For obvious reasons.

I chanced upon another piece of software that includes support for Ukraine on their homepage: pandoc.org, previously saw it on www.vim.org. There are apparently lots of projects on GitHub that do this too: StandWithUkraine. The same cannot be said for Palestine.

So people of Lemmygrad, should we include the flag of Palestine as a banner? Support could also shown in other forms, as long as it's immediately obvious that it's for Palestine.

We've always noticed something odd with user @Skipper1402@lemmygrad.ml, but we haven't formalized any space for discussion about them.

People have noticed they are apparently collecting info about us and our community. Have you interacted with this user? What do you think about it?

This post comes as a result of a little talk we had on GenZedong's Matrix servers a couple of days ago and I thought it was a good idea to bring it as a proposal to discuss here.

There are some strange people in Lemmygrad. I bet you can think of one or two names when I say this. Honestly, I have nothing against it, I don't think anyone should as long as they cause no harm, and quaint characters being attracted to on-line left wing spaces is as much of a natural law as that day follows the night so there's nothing one can do even if they wanted anyway. However, one can tell by some behaviours that the strangeness of some of them come from being young. Too young. And I think it would be nice to limit our list of extravagant individuals to people with a somewhat developed prefrontal cortex, since I think that currently we have none of that.

As some of you may do too, I belong to the earliest sector of Gen Z. As such, it means that I was part of that experiment of giving unlimited access to the internet to someone from an early age, and after remembering well having seen that one video of a man and a glass jar after barely hitting a double digit age, I can say with some confidence that it was a bad move. While there is nothing as nearly as inappropiate as that going on here, I still consider that now that we are older and it is us the ones who are in charge of something, it would be for the best if we did what we could to prevent the youngest ones from wasting their years of brain plasticity on Hoxha-themed soyjaks, anti-psychiatry drama and debates about whether or not the Shining Path was "giga-based" or "turbo-cringe" amongst other brainrot instead of playing Poptropica on coolmathgames dot com or, even better, away from the internet.

My proposal is to set the minimum age for a Lemmygrad account at 16. Of course we can't go around asking for IDs, but I think it would be sensible to put a message stating one must be 16 or older to join in the registration page, make it part of our rules and if someone's behaviour seems sussy then let the mods and admins decide according to their collective judgement.

That's it. Discuss.

Edit: Because some people seem to be missing the point - I know there is no way to enforce thia for all cases. But in the state things are right now, if some kid openly states that they are 12 they would not be able to be banned because there are no rules that justify it, which is no bueno.

Lemmygrad is not a large website. The statistics on the sidebar shows that it has around 10.5k users, with this number being considerably smaller in regards to its active users, with 1.11k users using the website in the last 6 months and half than that in the last month, with 591 users.

That is perfectly okay: the concept of a small, tight-knit community of active users with shared interests who can recognize each other frequently by name is an appealing one. However I personally think that on a site with a membership so small one should stop to think, before creating a community centered around certain topic, about the chances that exist for such to attract enough users and grow to the point needed to maintain a certain life. I would have imagined that it should be a matter of common sense, but it seems not everyone gets it, and as a result, Lemmygrad ends up full of extremely niche communities that have either no posts nor users except its creators or recieve content solely from these ones.

We have seven communities dedicated to Australian cities, all of them created by the same user and all of them without one single post. We have a community for clarinetists. We have a community dedicated to The Critic. We have whatever this thing is. Most recently we got a new community for Maltese communists, which with all due respect, as a country with little more than half a million people, it has absolutely zero chance of catching on in the slightest and is going to become either another abandoned community or someone's own personal blog (of which we already have our fair share).

The list goes on and on and all of these are just examples. I am not asking these specific ones to be removed: I am just using them to point out a problem that makes the section of Trending Communities irrelevant and unusable and the List of Communities tab completely unnavigable, amongst others, as well as to make the case that we need new policy in regards to the creation of communities and/or the elimination of those who become either abandoned or populated solely by their creator.

We have two communities that seemingly serve the same purpose. TankieTunes is more active and Socialist music only has a single mod that hasn't posted in 4 years.

