Thanks. Lots of the documentation was difficult to parse for a beginner so your explanation of those features is very helpful.

Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):

If you have a bit of time, please collect evidence of when that targeting and harassment happens. I’ve already seen a few accounts using low-quality /c/MoG posts to try and demonize .ml, lemmygrad and hexbear so it’s useful to have a post or posts to point to showing that it’s a harassment circlejerk, not the credible spectators they pretend to be.

First things first, I do not defend nutomic’s ignorant transphobia. It’s unfortunate to see how legitimate complaints about capitalist exploitation of trans issues (rainbow capitalism) can be wrongfully misdirected into reactionary anti-trans victim-blaming. Their personal writings on trans issues are harmful.

And I don’t think Lemmy really is defined by the politics of those instances anymore. Their politics are largely optional, especially now that many other instances have grown. These days, I see more red-scare posters than tankies, who regularly inflame off-topic instance drama whenever they see a username from one of the instances.

The cm0002 compilation linked is a list of trolling strawman claims, many are either completely made up or shamelessly misframed. I’ll pick a few representative ones to talk about, obviously there’s too many to give proper attention to in one reply:

• The first one: [Dessalines:] “Slava Ukraini” is considered a “Fascist slogan”: Yes, this is a true claim from cm0002 and a fair position from Desallines to hold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Ukraini#Second_World_War . Openly-fascist groups like Azov Battalion maintain a strong presence in Ukrainian nationalism, so the preservation of this slogan isn’t a historical oddity.

• ^^ We also see cm0002 list another post of a user being banned for saying “Slava Ukraini”, which cm0002 knows is considered by lemmy.ml staff as being a fascist slogan, but instead knowingly misframes the ban as “Showing support for Ukraine on .ml is worthy of a site ban”, which simply isn’t the case. fwiw, I do believe the two devs, in the busyness, do a terrible job of explaining their perspectives in ban messages, using quick messages like “orientalism” or “Rule 1” which will just puzzle someone who doesn’t understand how what they said was offensive.

• [Dessalines:] “The BBC is not a credible news source”: I don’t unconditionally agree with that as a general statement, but in the context of some political topics, this is a fair position. They’re a state-sponsored channel, and like all countries, the British state has biases too. Here is one case of MI5 state intervention into the BBC ongoing for over 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/“Christmas_tree”_files .

• “[Davel:] Response to a valid report of “NK is actually good” as propaganda/misinfo”: The report is right there to read, it’s not claiming “misinfo”. Spreading political beliefs is not against the rules of that community or the instance, why should it be? The point of thinking about politics is to improve the world. cm0002 just assumes saying some basic positive things about countries they don’t like should be banned. That is a chauvinistic belief, and them posting about it this way is propaganda in itself. Yet we can assume someone reporting their post for propaganda would get a similarly dismissive reaction.

• [Cowbee:] "Propaganda is good actually”: - and then you click on the link and now it’s changed to the lesser strawman - “Propaganda can be good!”… cm0002 is, again, making false statements to fabricate an extreme position out of some pretty boring factual claims, and then points to them and says “Look at all this extremism!”. Just look at the comments on that post, even they’re saying Cowbee is right, and that’s a politically-motivated circlejerk in a circlejerk community. cm0002 is inventing and exaggerating to create drama, and in my experience, drama spreaders are much more effective at driving people away than unpopular communities.

As a side note, and I want to point out that that I’m commenting about media propaganda practices and not taking a side (I support the working class in both Ukraine and Russia, I would pop champagne if Putin and their friends were shot tonight, and the same goes for Russian mercenaries, the Azov fascists and the US vultures prolonging their proxy war at the expense of Ukrainian people), but it’s always puzzled me that the phrase “illegal invasion” caught on. What the hell does a “legal invasion” look like? Laws are written by the victor, there is nothing inherently wrong with breaking law. 🏴‍☠️💿

[This user claims to have blocked the instance I registered on, so I assume they won’t read this]

Lemmy is what it is because of the beliefs and values of instances like lemmy.ml. There have been many other attempts at creating reddit alternatives, decades of them, from voat to raddle. The lead developers have clear values which guided Lemmy into being a better platform than reddit and the other reddit-like forums - free-and-open source, anti-commercial, decentralized, and counter to the pro-US media hegemony. These are not incidental, values aren’t a syncretic pick-and-choose buffet! They are a result of the socialist ideologies of the admins of each of those instances, and how they have been applied to material reality.

