OpenStars

Fwiw, I moved to Kbin.social more than a year ago at the time of the Rexodus, then bounced around multiple Lemmy instances, and this is the first that I have heard of that community iirc. And similarly I had never heard of this [email protected] either until you told me about it yesterday:-). The former is listed on the Lemmy.ml main communities page, but it is #43 (by the default sorting method - it looks like Users/Month?) so quite buried (and likewise this community doesn't even make the first page, even locally for the lemmy.ca instance it is on).

Anyway, it's a really good point that if this were to be taken forward, it should be noted that Lemmy.ml is one of the oldest instances, and that the admins/maintainers are the Lemmy developers, so anyone involved in advancing the Fediverse forward, or perhaps keeping abreast of the updates for the Lemmy code, may want to not block it. i.e. it is good to list both the costs & benefits of doing or not doing that.

That said, (a) I don't think those are scenarios for the mainstream public - e.g. people fleeing X b/c it is becoming too politically extreme (how ironic then that we are even more so, not so much in an average sense but in a maximum one, though just calling it by a different name:-P) - and (b) anyway it would be good to have such things be opt-in, rather than have to opt-out of them by default. So yeah, somehow finding a way to explain the situation clearly and cleanly, and without so many words as I have used here. Plus, how would people even find this information? e.g. going to https://lemmy.world/, you see e.g. a "getting started guide", but there are already so many comments on it that the auto-scroll takes many times to populate them - and using the web UI at least, we can't really search through comments, until they are all loaded.

So maybe something could be done on the Lemmy Explorer? There is already an option to "include suspicious", maybe something similar could be done to "include politically extremist"? Although I suspect in that case it would end up going back to being opt-out again rather than opt-in, though at least it would move things forward in the tiniest manner. Otherwise, for good or ill, Lemmy remains relegated to basically users of linux who will put up with such things, whereas mainstream users will simply not bother.

Most instances - e.g. Lemmy.World - have already defederated from those two, though almost no instances do that also for Lemmy.ml. So it's a matter of just how much of that style of content that someone prefers to block, and in particular if blocking merely a handful of communities from them will be sufficient, or if someone wants to block the user replies in every community as well. It's nice to have choices, and I hoped to help streamline the learning process to figure out which option will have which effects.:-)

I almost dropped the Fediverse entirely, after making a comment in Chapotraphouse (that at least Biden was at the time bringing gas prices down which wasn't nothing to combat inflation -> yup, I absolutely stepped into it, never having heard of that community before, and with me previously having been on Kbin.social, I was extremely naive to expect anything close to the level of reasoned and factual discourse that I had come to expect from most other places on the Fediverse).

Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml immediately improved my experience on the Fediverse by >95%. Then blocking Lemmy.ml months later improved it substantially further. Yes, blocking individual users one by one is one approach... but there is also merit in trying to salvage someone's situation by large leaps as well.

Also, nobody that I tell about the Fediverse irl can handle it - the level of violent rhetoric here is not normal, for mainstream people. And most are therefore unwilling to stick it out for months until they can make it become closer to what they want. Even computer programers. People talk a lot about wanting to see the Fediverse grow, but I'm saying that federating with such instances is already turning away mainstream people.

It would be different if such content were opt-in, as in like users say yes show me these "categories" of topics, but as it is, the number of world-wide votes places it higher in people's feed than less offensive content, created slightly longer ago, and as we are saying it takes much effort to have to opt-out, all the more so if done person-by-person (and even more when you have to take time & attention to realize that "a meme is not always just a meme", but that it's not due to an individual user or ten, but an entire community that consistently behaves a certain way).

Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and Lemmy.ml helps make the Fediverse more palatable to a mainstream audience. They can always reverse the decision at any time, whereas if they leave the Fediverse, they are unlikely to return, their first impression having already been tainted by their earlier experience.

Oh is that why so many seem to ignore it?! Lemmy is still very unpolished, though still leagues ahead of Reddit, in our hearts! 🥰

That will never end... they will keep creating new ones! On the bright side, that's a sign of a healthy Fediverse. On the other hand, it shows how desperately we need technical advances like "categories" where we can turn on/off whole classes of communities, which is coming in some newer non-Lemmy Fediverse exploration tools (I don't know how high a priority it is but perhaps it will come to Lemmy as well, eventually).

