Does anyone else have multiple accounts while looking for new reddit alts? So far I've got accounts on Lemmy, kbin, and Squabbles and I've been lurking on Raddle, Sqwok, and Tildes from the outside.
Also, man, that sentence is just the most 2023 statement ever. "Raddle" ... "Sqwok" ... "Lemmy" ... None of these sound like real things. What even is this timeline we're in...
I tried Raddle and the people there are crazy. I gave it a fair chance but even calling someone "he" is seen as an attack because I didn't instruct myself "whether or not the person wanted to be called he or she or they". This is the hill they are dying on.
I tried lemmy and the big problem is that people are attracted to the most populated subs, namely the subs hosted on lemmy.ml, which is administrated by the crazy chinese. It doesn't matter if you register yourself on beehaw, you will still talk on lemmy.ml, and when you are banned because you said "Taiwan number one" or because you insulted Putin, then you are out of the biggest channels. You can still talk on your own server, sure, but you will talk in a ghost town. The federation model has a limit. This is why we should populate Kbin and not jump on the lemmy.ml ship when the cloudflare component is eventually removed. Build here, stay here.
This is my issue with the fediverse. We are getting out of the frying pan and into the fire. If you think reddit mods and admins are bad you're in for a whole other level of crazy power tripping instance owners with insane rules.
I think that's a little unfair, speaking as a fedi admin.
There are certainly instances that like to block any instance that doesn't match its admins' precise ideological priors (i.e. "X on Y server of 10,000 people is a 'cop' through some loose definition... COP!!!! BAN!!! BAN THE WHOLE THING!!!!" - has literally happened). I don't agree with them or their methods.
But honestly they're relatively small and few, and safely ignorable by the people on the big instances, who by and large will only block places that simply won't moderate away their users' hate speech or harassment.
Same way how on Reddit you can easily go a million years without having to interact with the weird uber-tankies or the racists, you can quite easily join Mastodon.social or any other reasonably well-moderated instance and let the whole fediblock discourse just pass you by.
I’m in Beehaw and here. Beehaw is good if you stick to its local communities. You can’t create new communities at the moment, just join the existing ones. Don’t know if this model is good or bad - but it’s peculiar at best.
Hoping to Kbin gets traction and the project stays alive. Fediverse is a good thing and will prevent crazy admins to lock you out of “major” communities/magazines once new instances get relevant.
They aren't in your face about the tankie stuff on lemmy.ml but when it comes out holy shit. There was one thread discussing bans for "orientalism" where people were going on about westerners being racist without any hint of irony (that was also where I found out the .ml stands for Marxism–Leninism). I deleted my account there straight away.
At least with lemmygrad.ml you know what you're getting into...
Why are Marxist Leninist so pro-China anyway? Like doesn't China practice heavy capitalism and have a crap load of billionaires? Not very marxist there. Nor is their insistence on horrible worker rights and disallowing trade unions.
You're looking for reason and consistency where there is none.
Why do US right wingers who go on and on about "core American values" and the bible cozy up to Nazis and Russia? Obviously those things have literally nothing to do with core American values and the "good old days", in those days large parts of the population took part in WWII killing Nazis and the cold war was still going on. Paying any mind to anything they say is absolutely useless, what they do is what really tells the story. They just want to get their way and the power to punish those who they dislike and those who do things they don't want.
Tankies really aren't any different. They might say they are communists because they eventually want a utopia for all or whatever but what they do is cozy up to hardcore inhumane regimes like China and Russia because it's never been about creating a better world and doing what's right, it's just about furthering and protecting their ideology.
I don't want to start a war here, and I don't have the context of what you experienced over there. Perhaps they did go too far. But if you don't know the gender of someone, it is indeed incorrect to assume "he" is OK. That's inclusion 101: don't assume things about people. There is a commonly accepted solution to this problem, used e.g. in the academic peer review world where the reviewer is anonymous, which is to default to "they". That's a good habit to take, costs nothing, and helps (particularly) women feel included. That's a hill I'd happily die on.
Even then some people throw their toys out because they believe "they" assumes a person is non-binary. "They" as a singular pronoun for someone of unknown gender has existed since at least the 16th century.
Look if people are getting mad because you're using "they" to refer to someone who has not disclosed their pronouns, then they're being unreasonable. But I've literally never seen that. What I have seen is people getting mad when someone uses "they" to refer to someone who has disclosed their pronouns. And often, this is something that is done by mildly transphobic people who aren't fully comfortable using, e.g., "she" to refer to someone who they feel looks insufficiently like a woman, but recognize that using "he" is wrong. Using "they" in this situation is just as wrong.
That being said, it doesn't help that there's no easy way to disclose your pronouns on this app. I'm a lot of discord servers I'm in, they use badges for pronouns so you can click on someone's username and see their pronouns. But no such option exists here
I would say people getting mad about a they instead of a he/she even after disclosure are being unreasonable. The word they is neutral ground in text conversation. I can see it being awkward to use in a direct conversation, but so often in threads, we're talking to the public not the individual.
Having said that, I still haven't seen anyone really get mad except in cases of direct misgendering. Yes some people will be unreasonable, but they are the exception.
Speaking about assuming things about people, don't assume everyone is an English native. In some other languages there is no gender-neutral equivalent and instead the normal and expected way to address a stranger is by using male pronouns. Reacting aggressively instead of just politely correcting someone is the difference between making someone have a positive or a negative opinion on a given topic.
Being a non-native speaker doesn't help, for sure, but one can learn. Point in fact: I'm french :) And as a non-native speaker, I find it great that English has well-known gender neutral pronouns, so I'm more than happy to use them. I wish French had one so commonly accepted as "they" and "it".
Also I don't know if you refer to my post as aggressive, but if so I'd appreciate if you could tell me why. I haven't called anyone names, and I think I responded respectfully to the OP.
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