Formerly @Elevator7009@kbin.run, kbin.run died, moved here.

  • 8 Posts
  • 98 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • I feel like the intent of this post is obvious. Whether you personally believe it’s a good idea or not is one thing; but there seem to be quite a lot of people responding to “let’s avoid politics!” with “everything is political”. It frustrates me.

    Yes, I understand and agree with the fact that every small little action is informed by unpleasantly political realities like our demographics, our own explicitly political beliefs, who it affects negatively, who it benefits, etc. But if I ask “hey, is this instance full of politics?” I think it’s quite obvious I want to avoid a feed full of depressing news, threads about how [political candidate] and their supporters are being awful today (even if I agree). That even if my feed full of anime and cute animals and whatever else is still political, it’s not really quite the same kind of political as what you would see in Politics or WorldNews or the like. I feel as if people are pointing out an unhelpful and depressing technical reality that runs counter to what I feel is the obvious intent.

    I don’t want to come in and assert that the posts I don’t like must so obviously be made in bad faith, and would like to understand the intent behind these posts. Especially since to me they read less as “hey, you might want to consider this small little choice actually has effects… how everything can be political,” a friendly informational statement, and more as “let us set up a community free of politics—BUT EVERYTHING IS POLITICS GOTCHA.”






  • I see lots of at-least-weekly-active communities that aren’t politics but also don’t garner hundreds of upvotes. I’m not sure what the “dead” threshold for you is. Admittedly I also avoid political content like the plague and hide out in my little Subscribed-sometimes-Local hole, but the fact I can do this at all and come back to new posts every day means all the other communities are not dead. They just don’t critical mass. Even without algorithms specifically tuned to push people to outrage bait, engagement bait, people still just naturally interact more with the outraging things.

    Unless you are joking and I just ruined it.


  • I read it as a series of rhetorical questions intended to illustrate how crochet is political, even if nobody is going in with the intent of being political (e.g. a crochet group specifically for PoliticalPartyNameHereMembers, people creating crochet projects showing support for this or that politician’s platform).

    That said, if they approached me at a crochet group asking me those questions I would feel very uncomfortable. And then I’d torture myself over okay but are they doing that because the discomfort is needed to encourage you to make a change for the better? Or are they just enjoying making me feel bad for having enough privilege to have a hobby? Or am I just presuming bad intent on their part so I do not have to face the uncomfortable thing and make an inconvenient change? My own shocker I’m not white guilt complex may or may not be showing—I’m painfully aware how bad others have it while 1) I don’t have it nearly as bad through no merit of my own but mere chance, and 2) I don’t dedicate my every waking hour to optimizing these less fortunate peoples’ outcomes. I guess what I was trying to get at here is, point gotten that crochet is political, but (perhaps because of my own personal hangups, as well as the usual issues involved in reading tone online, with no tone of voice or body language to guide us) it also reads kind of confrontational instead of just calmly informative.


  • I know that when I first arrived here I was grateful for “how federation works” guides. I don’t know how I found !newcommunities@lemmy.world but was happy I did, and I think pointing newbies at that would be helpful too.

    Because I was already used to Reddit and learned magazines/communities were like that, and I moved over when lists of magazines/communities that were equivalent to subreddits were still a thriving thing, I duplicated my Reddit habits and looked for communities with my interests, completely ignoring anything outside that (aka, always shunning All/Popular) because of how much of it would turn out to be in those four bullet points you outlined.







  • The only gaming videos I’m ever likely to put out are tutorial videos.

    Now that I think of it, for consistency, because I have posted game tips on the Fediverse first and nowhere else before, I might actually post to Peertube if I make it a video. But for someone else just hoping to help out their fellow gamers, they might want to make sure the widest audience would be able to actually easily access their tutorial. If I make the world’s best tutorial, but it is never indexed by search engines, I’m probably not going to help many gamers looking up the problem I try to show them how to solve. How many eyeballs will possibly see the content isn’t always a “how much money can I extract” concern. Here it is a “how accessible is my help to other people?” concern.






  • One I’ve had to do super often is injecting a name back in a sentence. Why say

    Mary said the following about Jane: “She went to the store today.”

    when I could say

    Mary said, “[Jane] went to the store today.”

    I mean, I could just paraphrase Mary and do away with the quotation marks and brackets entirely, but when I am trying to prove something (primarily that I’m not talking out of my ass) I like quotes because you can easily just take it as direct evidence, an exact citation of what the other person said that you can use as evidence yourself, instead of a paraphrase by some random person whose reasoning and motives you do not trust.

    Of course, that doesn’t get into how people can manipulate quotes and take them out of context, or even just straight up write something in quotation marks that was never said, but…