They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.

It's both. Firefox for Android lets you run uBlockOrigin, effectively killing the ads.

A lot of this comes from the community from the streamer whose name starts with the v and who used to go by Irish Lassie. His community is especially toxic when it comes to using the term tankie as a pejorative.

And they don’t even keep the smear to people that support the Bolsheviks. They’ve been saying that about Noam Chomsky and Jeremy corbyn and basically anyone that has been critical of NATO in the last few years.

Imagine calling fucking Chomsky a tankie XD

Awesome!

I wish we had a Parenti bot. Nonfalsifiable Orthodoxy etc etc.

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

The United States is a deeply unserious country.

We're the most blocked instance by far, it seems.

Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation.

Yep. Lies in the very first sentence. The Myth of Neutrality.

I'd argue the drama is inherent. ActivityPub -- and federalization/decentralization more generally -- just surfaces it, and provides different groups of people with appropriate tools -- muting, blocking, defederating -- to curate their social graphs as they see fit, rather than ceding that control to a single centralized provider.

If "lemmy is developed by socialists/communists/leftists" is enough for folks to steer clear of it (or move over to kbin, as I've seen at least one radlib insist that folks do rather than lemmy), then... "task failed successfully" in my eyes. No real loss.

In order:

1. Reading. So, so much reading. Lots of fantasy (Merlin series, Redwall series, Harry Potter series), quite a bit of non-fiction (How Stuff Works-type books), and foreign language stuff as well. I'd try and line up English and Spanish, English and French, and to figure out the "rules" of the other language and its vocab.
2. Video games. The Nintendo 64 was my first "big boy" purchase that I made with my own money. I played a bunch of Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie (and later Banjo-Tooie), and GoldenEye (as well as its "spiritual successor," Perfect Dark). I also picked up a Counter-Strike 1.5/1.6 habit in the early aughts.
3. Aggressive Inline Skating. At least until I broke my arm right before high school, and then ended up too swamped in academics to spend much time on physical activities.

Edit: alt text below. The OCRbot would (understandably) have trouble with this one. @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml

Virgin vs Chad meme.

On the left, virgin, captioned "Virgin API consumer," wearing a blue long sleeve shirt and black pants and shoes, and holding a mac book. There is a collar and chain around his neck, and a ball and chains attached to his feet. Numerous text bubbles and logos surround him: "JSON", "Fears HTML," "Limited to what the API can do," "Has to identify himself even for read-only APIs," "A slave to the API provider," "Json," "Tokens," "has to agree to Terms of Service and follow the the rules," "API keys," "Thinks that he is making his life easier," "Has to worry about quota."

On the right, chad, captioned "Chad Independent Scraper," wearing an orange tank-top (with the HTML 5 logo on it), blue pants, and brown shoes, and holding two different types of paint scrapers, one in each (outstretched) hand. Numerous text bubbles and logos surround him: "follows no rules, doesn't agree to any terms of service," Selenium logo, "has no limitations can access any data he wants," cURL logo, "His software is always independent," "Doesn't care about changes in policies," unknown logo, Python Requests library logo, "Websites can do nothing to stop him," "Can do whatever he wants," "handles HTML like a real Chad," "Doesn't fear HTML," "can work anonymously," Python Requests-HTML library logo, "Even Javascript can't stop him."