The owner has locked it to only allow them to post. That's fine, but all posts they've made so far they've also locked at zero comments to disallow the community to interact with those posts.

This goes against the purpose of lemmy(grad) in my opinion which is interaction and discussion. If the person behind this wants to post static things without feedback they'd be better served by hosting a website and hoping people stumble on it.

It's one thing for admins to lock posts at their discretion because of an nonconstructive turn to discussion or because it's an announcement and they don't want fighting over their rules that they've decided on. Likewise for mods to not allow comments on a rules post or shut down discussion when it becomes unproductive.

The content is also somewhat sketchy feeling. I admit it's true that there can be issues with female on male relationship violence not being taken seriously but such statistics are often pushed to silence and tamp down on the overwhelming societal issue which is in fact male on female violence within and outside of relationships. To shout down feminists with "men can be raped too" is like shouting down black lives matter with "all lies matter" or "white people experience police violence too".

Honestly it rings alarm bells. There's nothing wrong about talking about gendered violence towards men and boys, but this site seems to frame it in terms of persecution, in terms of there being some sort of feminist agenda to silence and shut down discussion on these matters.

Take for example this link from the blog this community models itself on: https://thetinmen.blog/we-are-not-violent/

In it they feature researchers who claim they received bomb threats, had their dogs shot, were shouted down by feminists. All of this rings alarm bells in my head that these people are likely reactionaries using progressive language as a cover. It uses the classic reactionary tact of claiming repression. They claim to have studies showing female on male violence in families being equal to male on female violence. Which is on its face a dishonest framing. Sure women may shout (verbal abuse) and with dishonest twisting of terminology you can over-count aggressive but not actually violent or dangerous behavior and use it to try and equal out men who give women black eyes. But you can't hide the homicide rates and those show us that women and girls are far more frequently murdered by men and boys than the inverse.

Once more, it's not that gendered violence towards men and boys doesn't exist, it's that gendered violence towards women and girls is much more severe, prevalent, has within our lifetime been the subject of tv-tropes and jokes (slapping a "hysterical woman" to calm her down as just one example) and has more severe consequences such as girls and women being attacked, seriously injured, and even killed.

Rape against men and boys is unacceptable, coercion for sex is unacceptable. But the fact is men and boys are the overwhelming committers in volume of sexual violence on women and girls that is actually physically violent, forceful, etc. Men for the most part merely feel a social pressure on their status to agree to sex with women, that they'll be less of a man if they don't agree. Every request from men and boys towards women and girls carries an implicit fall-back of violence, even lethal levels of it for rejecting a male, for denying them sex, intimacy, a relationship, etc and women and girls live with that every day, every encounter in the back of their minds. While such violence towards men and boys does not define their lived experiences, they do not naturally due to a felt prevalence assume that denying a girl intimacy, a relationship, or sex will likely result in her escalating to violence and the potential of bodily harm and danger.

Not taking that reality, that material and historical reality into account when discussing gendered violence makes one dishonest.

The site is evasive in what it talks about, it frames itself as for progressive rights of men and boys and what woman can oppose that? Not I. I'm all for men having conversations about healthy masculinity, reform, male solidarity that isn't to the exclusion of women but looks like support for men by men. But it feels off and the fact the owner has locked any ability to discuss it also adds to the ringing alarm bells. Truthfully if they hadn't done that I wouldn't have spent 10 minutes looking over a few things there and realizing it felt sketchy.

It seems like a lot of this sketchy stuff is papered over and hidden between bland, no analysis, uninteresting, unenlightening, surface level feminist-friendly stuff like roe-v-wade being overturned being bad but then just throwing some statistics out and not really getting into any analysis or insight.

Here's an example of more problematic stuff: https://thetinmen.blog/just-be-you/

"I want to define myself by who I am. Not as a feminist, an MRA or egalitarian, as left, or right, liberal or conservative."

It's alarming that MRA is mentioned as a possibility as if egalitarian which is used by the manosphere to disguise their hatred of women.

And one last one: https://thetinmen.blog/soft-power-and-the-henpecked-husband/

Which seems to downplay the power and reality of patriarchy.