In the meantime, we make do with what we have.:-)

Same in return!:-D

I like to think that we all waste many of our talents here - it's what brings us all together:-).

My theory was that they had kept him tucked away somewhere in Vorlon space all that time - I forget if they said he worked over others, but if so then he could have been kept either in stasis or merely with no work to be done in-between, which might be heaven for some but for his personality type seemed like hell.

But either way, like you said about Lyta, he was an absolute tool - their absolute tool.

Yeah and he could also have been a clone, so both rather than either-or:-). I don't think they'd hesitate to lie to him, or conversely to tell the truth about his abduction, so if he has memories that they allowed him to keep I presume they would be real - the Vorlons just couldn't care less otherwise so why not? (Occam's Razor)

You bring up a very interesting point about Kosh: yes the Vorlons were assholes, but he (it? they?) was not - and oddly enough, it wasn't that he "wasn't a (real) Vorlon", but rather like he was a true one and all the others were the fakes?

I don't quite have the words but like, he was what he was because he knew about the ancient task that they had set out for themselves hundreds of thousands or even millions of years hence, and decided to actually do it rather than as the others all seemed to, do the exact opposite of "guide" the younger races (to self-discovery).

John Sheridan was ofc the same type, as too was G'Kar: both men ready for war, while in the service of peace (a different purpose than the Vorlons... or is it?).

We see this all over now: people showing up on January 6 at the USA capital to "defend" democracy by... overthrowing it? And religion that somehow becomes warped into diddling kids, yet side by side with others in the "exact same" religion who take care of widows and orphans and do so much good in the world. The cheaters are never going to be honest about who they are, preferring instead to hide out within the existing substance living as parasites rather than do the work of making their own structures, borrowing its reputation and forms of earned authority - e.g. President Clark did not declare himself an emperor but retained the title of a democratic "President", despite the literal coup that gave him that position.

Kosh, John, and G'Kar were those who refused to blindly follow their culture to "just do the thing", and instead questioned everything according to the logical principles of self-consistency: "is what I'm doing right according to the goal that I want to eventually reach?", and by doing such they not only served their peoples (hehe, but not necessarily the ones in charge at the time) but also lead them, as in they went out ahead and did that next right thing, thus setting an example for others to follow, if they wanted.

So I said that I lacked the words but a stab at it could be: Kosh was who he was not despite being a Vorlon, but rather because of it. However, if true, that has massive implications for the nature of Truth, i.e. it must not be defined by a majority-rules consensus (even for something like a race of people or a democracy) and rather some other standard that if not purely external then at least is not entirely internally defined, in the sense that it is a combination of whatever was internal but also subject to the (external?) constraints imposed by the need to remain logically consistent.

As in, there was a "correct" way to be, and Kosh chose it in defiance of his people, which we as consumers of the media recognize and respect.

That show is so deep. Or perhaps it is better to say that I feel deeper as a result of thinking about the material presented in the show.:-)

Okay that's definitely not the one I was thinking of. However, he reportedly wrote a story a year for Issac Asimov's periodicals for almost two decades, plus his many actual books, so it is no surprise that some of his themes were re-used, yet hard to find the name of:-).

I thought the one I am thinking of was neat b/c the dinos were gate-keeping offering their transportation technology to humanity, thinking that surely no warm-blooded mammal could possibly keep their emotions in check to do what must needs be done, unlike the cold heart & keen mind of a reptile.

In other works like his collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke "Altered Carbon", Pohl used the concept of that "stack" to limit the spread of one human mind that would otherwise just be spread out amongst the stars with as many copies as bodies could be found to hold them. But in other anthologies there were other limitations preventing that (and presumably some others still that I haven't read where those limitations were removed?:-P).

Du hast mich gefragt und ich hab nichts gesagt

Is that the one with the "dinos"? I recall a short story about teleportation in that manner, and something happened, but it was the confirmation that got delayed. So the original person was up walking around, waiting to be sent again, drinking tea, etc... when the equation had to be balanced. Stories like that really make you think, not just bam-pow-punch-kick... in space.