And keep in mind that these instances aren’t some outsider aberration, they were the three largest Lemmy instances until 2023, they remain large and popular, and host popular active communities frequented by users of many other instances.

And while Zedestrian perceives lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad and Hexbear as problematic (and I have my criticisms of each of them), from my perspective, many of the big liberalist instances are far more problematic, tolerating right-wing bigots, allowing obvious pro-US think-tank propaganda accounts, and banning users from advocating for action (including, where necessary, violence) against the ruling class destroying us and our planet. That’s a big reason why many left, for were banned from, reddit. Should lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works therefore be removed, for being problematically close to the harmful behaviors of reddit.com that many of us are trying to escape? That’s a serious reputational liability too, it can drive users away if they can’t find the places they want to join.

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.

but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience

Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)

If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.

no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks [snip]

Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.

Yep, I’ve also gotten responses pretty reliably from professional artists, including those I’d assumed would be far too busy to answer (including the directors and writers of famous tv shows).

Are you looking for the Animal Smoothness Scale?

On the topic, I’ve been seeing plenty of war-hawk think-tank accounts who only post propaganda, like:

• Scotty@scribe.disroot.org
• Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org
• randomname@scribe.disroot.org
• 0x815@feddit.org (and all their alt-accounts, including 0x815@feddit.de and thelucky8@beehaw.org )

They are clearly not involved in our communities.

I wonder if this has any practical benefits over running a Windows OS in a VM…

edit: piping, or easier collaboration between, Win32 and Linux programs could be an example. The creator mentions creative and gaming applications.

Win32/Hurd when?

This post just gave me flashbacks to when I was trying to make a custom Plymouth boot logo on QubesOS and kept having to restore from backup after bricking.

But hey, at least eye strain won’t be an issue for your lxdm now

private as possible

What are you trying to hide, and who are you hiding it from?

I dislike that some privacy forums, like reddit and therefore here by proxy, have a cultural habit of talking about privacy or security as an abstract value in itself. But when we start getting into more detailed questions, it’s all vague and vibes until we make it clear who we’re trying to hide from and what we’re hiding.

For example, most of the time I’m not hiding from my own government. Sure, I incidentally do make it a bit harder for them to track me, but I’m more focused on hiding from Meta/Alphabet/Amazon/etc. (plus from a small group of deranged online stalkers obsessed with some of my friends) so there are plenty of online services and stores I can buy from without taking inconvenient measures. It’s fine for me if some services can guess my name and know where I live and one of my phone numbers. It’s not fine if they learn some other details.

It’s important to get out of the habit of saying “more private”, “less private”, “most secure”, and talk about what your specifically concerned with and how tactics and tools specifically address that. What information will Google gain from knowing your investments? Is that a threat to you? Are there acceptable ways to mitigate that threat?

Using google to create an account would mean giving them my real data

I’ve been surprised how easy it was for me to make a fake Google account with no links to my real identity. I only use it for age-restricted YouTube videos, I wouldn’t trust it with money like investments, because the way I set it up is inherently suspicious and I wouldn’t be able to verify identity if challenged.

Always good to try out a few distros before settling in for the long run. As much as I love Mint, there are always cases where one distro has issues with your hardware where another doesn’t.

Copy paste did take a while to get used to.

Which part, the highlight-middle click part or something else?

Also the default screenshot tool doesn’t automatically put the snip on the clipboard.

In Mint? You’ve made me realize that would be convenient for me so I looked into it, I believe copying straight to clipboard is a default keyboard shortcut option I didn’t know about.

I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers

For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.

Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!

As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives already exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful to the user or project (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.

gel electrophoresis

Thank you, this is the kind of answer we’re looking for :)

why not just … make art that looks like this?

The value of this kind of art, to them, is that it represents something real and personal.

You could always submit DNA from a pet or something that wouldn’t be a privacy issue

Good idea!

Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.

I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)

On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.

A happy ending!

Hey, actually reading the article is cheating!

Tor is not a VPN, so something calling itself “Tor VPN” is ringing alarm bells. Is it official? Who developed it?

edit: Yes, it’s official - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/vpn/

I was confused since I didn’t understand the difference between it and Orbot, and misunderstood its name.