I don't want to get too into the weeds of the content and it's merits. Because even if the content were incredibly uncontroversial and in no world could be considered sketchy or one-sided, even if it were something we all agreed upon as Marxist-Leninists just by our nature, the lack of ability for discussion is in my opinion against the intended nature and function of lemmy.

If you're going to post something here you have to deal with people replying, even disagreeing with you. You don't have to respond, you don't have to even look at their responses if you don't want to, you can chuck something out there into the feed and then ignore all discussion. But others should be able to.

I ask admins to consider whether this content should be here and whether this community should exist given two separate issues:

1. The locking of the whole community against interaction and just using it as a posting board for someone's stuff which seems counter to lemmy's intentions and function.

2. The questionable content present

edit 13 hours in: Since looking more into it since I wrote this post I have changed my mind. I was too conciliatory in my language. So let me be clear. I think this rises to a case of global rules violation, hatred, misogyny and the OP and sole moderator should be appropriately sanctioned. No benefit of the doubt is deserved given the language they used on the sidebar about the stuff they were posting being useful

https://lemmygrad.ml/c/comunism_69

It's made by a recent account, so it's probably just spam.

Right now, we have /c/Introductions, but it only has one post from nearly a year ago. Would be cool if those who wanted to introduce themselves knew that there was a place where they can.

I just noticed that out of the 4 moderators of !china@lemmygrad.ml, 3 have been inactive since 2020/2021 (@MountainChen@lemmygrad.ml, @redjoker@lemmygrad.ml, @Iskender@lemmygrad.ml, and along with the 4th mod (@Makan@lemmygrad.ml), all of them are the same moderators of !cpusa@lemmygrad.ml.

I hereby make a request to become a moderator of !china@lemmygrad.ml, and to remove all 4 current mods.

My qualifications include:

• I am Chinese
• I like to fact check information

I hope other comrades will also step forward to help moderate !china@lemmygrad.ml.

Update: Most people in the replies seem against the idea. On second thought, I realized I don't want to contribute to the proliferation of machine generated garbage. To that end, I have deleted the bot and the AI "art" community. I have also removed the repo for the bot from github.

Recently, something happened on Lemmy after another update I think and now I can suddenly still see deleted posts even if they were well, deleted, they just have a trash bin next to them and still appear and can be seen.

Same thing for comments, for example lib comments with mass downvotes and whole sections of replies can still be seen even if they are deleted, it just says ''deleted or deleted by creator''. Before when a comment or post was deleted, it completley disappeared, but now it can still be seen on the feed.

Can we please do something about this?

🤨

Got randomly suggested by Lemmy for some reason. It's an old community with one post, seems to be superseded by other comms like SRS

Edit: Link is !thefuhrerispleased@lemmygrad.ml and !fecklibreals@lemmygrad.ml

tværpostet fra: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2494464

If at least it were a ukraine community you could post a few more things but this is just the same as as shit r s. The war is fading almost irrelevant so it is not even much of a thing naymore

Recently, many of our anti-Zionists posts have been downvoted to oblivion by liberals. As hexberians realized a while back, downvotes only help liberals since they are more numerous and they don’t need to engage in discourse. I am proposing to just get rid of downvotes and instead engage in discourse on content that we disagree on.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/777738

What do you know, a folk-tale from my ancestral homeland.

I read Lemmygrad in public so it is kinda bad, especially with the recent war in Ukraine, to see nazi imagery in Lemmygrad posts unblurred, so I suggest that we blur any posts with nazi imagery so that people can choose when they want to see the posts that contain it.

I've seen plenty of posts around here lately about how we should explain things patiently to the liberals. But it's hard to be patient when they come into our communities uninvited and start an argument over something that's so obvious to us, over and over again, especially when they're also full of american chauvinism (I recall one guy a while ago who didn't believe the occupation of south Korea was real). It's plain frustrating and not conducive to a meaningful discussion. Besides, can't speak for others, but personally I sometimes want to enjoy fellow communists' posts without having some lib causing a mess in the comment section.

