Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Can't believe Beehaw went mainstream πππ
I thought the whole point of the Fediverse was to have an entire social media website to myself!
Jokes aside, I'm really happy to see this community growing. I don't have much to contribute myself, but I admire the dedication to decency and I hope to see the platform thrive
Reading and responding to people and posts is contributing, and I would argue more important than starting new posts.
I thought the whole point of the Fediverse was to have an entire social media website to myself!
You still can if you're technical enough. Many people run their own instance.
Yeah beehaw was listed at the top on join-lemmy.org so many users just likely go there.
That was definitely a factor in me joining Beehaw. The other factor is that a lot of their "mission statement" or MO aligns with my own values and beliefs. I was looking for an instance where I can feel more welcomed to speak candidly and this seems like the place.
I've also been recommending Beehaw to people on Reddit because they're less likely to run into, uh, certain people from certain other Lemmy instances.
Iβm too new to know lemmy drama
If you go to https://beehaw.org/instances, you'll see a big list of instances which are allowed...
...and one that is explicitly blocked.
See, Lemmy caught on with certain groups very early on. The main Lemmy instance has always been left-leaning. But one group that really latched on to Lemmy from the extremely early days was tankies.
These guys have their own community, "Lemmygrad" - IIRC, their servers are even based in China, or they claim to be. They were the most active users of Lemmy before Reddit shot themselves in the foot, and their influence has been felt across a lot of the other instances. If you ever went to GenZedong on Reddit, you get an idea of what they're like. (There's even a version of that subreddit on Lemmygrad.)
One reason why I switched to Beehaw is because they've blocked that instance. If you're on the "main" lemmy.ml instance run by the developers and you go to your version of /r/all, you'll see posts from Lemmygrad show up pretty frequently - because Lemmygrad still has a fairly large community, and they're still pretty active relative to the size of Lemmy itself.
If people go to join-lemmy.org like they're "meant" to, they'll almost certainly see Lemmygrad at the top of the instance list. Anecdotally, a lot of Redditors see that and get turned off, thinking this place is full of tankies. (And, to be fair... before everyone from Reddit started showing up, a lot of Lemmy was full of tankies...)
Even on Lemmy itself, there's a lot of people who dislike that side of the project. They're authoritarian at best, and genocide deniers at worst. And the people who created Lemmy are at least sympathetic to them, even if they don't outright endorse it publicly.
But. Lemmy is open-source. No one person or ideology can control the project, as it can always be forked. Even the creators of Lemmy itself have no control over what happens at Beehaw. So steering people away from the tankie side of Lemmy and towards a more, uh, "normal" instance is for the best, especially since this place needs to grow if it's to be taken seriously as a Reddit competitor.
Beehaw has chosen to step away from that drama by explicitly banning that instance, hence why I've been sending people on Reddit here instead of mentioning join-lemmy.org.
I get all of this and I was surprised by the left extreme content on lemmy.ml All page before I joined beehaw and all of that disappeared.
My only qualm (that I'm perhaps unfairly voicing to you) is hearing people call a group of people 'tankies'. It feels a bit derogatory.
I would like to hear your take on this :)
Not the person who you replied to but isn't the name tankie referring to the people who support the use of tanks as a tool of political repression? Like specifically Stalin using tanks to commit mass murder and being ok with that because the massive amount of civilians killed by tanks "deserved it"?
Not super informed but that was my impression of the name. If that is the origin, I don't personally think it's derogatory. Political violence is a complex topic but uhhhh I think using tanks to murder civilians instead of political targets/active combatants doesn't make people the good guys. It's basically just a name to refer to people who are ok with use of mass violence to subjugate people as long as the end result is achievement of a political goal. Genocide isn't cool and people that glorify that aren't cool either and should feel ashamed (pretty sure it also ties into denying the Holodomor genocide so). It's basically just a name for people who think it's ok to enforce political will over other people with mass violence. Who tf thinks that Stalin was actually a good guy? Lol
I'm actually listening to the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan right now and I finally got to the Russian revolutions. I'm only up to 1906 after 39 episodes so I can't speak to Stalin yet. What's interesting is that the revolution of 1905 was actually pretty spontaneous with people all over coming into simultaneous revolt due to being pissed off at how their life was going. The socialist movements kind of joined/co-opted/spread information to people but it really was a mass organic grassroots movement that lead to (ultimately failed) reforms (due to the Czar being you know... A power hungry Czar). A general strike shut down the country. That's a people's movement... The tanks will come later to repress people who didn't want to do what Stalin wanted them to do.
What's sad is that it seems to me like the people who glorify the violence of Soviet Russia/China/etc are making the same mistake that happened after the The Great Terror of the French revolution of 1789. The fear of repeating the violence of the French revolution hampered revolutionary potential across Europe for like 100+ years. Russia was able to finally get a constitution in 1905, over 100+ years after the French because monarchs heavily suppressed revolutionary thought after seeing how Robespierre/etc went sicko mode. Will the violence of the soviets/China hamper revolutionary thought for another 100 years just like the fear of French violence did? Seems to me like the tankies are making the same mistake.
Not the person who you replied to but isnβt the name tankie referring to the people who support the use of tanks as a tool of political repression? Like specifically Stalin using tanks to commit mass murder and being ok with that because the massive amount of civilians killed by tanks βdeserved itβ?
pretty close. it was originally used derogatorily to refer to communists who supported the crackdown of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and has since become a broader label against perceived or actual authoritarian communists, especially those that support political violence and/or repression of democratic reform movements. (in even more recent times, like many political slurs, it's also been misused to refer to basically any socialist, authoritarian or no)
Ah, I see.
