I like languages. This is my account to access West Lemmy.

she/xe/it/thon/seraph | NO/EN/RU/JP

  • 7 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it’s silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app – no need to know why it works, just that it does.



  • Also, like, language learning apps suffer from the same problem as dating apps: if these apps could actually teach you a language, you’d eventually get proficient enough at the language to no longer need the app — and if you no longer need the app, then it can’t harvest your data or subscription money anymore, and line goes down. So the app always needs to give you the impression that you’re making progress, while actually sabotaging your learning at every step.

    This isn’t to say that these apps don’t have a place in the language learning process, but rather I’m saying that you need to be incredibly wary not just of the privacy issues, but of how to actually use these apps effectively. If you’re aware of their tricks, then they become less effective.





  • I can’t find any laws that would apply in Norway’s or Minnesota’s criminal codes. The only laws there that I can find concern threats against specific people and threats to commit terrorist acts. People saying “death to Lorem-Ipsumland” is most likely just going to be taken as free speech.

    When I’m referring to “illegal content” I’m honestly specifically thinking of websites used in the proliferation of drugs, snuff, and sexual abuse material (incl. drawings thereof), and websites used to plan real-world criminal acts. It’s also illegal to share memes based on anime fanart due to copyright infringement, but you don’t really see anyone worrying about that, do you?



  • or that I was trying to make some sort of implicit comparison to terms like “people of colour”, […]

    Honestly that just seems like people reading too much into things, even though “people of NATO” is still a really unusual and imprecise phrasing. If English is your second language and it was sort of a heat-of-the-moment edit, then phrasing things oddly is understandable, and it’s really bad that people were assuming ill intent just because of unusual phrasing.

    Anyways, sorry if I’ve been too impolite and added too much to your stress, you do good work overall (and if this seems like groveling, sorry about that, too) — I’m not going to change my views, but it’s also probably best not to keep prodding at such differences, in your den. I wasn’t aware of this unwritten rule when I signed up and I’ll make sure to respect it regardless of how I feel about it.


  • This comment has been bothering me for the past two hours. I just don’t know how to respond to this perspective which clearly comes from a very different lived experience. Assuming you were a Redditor before, which types of subreddits did you spend time on? I spent most of my time in the past few years on TGCJ, which could be described as the most “anomalous” of the major trans subreddits. I see a lot of the TGCJ spirit in Hexbear, in how anti-respectability-politics and anti-tone-policing it is, and this is probably why I’m so invested in defending Hexbear even as a non-member.



  • I essentially agree with the quote, but I can think of plenty of things that are less trans friendly than a digital pronoun circle. My point is that there is a very large trans population on Hexbear, and we can only assume that the trans population there are also universally the types of trans people who are open to sharing their pronouns publicly anyways — or else they would most likely just join a different instance without that requirement.


  • I will summarize my views that I left on the first thread:

    • While I do not agree with mandatory pronoun marking, or with needing to have one’s neopronouns approved, the number of Hexbear users with neopronouns in their names indicates that the instance is extremely pro-trans and inclusive of all non-binary identities.
    • Ada has very poorly handled the response to her “people of NATO” statement in a way that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth regarding the administration of Blåhaj Lemmy. I have noticed that a comment left by a Hexbear user saying “death to Nazis and transphobes” is gone now as well, which if this was an act of a Blåhaj Lemmy administrator, further reflects poorly on Blåhaj Lemmy’s administration.
    • For as much as I’ve enjoyed some of Hexbear’s communities, such as !transenby_liberation@hexbear.net, Hexbear users have often been weird, annoying, or wrong as well. However, I do not think that being weird, annoying, and wrong is cause for defederation, and would prefer that defederation be reserved for illegal content and neo-Nazis, lest we create a culture that is hegemonic in its beliefs and values.
    • The ideal solution is for individual users to be able to block Hexbear, but this appears to only be possible using uBlock Origin and half-possible with one of the mobile clients for Lemmy. Until this becomes a feature of Lemmy itself, I believe that Hexbear should be defederated if this is the will of a majority of Blåhaj Lemmy users.

    I will also state that I am biased in my views due to the fact that I am an anarchist who doesn’t use the word “tankie”, I am very strongly opposed to respectability/civility politics, and I am very careful about SIFTing every bit of news that appears on my feed. For these reasons, my experiences with Hexbear and its users will be markedly different from those with differing views or social media practices, a number of whom report experiencing “harassment, brigading, disinformation, and bad faith arguments”. I am sure that these people are being honest, but I can only speak from my own experience.

    Lastly, I would like to note that I read that a number of Hexbear users were opposed to federation to begin with, due to the potential disruption this could be for the site’s culture, and as Hexbear’s culture (e.g. emojis, which improperly scale on other instances) are taken to other sites. It is therefore my conjecture that some fraction of Hexbear users may be intentionally going against their admins’ words and being annoying on other instances specifically in order to get Hexbear defederated. I do not fully understand Hexbear’s culture or site politics, so I would prefer to hear from Hexbear users on this matter: since this thread is local-only, Hexbear users may wish to send me a DM explaining the controversy on their site regarding federation, and if my conjecture has any merit.

    I may edit this comment with other thoughts as they come to me.

    Edit: I received this DM from a Hexbear user regarding federation politics on the site. I am sharing this with his permission. I will create an audio version upon request.

    Relevant links in the DM:

    @JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net also sent me a message reading, “[…] Also, it looks like our admins have posted new rules concerning federated conduct. Some people are being grouchy about it, but I do think moderation is going to improve: https://hexbear.net/post/352119?scrollToComments=false