Source: Trust me bro.

In the 3 years Hexbear has been around it has been attacked A LOT because obviously far right chuds have an interest in messing with leftists but has not to my knowledge had an admin breach. At one point image embeds were completely disabled because they were handing over data they shouldn't though and risked exposing people to doxxing.

The Russian government’s internal security apparatus appears incompetent because it did not consider Wagner a threat, even though Prigozhin had been telegraphing his intentions for days (and probably planning it for months). The Russian military appears weak and overstretched, because it could not protect its operational HQ by force. Putin appears weak because he disappeared at the crucial moments, and large parts of Russia appeared sympathetic to Prigozhin even if they weren’t prepared to directly take part. The image of Putin being the supreme ruler in charge of everything looks pretty suspect at this point, and Russians know it because most of the events happened live on Russian state TV.

This is all "appears" "appears" "appears". You are hung up on appearances. You seem to think that if they just appear a certain way to people then that will magically change the balances of factional power in the country.

Liberals have this bizarre idea about where power comes from. You all seem to believe that the population of the country has power, that if the government simply appears weak then it will magically result in the population doing.... Something... And then the government will be overthrown and the war will be won!

Power is derived by those in hierarchical positions in a country to command various things within their positions to occur. And when enough people all align alongside one another and command things to happen together, if the related organisations follow those commands, they hold power.

I acknowledge in my other comments that this is embarrassing (which is quite a similar interpretation to you saying it hurts appearances). But the bottom line is how it affects power in the country. What factions exist and who those factions are aligning themselves behind.

This attempt did not result in anything like a weakening of the state or Putin. It consolidated all the sources of power in the country behind Putin, into statements of support and actions that back it up.

Putin has a long history of wriggling out of difficult situations, and he might still pull things out of the bag, but I think this is the beginning of the end for him.

By what mechanism?

A lot of the people that have come over aren't people who want decentralisation. They are people who don't give a shit but are unhappy with reddit.

They haven't learned WHY reddit is making this decision. They have no understanding of why IPOs and privately owned companies will always lead to this. They do not understand.

They are just people that want their content slop, but are also mad. They don't actually care how the slop is delivered to them they just know they want it and know they're mad at reddit.

The result is that they want to come somewhere else and behave exactly like it is reddit, when it is not.

After the events that just strengthened it? Absurd. Anything to avoid actually feeding people, addressing the 33% of children currently in poverty or the constantly declining living standards we have I suppose.

EDIT: God this place has gone south since all the redditors came over.

1. When a coup fails, it strengthens the existing state. It has told everyone that might rebel that there is too much support in the existing state for it to succeed. See Erdogan doing it intentionally in Turkey to strengthen and consolidate his power if you want another example of this.

2. I live in the UK. This is absolutely a fucking waste of our time and energy. Nobody gives a damn about this when a third of children in the country live in poverty and cost of living is through the roof. It is entirely a distraction because Brexit, austerity and successive neoliberal governments have systematically gutted the country. Anything to distract from the fact half the country keeps going on strike or actually paying people more.

Lmao what a stupid argument. If you want money paywall your content and see how many people really want to see it. You do not have the right to fill anyone's head with manipulative garbage propaganda just because you made a video about how much you love the second reich and want it to retvrn or wrote some shitty blog post.

People that call themselves CONTENT creators are the people churning out pure garbage for the bazinga-brained sake of contentcontentcontent and the quality of actually worthwhile shit would skyrocket if they would all just collectively quit because what would be leftover are the people who actually care and aren't in it for some ad views.

Artists, critics, musicians, designers, etc etc? They don't call themselves content creators like the bazinga-brained influencers in it purely to chase metrics. Tell the bazingas to fuck off.

Citizens of authoritarian countries often trust their governments more than those in liberal democracies. This apparent paradox is easily explained by the tight control these governments maintain over what people can see and hear

Your argument was falsified by Harvard a 30 year long study they did on Chinese approval of their government. They found that 95% of the country approved of the government and they specifically say in that study that it is NOT to do with this magical orientalist brainwashing that you claim it is caused by but instead it is caused by the fact that the Chinese population sees constantly improving conditions in their lives. The study also states that their opinions of the government change negatively when conditions decline, just that it doesn't happen often.

Article on the study: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/

The study: https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7.6.2020.pdf

Quotes:

the attitudes of Chinese citizens appear to respond (both positively and negatively) to real changes in their material well-being,

Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread, our survey reveals that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being

You need to readjust your thinking. The fact of the matter is that the popularity of the government in China has nothing to do with the racist claim of brainwashing and control as you claim. And your own research institutions say that themselves. Nobody here can call Harvard biased in favour of the CPC. Nor can they fault a 30 year long completely independent study, literally the longest study of its kind.

Science completely contradicts the racist claims that you are simply regurgitating from reddit comment sections.

The reality of the popularity of the CPC among the Chinese people is that it has improved the lives of the people by incredible amounts, and continues to do so.

I didn’t say or suggest a single thing you just said.

Of course you did. You said that the defederating thing turns you off the concept of Lemmy, and you advocated for it to be not-a-feature.

You are advocating for centralised mega platforms owned by mega dictators.

The are two options. Centralisation, or decentralisation. That's it. There is no magic alternative. This is the material reality that exists.

If it turns you off Lemmy, then what you are advocating for is centralisation. The literal polar opposite of what the entire fediverse aims to be and exists to solve. There is not an alternative and there will not be. You either get one owner of a super site or thousands of owners of minisites that federate in order to be emulate a supersite without the oversight. That's it. There is no third-way.

So you would prefer massive dictators with a profit motive instead? Because that's the alternative you are advocating for.

The entire point of federation as a tool of decentralisation is to address the issue of Spez, Musk, Zuckerberg and so on. Massive corporate dictators of the internet.

The solution is to split up the massive dictators into lots and lots of smaller ones, who can federate with who they want to in order to make a bigger space, and ultimately provide you with the choice of which approach you like better. It ultimatley allows all of these spaces to shut out corporate advertising as well because if McDonalds ever makes a fucking instance everyone will defederate that shit to get away from the advertising immediately.

If you like the mega dictators better. Reddit is over there. I assume you do not, because that's why you left it.

Wtf? Why are people upvoting this garbage?

Google, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, there are TONNES of "platforms" that literally ban porn content from being uploaded to them. What are you talking about? Not viable? The biggest fucking social media site on the internet does not allow porn, the biggest video site on the internet does not allow porn.

Redditors have seriously broken brains and only know how to repeat what they've read other broken redditors repeat and upvote ad-infinitum without every actually thinking for 5 seconds about how ridiculous what they're saying is.

As someone that mods on multiple 1m+ subreddits, this is not viable across hundreds of subreddits with tens of active mods per subreddit.

And it's not viable with the userbases either, many of them would go full scorched earth rebellion against the site. Reddit is trying to calm things rather than turn it into a massive thing.

If large quantities of users decide to wreck the site with spam posts there is very little that admins can do. Committed users hell bent on trashing reddit can do so in greater numbers than can be responded to. This occurred when /r/FatPeopleHate got banned (a sub that thoroughly deserved it but hey ho) when a lot of the site went into a rebellion against Ellen Pao. They remember this, and do not want to repeat it.

Tone policing is classist and is the reason I stopped using this instance. It'll be popular with the liberals who will weaponise it against those saying things they dislike but it'll cause situation after situation where leftists get punished ultimately driving away the base of people that supported the site and platforming up to this point.