Valbrandur

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.

Gains goblins. Those things in your life that rob you of what otherwise would be your hard-earned gains on strength, muscle size, endurance or whatever other thing you want to develop by training.

It can be anything: a person (like that gym bro that maybe distracts you more than it's good for you), a medical condition, a commitment, or what is usually most common (and be honest here, because for most people it is one in this category), a bad habit of yours, amongst others.

Feel free to share.

Just sharing something silly that I decided to put together. Try to see how many of them you can recognize. Optional video essay background music to go along the post.

Tier 1: The big three. On top of the iceberg due to the enormous impact that they have had in the world's history and popular culture, being known by even the most politically illiterate. It is very likely you have been told more than once to move here by angry people during political discussions.

Tier 2: Smaller socialist states that stand out more than the rest in their respective regions. Still well known and recognized, but most people have a weaker grasp on them than on the ones listed on the tier above.

Tier 3: More unlikely to pop up in debates about communism, this likelihood increases drastically if the person you are talking with had a grandmother whose castle, servants and favourite pony were taken away by one of these states.

Tier 4: This tier marks a barrier: an average Jane and Joe is most likely not able to recognize these. However, they do not suppose a very deep level of knowledge for a ML, who should already know about their existence and point one or two facts about them at the very least.

Tier 5: Many people are unable to even point on a map where these countries are located, and much less to even know that they were once socialist states. If you know in depth about them, it is very likely that you put a desproportionately large focus on anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in your theory journey. It is also equally as likely that you haven't seen the sun in years.

Tier 6: The bottom of the iceberg. These states are almost never mentioned even by the people who are well read on the states on the tier above, despite the very unique and interesting challenges that they had to face as socialist projects. Venturing into these shows a willingness to search for knowledge further away than anything that you will ever need in practice.

Tier 7: The dark depths of socialist history. Some are states that lasted for several years flying under the radar of even the most dedicated MLs, but most of these are ephemeral projects, having lasted as much as the elements at the bottom of the periodic table, or what is the same, about two or three times longer than the average anarchist project. If you know about these, you either live in the place where they existed or you most likely learnt about them not in the pursue of anything practical, but searching for knowledge purely for the sake of it.

Tier 8: Have you ever had a dream that that you um you had you'd you would you could you'd do you wi you wants you you could do so you you'd do you could you you want you want him to do you so much you could do anything?

Are you someone who has left their country of birth to move and settle somewhere else, or who is thinking of doing so in the future? What led you to take that decision, or what is making you consider it? What have your experiences been until now, and what do you expect and hope for in the future?