Zero22xx

Firstly the obligatory disclaimer that I'm not American, just someone that has been watching this unfold on the same world wide web that we all use.

Maybe I'm too radical but I would say fully. Whether they want a white christian nationalist country or just wanted cheaper eggs. Because that first thing was never a hidden objective, it was clear from the start. We had people who find secret illuminati pizza messages on bathroom walls take one look at Project 2025, an actual real conspiracy and go "doesn't look like anything to me".

So whether they're true right wingers, conspiracy theorists, or people that closed their eyes and ears and hearts while convincing themselves that this was all about cheaper groceries; I'd say they're all equally to blame.

We don't need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.

I've been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there'll be 4 posts instead of 3.

And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I'm always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there's a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn't be impossible here.

It has been eye opening to say the least, how easily people are whipped up by obvious propaganda, as long as it gives them something to hate.

Even as far away as here in South Africa, I've come across people that have been clearly listening to Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or some shit; who want to 'chat' about transgender people.

As if it even concerns them in the first place. And as if being transgender is some sort of fad, and not talking about a miniscule percentage of people who are just trying to live their lives without bothering anybody. Because this 'fad' must be happening in some other town from what I can see. With my eyes. While not listening to self important 'gurus' on the podcast or some shit.

I just want to say that it has nothing to do with being transgender and it could've been any easy to single out group. People like to hate and look down on something different that they don't understand in order to feel superior in some way in their own shitty lives.

But I feel like that's empty and useless to say to someone while they're being actively targeted. Like telling a bullying victim to just suck it up because their bully has a bad home life or some shit.

So really all I can say is that I'm sorry this is happening to you. And that I wish there was a way to offer support other than with just words. Like a new country or island where the people are enlightened and not prejudiced, hateful and easily turned by easy to spot slimeballs.

I was always tempted to make a bot on Reddit, but put off by the seemingly random and poorly communicated ways that they were handled by the admins. There were many innocent bots randomly banned for nothing (including largely incoherent ones like AgentSmith) as well as bot creators being randomly banned.

It's a pity about the limitations here on Lemmy. Letting them completely loose like in the Interactive sub on Reddit is them at their best IMO. I used to wait in anticipation for those notifications. Looking at the community here, it fell flat in this form.

So glad that free speech has been restored.

I've also been given the "I've always suspected" thing (not diagnosed) from certain people, family to be specific. And while, fair enough, so have I; when I start thinking about certain treatment and button pushing that I've gone through, and the fact that no one ever bothered to get me professionally assessed growing up so that maybe I could've had a better quality life; it makes my mind start going to dark places. And I don't like it because maybe it's all in my head.

Edit: although to be fair, I do believe that I have become quite unintentionally good at putting a mask on throughout the years. And maybe it's only really starting to show now that I'm older and still the way I am.

I don't want to directly be responsible for another community on top of admin stuff.

Yes, as a noob here, I'm realising that another thing to consider is that certain instances might just not have the capacity or work force to take everything on at once. So that's quite an understandable position to take. It would be nice to see though, if someone felt so inclined.

I'm going to just try again here. I've woken up ill today, in a bit of a brainfog and right now just doing this from the Lemmy app that I use is the easiest. I'm going to get all of the text out of the way at the top of this post and put the screenshots at the bottom. First screenshot is the issue I'm facing when I first load the page. Second screenshot is what it looks like after multitasking for a bit and returning to Firefox (at which point the page reloads, reloading manually without the multitasking didn't fix it however, so I'm assuming this a memory management thing?).

I feel like I should also note that my phone isn't great at all. And I'm running a custom firmware. So if this is an odd issue that no one else has ever encountered, I'm prepared to re-flash the vanilla firmware to my phone and try again.

I also feel like I should just alert you that in your welcome email, you mention to reply to the email with any issues. However, the email is a 'noreply' that returns "address not found". I'm guessing that the wording in the welcome email is from an earlier time and hasn't been changed yet.

I dunno but I always get the impression that these fucking people that are too cool for school and need to loudly tell everyone how little they care about downvotes every chance they get, are probably also the people that go around using downvotes in bad faith and making the platform a little less welcoming for everyone.

My advice would probably be to just stay away from instances that are populated with the kind of people that use downvotes as a 'disagree' button or panic button to make themselves feel better when reading something they don't understand. Those were always the worst people on Reddit that dragged the experience down for everyone. And it sucks that they're all here too. And in a smaller pond, they're going to be making a bigger splash.

I'd find a nice instance and / or communities to spend 90% of my time in and only actually go to places like Ask Lemmy in world when you actually feel like dealing with smart alecs and neckbeards.

Edit: and downvoting people for talking about downvotes isn't actually funny, it's just proof that you use downvotes for the wrong reasons. For the meme and 'disagree' button.

I think I may have come down with a mild (that hopefully stays mild) case of covid. And it pisses me off because I've got this far without getting it. Apparently it's doing the rounds in my country and while I can vaguely understand not wanting to shut everything down again and making everyone bankrupt again, they haven't even bothered with precautions this time or making supermarkets follow certain protocols. So it seems like the fucking anti-vaxx, anti-lockdown, head in the sand idiots have won here.

Sorry for offloading this, just saying that I'm probably going to be even more delayed at checking out PieFed now in the next couple of days. Feeling pretty woozy and lacking in the energy to much else other than scroll.

I'm definitely going to give PieFed a proper go, I've even made an account there already. There's just a couple of things I'm still doing and seeing here.

The web UI on mobile really isn't that bad, even with the full card view, unlike I thought it would be. I do have an odd issue though where on first load, the page is darker than it should be and text and pictures are surrounded by a white box. And seemingly if I switch to another app and back to Firefox again causing it to reload, it loads correctly.

I'll send a screenshot from PieFed maybe in a couple of hours or my tomorrow. Been trying to upload an image here in this reply for the last who knows how long but there seem to be server issues.

I'm aware of ask transgender, but what I had in mind would be a lot more general purpose, like Ask Reddit / Lemmy. Just in a better environment.

Reading that previous post made me remember how intimidating it could be joining forum sites and trying to fit in and find your way at first. I'm pretty sure I was intimidated by Reddit at first way back in the day too.

And Ask Reddit style place is perfect to break the ice in that case. I get the impression that a couple of people that are new(ish) to here are trying that and getting edgy and (maybe unintentionally) abrasive responses. And getting scared off. Which made me think of this instance having a section for noobs or people who just like to ask random questions and chat.

Either way, I'm no moderator as I said. So it's just a suggestion anyway, for anyone that might think it's a good idea.