The second wave of arrests was almost entirely students, because Columbia has been on lockdown and it’s been increasingly difficult for non-students to get in in the first place. The “outside agitators were at fault” narrative that Columbia is pushing is at odds with this.

Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you… edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website’s UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you’re browsing from?

This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia’s content moderation problems, but it doesn’t do much against that that wouldn’t also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others’ pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you’d have to make a new account to edit things.

I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you’d know that all the options were wikis that haven’t been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki’s admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.

I don’t know. I’m happy this exists. I think it’s interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.

No - semantic satiation is when you read or hear a word so much in a short timeframe that it stops feeling like a real word, and briefly feels like just a jumble of letters/sounds.

If this question is “Would you rather everyone be able to talk, or just people who are correct?” Then, uhm, correct according to who?

I prefer having a range of forums of different functions, from “Only my friends can speak” to “everyone, save for those who use speech to harass or intimidate, can speak” to “only the teacher can speak.” None of those fit neatly into either category here (even teachers are sometimes wrong).

Mx is common-ish among nonbinary people. Here’s a relevant poll regarding people’s usages of it: https://www.gendercensus.com/results/2023-mx/

The pledge of allegiance, not the anthem. But yes, it was every day. Although, where I grew up, it was never enforced, and most kids didn’t stand or participate.

About 2300 in Terraria. Great game.

Wars tend to involve civilians getting hurt, because yeah, it’s cheaper and easier to disregard international law.

I wouldn’t generalize that to evil always winning vs good, though. Human life is complicated, and mean, but progress gets made anyway. There’s a reason most people dislike war.

Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.

Huh, okay. Good on you for being consistent.

I find the banning of individual users to be highly necessary, to prevent spam of porn/nazi shit/general assholery. Instead of everyone having to spend a long time forming their own blocklist, they can sign up for an instance with a mod team that they trust to do it for them. Defederation is a useful tool towards that end, because (for example) Exploding Heads is an instance that explicitly allows racism and such, so a well-moderated instance will defederate with them rather than having to ban hundreds or thousands of individual trolls who sign up over there because they like racism.

Are you also against the idea of banning individual users for the content they post?

Subscribing to a community does not curate content. All subscribing does is add it to your list of subscribed communities, so it’s one of the ones that shows up when you look into your Subscribed feed (sometimes called the Home feed). Subscribing to a community will not impact the Local feed or the All feed.

Lemmy does not have “curated content” outside of your subscriptions adding to the Subscribed feed, and your blocks taking away from all feeds.

This question is analogous to “why hasn’t anarcho-communism yet worked on a wide scale?” Which is a question with many, many facets to it. You’d have to ask a lot of questions separately.

If I were to try, though, I think the simple answer is “people who work in X area usually do not own the means of production and as such cannot redirect the end product to horizontalist organizations.” Most people can’t just quit their jobs to join a mutual aid group because, without being able to contribute things, the biggest thing a mutual aid group can pass around is time, and most mutual aid groups that exist irl are focused on doing tasks like “picking up prescriptions for others,” and cannot replace participation in the capitalist economy.

Nevermind how most governments don’t want horizontalist non-capitalist organizations to gain enough power to provide a viable alternative to living under capitalism.

no, since the misleadingly-true fact is still that congestion wastes gas - congestion is cars spending gas on going nowhere, so the gas is wasted

explanation, since this one might be more confusing than most:

Traffic congestion does indeed waste gas. However, any place worth driving to is going to have congestion–driving without congestion is easy, fast, and comfortable, so people generally won’t take other options until roads become congested. Thus, congestion actually reduces gas usage overall, because it is only once areas become congested that people stop driving places.

Trying to avoid congestion, on the other hand, usually involves expanding roads, something which increases driving, and makes other forms of transportation less useful/comfortable, thus increasing gas usage overall.

Every year, traffic congestion wastes billions of gallons of gas.

Dihydrogen Monoxide, commonly used in laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies, is also present in Subway sandwiches