• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Lemmy will never really grow beyond what it is now. Even if there was another influx of users, the retention rate is going to be low and the amount of active users is going to be even lower. It will forever remain a niche platform for 3 reasons:

    1. It’s made by and for people on the far left, tech/privacy nerds, and people who have been kicked out of Reddit. Because of this, the actual active users on here tend to fall into of these 3 groups, and they define Lemmy’s culture, and this includes the developers. Because of this, much of content on here revolve around niche topics and so there isn’t much here to appeal to the mainstream.

    2. It is fundamentally flawed by design. There are bunch of different communities on different instances about the same topic, and there is no way to consolidate them. Because of this, you have a bunch of dead communities that operate as independent nodes, instead of having centralized communities that are big and active. This issue would’ve been solved if Lemmy was designed to have each instance be a community in of itself (AskLemmy has its own instance and so does tech, gaming, and so on), but instead we have the current implementation.

    3. Lemmy has many of the problems that drive people away from Reddit. Sure, Lemmy isn’t a greedy corporation, which is nice, but it still has terminally online powermods with little to no accountability, a hostile and negative community, weird/extreme echo chambers that make most people cringe, and so on. If you sign up for Lemmy, you’re going to get the same problems but with a worse experience because it’s way smaller and has less content, so why would you come to Lemmy instead of making another Reddit account?

    I just don’t see Lemmy every becoming mainstream or overtaking Reddit. It’s already been 6 years since the start of Lemmy’s development, and 2 years since the big influx of users from Reddit’s API fiasco, and it STILL has to rely on the same dozen or so people spamming the platform to keep it barely active. Lemmy won’t collapse, but it also won’t be more than what it is now, at least not any time soon.







  • I am very skeptical of any article that boldly claims that China is on the rise and the US is in decline. We’ve been hearing about this decades. People underestimate just how corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent the Chinese system is under the CCP. People think the US is worse only because the US is an open country. China’s isolation give it the illusion that it’s better, but in reality, it’s even worse. Every major Chinese achievement from their mass transit system to their big corporations to their economic growth to them pulling ahead technologically to so many more, all come with big asterisks attached that make them much more questionable.



  • It’s the wrong approach to take the talking points of AfD to begin with. They’re neo fascists, why would they try to copy them? Not only is that lazy, but it’s also shows that these establishment parties are out of touch with the populace. These far right parties are gaining ground because there’s no viable alternative to them on immigration. Establishment parties trying to compete with far right parties at their own game is a losing strategy, and it shows. If they want to win people over on immigration then they need to actually understand what people are concerned about and then actually take the time to provide a viable and pragmatic alternative for people to vote on.


  • Athenian democracy still had a pretty well structured hierarchy, the big innovation at the time was citizens were able to vote directly on policies which wasn’t common before then. They still had leaders, officials, and a social hierarchy. For example, women, slaves, and foreign residents were not eligible to vote, only adult male citizens were. This means that out of an estimated population of 300k at the time (5th century BC), only 30k-60k were able to vote. The reality is that one of the hallmarks that define civilization is social inequality. I’m sure we’ll innovate more equitable systems in the future, however, it’s not possible to get rid of social inequality entirely and it’s certainly not possible to get rid of hierarchies when it comes to social organization. At our core, we’re still just a bunch of apes, and like all the other apes, we’re social creatures and our societies have hierarchies.



  • I think it is a case of comparing apples to oranges. I’m saying this as a first gen immigrant from Iraq myself, I’m in the US but I have family in Europe (Finland, Sweden, and Germany), and it’s just a very different dynamic. The national narrative about immigration, the ways immigrants are treated by society, and the way government assists immigrants in Europe and the US are quite different. They also get different kinds of immigrants, which is also important. All these factors contribute to very different situations economically, politically, and socially.

    But I think this is the wrong way to approach this topic in this context because what matters more in politics is perception. When you look at the polls of any European country with a large immigrant population, virtually all of them have a pretty big chunk of the population, usually ethnically native and working class, that are heavily anti-immigration. This implies that the big issue with immigration in Europe is integration and assimilation. Since the establishment parties over there outright ignore them entirely, they end up flocking to far right parties instead since they’re the only ones who want to place restrictions on immigration.