#Hexbear enjoyer, absentee mastodon landlord, CNC machinist, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.

He/Him

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 12th, 2020

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  • Mastodon and Lemmy are both built on top of the same protocol: ActivityPub. That said, they provide a substantially different user interface. Mastodon is focused on microblogging (basically, a Twitter clone), where you follow individual users and boost (retweet) or like posts. Lemmy is focused on communities (basically, a Reddit clone), where instead of subscribing to users, you subscribe to communities. There is some interoperability, but it kind of like a Spanish person trying to speak to a Portuguese person at this point.

    Long story short, even though the goal is for all content to be accessible regardless of which platform you are using, there is a lot of content that can only be understood if you are using the correct one.


  • As an every-day Gentoo user, there is little reason to use Gentoo unless you have specific, niche configuration requirements. For instance, if you need to use a very specific version of a piece of software with very specific build-time parameters.

    Where Gentoo shines is the ability to combine some old packages with some bleeding edge ones. If I, for some reason, want to run PostgreSQL 10 (released 2017) alongside Node.js 20 (released 2023), it is a thing I can do. This is not possible on most other distros - at least, not without side-stepping the package manager and compiling a bunch of things yourself.

    I’ve used Gentoo several times over the years, and what ultimately made me switch back was Docker’s reliance on iptables. I was using Fedora at the time, which had switched to nftables. (I don’t think this is as much of an issue now, but it was a few years back).




  • Anti-sectarianism is the general rule. The community is predominantly Marxist, but has its share of Anarchists. There is no official list of points of unity, but anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-gender/sexuality discrimination are basically non-negotiable.

    I can only speak for myself, but my sentiment is that the left in the imperial core is so disorganized that the majority of sectarian disagreements are purely hypothetical and stupid to get worked up over. We can have discussions about theory and tactics, but there is no reason to assemble the perfect party platform and get into bitter fights about its nuances when there is no party to speak of. You can’t build the mass line without the mass.

    Of course, this doesn’t apply to the type of historically illiterate, American-exceptionalist Reddit “Anarchists,” or any of that PatSoc MAGA Communism bullshit. People stanning the Shining Path will probably get a lot of weird looks. We give the handful of Trots their fair share of noogies, but we don’t exclude them.

    It is a relatively small community. If you are comment in good faith and demonstrate you aren’t full of imperialist brainworms you will probably be fine. If you pick out individual people with the dumbest takes and graft that onto broad movements, putting words in peoples’ mouths, you might run into trouble. We love dunking on people with bad takes, but if you take a particular Bellingcat dropout’s cringepost and act like they are the designated spokesperson of Anarchism, that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t fly. Basically, don’t be disingenuous.

    We’re not the type of community that will ban somebody for mentioning in passing that they participate in mutual aid on the basis that mutual aid is charity and therefor not praxis. That kind of hair-splitting dogmatism can stay on Reddit as far as we’re concerned.


  • The way I see it, this isn’t really a step backwards. On the centralized platforms, our communities get banned and their ashes get scattered to the winds. On the fediverse, we get blacklisted by large instances operated by liberals, but our communities remain intact and can still network with one another directly. We are also protected from ideologically hostile admins quietly picking off our comrades one by one.