I personally don't think people have to put too much stock into whether tankie has been used to refer to all socialists or not - those are the kind of people who don't understand that there are more political dimensions than left/right. And even then, people will learn more about the terms and the meaning of the word will become more well known in common use.
Personally, I think it might be useful to keep the term around because it helps observers to understand that there are different kinds of leftist politics and not all leftist thought = Stalin's USSR. Putting a name to the specific brand of authoritarian violence helps people understand that it is something that is acknowledged, named, and disliked by different kinds of leftists. Probably good for recruiting from the general public who will feel more comfortable exploring leftist politics without having to feel like they are doing something bad if they can dip their toes into leftist spaces and think "well I should be safe because they say there are no tankies allowed here". Lemmygrad has a literal tank in the profile pic for the instance... I feel like as long as that kind of thing is around, we need words to describe it especially for newcomers to leftist politics. Particularly as people on the right love simplified labels and ingroups/outgroups, labels can create a sense of comfort before telling them to read literature from the 1800s to understand what they are seeing. Memes are incredibly powerful tools used in the right way! Personally, I can understand having interest in marxist-leninist ideology and whatnot but I really can't get behind genocide denial or use of indescriminate suppressive violence.
As I said I'm listening to the Revolutions podcast right now and the Bolsheviks have just become the communists... Lenin put into the constitution that states are free to secede from the USSR but then immediately have to not actually allow that because for example Ukraine is so resource essential... What's interesting to me learning about this stuff is that part of it is happening before the end of WWI so part of it is trying to figure all this out with imminent German imperialism on the table. And also that they all thought that other states would rise up in socialist revolution at the same time to make it all work out... It's actually very interesting to learn more about how people THOUGHT it would all go vs how it actually all went. Tbh I just think authoritarianism is just part of Russian culture because there were secret police and imperial strongmen with monarchy, then communism, and then oligarchical capitalism... Three different political systems but new boss is the same as the old boss. Russian military doctrine has also always been good defense and horrible offense and human wave attacks for every political system they've had. I really think that authoritarianism is just deeply baked into the actual culture of Russia (and China) and not so much the political system tbh. These are just some random thoughts but overall I think that most random people associate political violence and oppression with leftist politics so we need language to describe how to get into leftist politics without obligatory gulag jokes.
The community in the lemmygrad instance (which apparently used to resolve to the same IP as the flagship lemmy instance) are uyghur-genocide-denialists and pro-russian-invasion.
Beehaw uses the same software, which rubs some people the wrong way.
That said, it seems better to use open-source software developed by someone with unpleasant political leanings than to use a proprietary platform operated by someone with unpleasant political leanings who actually bans people based on them.
Yep, and the fact that Lemmy is open-source means that an instance like Beehaw can always fork it if needed.
But thankfully they do a fairly good job of at least giving other people a place to avoid. Even on lemmy.ml itself they're really not bad, despite technically having a lot of overlap. It's like how you don't go on certain boards on 4chan.
That was initially my first move. So far though, Beehaw feels the most like old Reddit, both in tone and community feel.
I really didn't expect it to feel so nice and yet familiar here.
It's reminding me a bit of my super vague probably-inaccurate memories of reddit pre-Dig influx.
P.s. you picked a great display name π
Thanks! It's quite rare to get a 4 character username of any kind these days. I have an irrational worry that future generations won't be able to have common usernames in general because they've all been taken up already.
I really like systems that let people pick a display name that doesn't have to be unique, in addition to the unique username. Like discord's old system, and the one here. It feels more natural that names don't have to be perfectly 100% unique, too.
I looked at the join-lemmy list and picked beehaw because it was the first one I saw that explicitly noted valuing diversity etc, and I am hoping it may therefore have a good amount of users but also not be full of transphobes.
Users from all other instances can view these posts and comment on them. I think the main point of choosing a server is that your local page will be more relevant to you.
I'm following 6 communities right now, 4 of which are from different instances because they just don't exist on beehaw yet.
Luckily from my experience Mastodon and Lemmy have both been very pro LGBTQIA+, probably because the haters can barely use the internet in general lol
My experience so far has been good too. I'm glad I picked beehaw though because they've banned lemmygrad and so I don't see those posts in the All feed. Although I guess I could ban it from my account independently anyway. But I don't think Lemmygrad accounts can comment on beehaw communities either.
I found beehaw via the android app + mentioned in the abandon Reddit posts where commenters mentioned using beehaw for lemmy.
ETA: the android app is called Jerboa
Look, I'll be honest, beehaw was a funny name to have and also it's one of the top results in the app that actually looks like a web address.
A lot of sillier looking top level domains are cheaper then .com or .org and fediverse services are run off of donations so people opt for cheaper names.
If that's the case, I'm surprised the lemmygrad server doesn't use the .su top-level domain. I'm not even sure if those domain names can be purchased for it since the origin country no longer exists.
you can get an .su domain and there are a lot of them. they're unsurprisingly administered by a Russian institution according to IANA, the Russian Institute for Public Networks
It was the recommended instance when I went to sign up
Yeah, that was how I found Beehaw. I created an account on here and on lemmy.ml, but I like that downvotes are disabled here, and the local feed is more interesting to me so far. I also honestly kind of like Beehaw's approach to communities, too (broader and fewer of them).