I think isolating them into a particular community (maybe call it something like /c/debatecommunism) could be helpful for the following reasons:

• We can engage on our own terms. When I feel like debating, I could go there and do it. When not, enjoy the rest of the site without being bothered by them. That'd also make it easier to be patient with them.
• Have past questions in one place. If someone is genuinely there to ask questions in good faith, they could read a previous thread if the question was already recently asked.
• Could make a sidebar or a stickied post with links to resources.
• If some experienced people are willing to moderate such a community, it would have more effective moderation than the current state of moderation falling on whoever happens to be the mods of the community the argument started in, or on the site admins if something is reported. There is a line between debating and just insulting us or being racist towards whoever is liberals' designated enemy right now.

With "isolate", I mean, creating the "debate communism" (or whatever other name we'd choose) community, and a policy of reporting/removing liberal-attempting-to-debate-us comments everywhere else on this instance.

Thoughts? Are there any downsides to this that I have failed to see? Are the obnoxious posters from other instances not a big deal for everyone else and I'm the only one who is bothered?

(I'm sorry if I phrased something badly. I'm really not good at words...)

Hi. I wanted to talk about an issue that has been bothering me for a long time and that is the quality of the publications that are being made lately in the Leftsthetics community.

I have a specific problem with the user “Роძэя ΟЬяэяо” who I think has not understood the purpose of that community very well. The description of the community reads as follows:

For propaganda posters, art, influential photos, and anything else that promotes the aesthetics of revolution and the Left.

The problem is that this user does not upload anything that has to do with socialist or Marxist aesthetics. With so many artistic and aesthetic expressions of this movement, I don't understand how they can use the community to upload memes, which are also in Spanish. They also share famous quotes from great thinkers but again, is out of place in this community. In fact, this user currently moderates the Latino Marxist community and they have not even oriented it towards anything concrete, it is an accumulation of his publications that are completely decontextualised. And always, in all publications, it says "Latino Marxist", without descriptions or anything, as if it were some kind of branding or an automated bot. It gives a very bad image and worsens the impression of Lemmygrad.

I don't want to promote hatred towards this user because I doubt their intentions are evil, but I think this community has a lot of potential and right now it is full of out-of-context posts and memes. For that we already have other communities with more varied subject matter.

I attach examples where you can see what I am talking about. Having said that, I hope that the moderators will do something to improve the quality of the publications. Thank you.

Edit v1.01: Change pronouns (he/him -> they/them)

The community !lemmysuggestions@lemmygrad.ml is not an official avenue of communication as it appears to suggest. The community has always been fairly inactive, but now there’s Lemmy.world users posting in it after a year-long post hiatus.

Would it be better to restrict the community and redirect people to Lemmy’s official GitHub where people can and do post suggestions that have a more serious chance to get heard by Lemmy developers?

There are so many >1MB images on the web and it's annoying to always have to downscale them. I'm not asking to remove the limits, as lemmy only has a finite space. But having it on 2MB sounds like a nice way to have people upload pics that are original resolutiom, but now too big.

Would like for us to get ahead of this instead of having to scramble

Hexbear is far more likely to have users entering and using our comms, being another large socialist instance, albeit dedicated to left unity rather than Marxism like ourselves. I think there is enough of a culture change that we need to have a pinned post for hexbear users coming here explaining what kind of content/attitudes they might see here/what different rules to follow

There should also be a section dedicated to explaining to lemmygrad users to respect hexbear comm rules and what to expect from their users etc.

I think this would help ease any potential cross site struggle sessions

With the Reddit exodus, there's been a significant increase in the number of bad-faith liberals commenting on communities like LSC. I don't personally think we should ban liberals from all communities if they're being respectful, but immediate hostility breaks the instance's third rule and seeing it everywhere might make some users uncomfortable. In particular, the bigger communities that only have admins as mods (I get the feeling that they have a lot to deal with already) or have inactive mods might need some help

~I\ haven't\ spoken\ to\ any\ admins\ about\ this\ so\ ignore\ this\ if\ it's\ already\ being\ dealt\ with~