be allies in many situations, they are often the biggest obstacle in our way, demanding we stand down and acquiesce to capitalist policies, and talk down to us smugly and condescendingly.

We already all know we detest fascists and "conservatives" and Republicans. We vent about them too. But "liberals" often get our ire in our spaces because of the above.

That doesn't mean we work toward conservative goals.

It makes sense.

Most people who came here two months ago did so because they explicitly wanted to leave Reddit, but not because of Reddit content or the site culture. It was because admin decisions on third party apps and the API.

They still wanted Reddit, just with different Admins and different apps. Ideally, they'd have wanted communities to fully migrate over.

lemmy.world specifically became basically a lifeboat, having been linked to from original third party apps.

Yes, it was created and had the technical and resource requirements to keep up with the new influx of users without constantly crashing (in the beginning), but nonetheless, that meant it got the largest influx of the migration.

It's honestly a bit strange for me to see people in here with two month old accounts saying "oh yeah the culture has just changed so much".

You all were the change. It's that influx of users that basically brought Reddit here.

Anyone who came here before the API changes did so either because they had some kind of issues with Reddit, whether it was the dominant culture or what, and wanted an alternative or because they were interested in the open source and federated nature of the project regardless of Reddit's own decisions.

Though tbf, pre migration, this place was basically dead. Posts would have a handful of comments at best and it was mostly Lemmygrad users and also FOSS enthusiasts. Hexbear was the most active Lemmy instance and was a chapotraphouse lifeboat formed in 2020 but it didn't federate so it was really mostly just Lemmy.ml as a general instance and Lemmygrad unless you explicitly knew and cared for Hexbear. Neither was very "toxic" in their own communities and there really wasn't much inter instance fighting, even if there still were people on lemmy.ml who didn't care for grad, as far as I remember. I honestly mostly lurked and didn't participate often.

The apps also were much worse.

Things started picking up as the API announcement happened. That's probably when we had the best balance of positivity and user growth.

It exploded when the API changes went into effect and voila.

Still, I would say it's mostly still a bit better than Reddit and there's more effort in commenting for the most part.

I don't think I've seen a pun chain or a "he's not your buddy, guy" or anything like that.

I flirted with journalism before getting my degree in CS.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the faculty and many of the students were almost proudly "bad at math" and basically bad with tech too, other than learning the basics of a Macbook.

Doesn't have to be that way and many journalists are smart, great people, but there's a weird self fulfilling culture when it comes to tech. Not totally sure about how tech focused writers would be similar or different.

Edit: Just googling "journalists bad at math" and got this from the Columbia Journalism Review:

“In many cases, they got into journalism to stay away from math.” Journalists love to joke about how we suck at math.

Edit 2: I guess I was bringing up my experience to be an example of how many journalists do not have a strong grasp of technical concepts and sometimes are almost proud of that. So it doesn't surprise me that many may have struggled with Mastodon.

That being said, that attitude is far closer to the average user than, say, the user base of this platform, which is likely far more tech savvy. Streamlined user experience is not a bad thing if you desire mainstream use and is something that could be improved, though Mastodon has been making strides in that regard.

I've been busy all day, but I've just seen through talking with others how threads is basically blowing up today and lots of our local Twitter accounts, companies, bigger celebrities/influencers and more are going to it and sharing their accounts.

And it just makes me so fucking sad to see people embrace Facebook again when a decentralized, grassroots, non corporate alternative was already right there. It's a lot of "liberal" people, too.