Right. Sus, like I said. You can’t trust people willing to use their authority to protect kids.

Although, when it’s put like that, it seems people are also sus who want to or would use their authority to force users to accept the risk of seeing porn and gore by allowing NSFW communities. You know. They could always go somewhere else that already allows it but no they’ve got to cry that they want it here or there, a place they already don’t like and don’t want to visit.

I have a feeling everyone involved in those equations would disagree.

Censorship is certainly the kind of thing that drove people away from dotworld for preemptively defederating from Hexbear by fiat.

You should read some communist literature before pronouncing about it.

Historically, who funded fascists and who fought them?

Because liberals sleep in the same bed as fascists and both are ready to fight socialism tooth and nail?

Other than, you know, the millions and millions and millions of them organised in parties throughout the world.

That’s right, not wanting to have SFW communities interrupted by porn and gore is sus.

That is not what happened.

When the Lemmy software was first created, the original Hexbear (it had a different name, then) created a fork. A development or two down the line and the two forks were incompatible. The Hexbear devs started working on a fix long before the Reddit API-debacle exodus. It wasn’t easy because the fork added features that were incompatible with, let’s say, vanilla Lemmy until recently. The Hexbear devs eventually made the fixes, which made federation possible again. And the long-planned re-federation occurred. The timing is a coincidence.

As for federation, Hexbear asked it’s community which instances should be federated. To maintain the friendly culture of Hexbear, there was an agreement to only federate with a few instances. Before that happened, dotworld defederated preemptively. Since then, I have no idea whose federated or defederated with who because I quickly lost interest with the drama.

I should say that I’d never used Hexbear before federation with my instance. I learned all this because it’s publicly available knowledge. After federation, with all the drama, I searched ‘federation’ and some similar search terms on Hexbear communities and learned what I’ve just explained. The key point is that you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain motives for and the chronology of federation because, like the modlogs, the relevant conversations are still available to read.

Thanks for these!

Any good sources on this that you could recommend?

Also, YouTube ads are about the most random things. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad on YouTube for anything that I would actually buy. I’m not even nearly immune to ads, either. Show me a product that solves a problem for me and I’ll strongly consider it. Consciously and I’m sure subconsciously.

Google knows what I do for a living, where I live, and what I spend money on. Google also knows that I use YouTube primarily to watch videos in other languages. It’s not a secret to them. Yet they insist on trying to sell me products or services that have zero relevance to anything that I do. In English.

It makes me wonder if they’re even trying to profit through ads. I know the answer – no, not really – the advertiser is the customer, not me. It must be too complicated for them to realise that they could charge more for ads the more sales they led to.

I disagree that a flop means lost revenue. This is an industry that’s so adept at hiding income to avoid paying taxes, actors, and every other studio worker that dodgy accounting is known as ‘Hollywood Accounting’. Maybe we’re talking about different things. When I say Hollywood, I mean the movie industry as a whole.

Hollywood has failed to capture some income streams. From theatres, for example, as you say. But there’s still too much money to be made (and too much propaganda potential) for enough big money to leave that the problems of monopoly finance capital go away.

Good point. And it’s a lot easier to accept ‘failure’ (there could still be something learned in a game that doesn’t quite hit the mark) if the budget isn’t astronomical.

There are games like FFXV that get quite creative on a big budget. (Not sure if it’s AAA.) I enjoyed that game but some of the novel features bugged me a little bit and they skimped on some important features, I thought. Maybe there’s a better formula for trialling novelty than an all or nothing approach.

I can’t remember who it was. A famous actor, anyway. They were talking about what’s happened with movies. There’s nothing in the middle.

It’s either $100m+ or less than $3m. Either it gets a big producer and they pump so much money into it that it must be safe because it can’t lose money. Or is a small producer doing it for the love, but a small budget doesn’t go very far. The risky narratives done well would be funded somewhere between the two extremes but it’s just not how it’s done anymore.

In a strange way, to get more money in for the riskier productions, we need to get the money out of Hollywood. Can’t see it happening, myself.

We live distinctly under capitalism. No need for any other names that obscure that relation.

That’s partly because ‘tankies’ read theory. Liberal theory, Marxist theory, all of it that they can get their hands on. According to both liberal and Marxist theory, liberalism is the main ideology of capitalism. When ‘tankies’ oppose ‘liberals’, they are talking about the ‘progressive’ left of the Anlgo-European empire and what that ‘left’ calls ‘conservatives’. So if conservatives laugh when ‘tankies’ make fun of liberals, the joke’s on them because the ‘tankie’ means them, too.

There is absolutely no defence of fascism from ‘tankies’. That term usually refers to Marxist-Leninists, who praise Stalin and Mao for their stances against fascism, colonialism, and imperialism. If nothing else (and there is a lot ‘else’), anti-fascism is a central tenet of ‘tankie’ ideology and practice. Anti-fascism is/was a core tenet of all Marxist parties. If you think that a ‘tankie’ is ‘defending fascism’, you have misunderstood what they are saying and/or have inferred something from their words that they did not intend. Horseshoe theory is an intellectually bankrupt ‘theory’.

You are right about this:

We are inherently a position of compromise[.]

As Mao said:

… liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration[.]

This and the other types of liberalism are often what ‘tankies’ are challenging when they criticise ‘liberals’—not what counts as ‘liberal’ in the extremely narrow US electoral politics sense of the term.

Marxism is dialectical and historical materialism. It is the analysis of contradictory and internally-connected relations and processes. To detach NATO from the actions of its member states is anti-dialectical.

Additionally, as you say, words have meanings. When people criticise NATO it is as a stand-in for the imperialist world order. It includes the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, the ‘international’ courts and rules, and all their elements and capitalist lackeys. You’re making a semantic argument, which misses the crucial point: that NATO and its member states are concerned only with the wealth and power of their bourgeoisie, regardless of Russia.

I’m not trying to hide the fact that I have an agenda, that we can’t have world peace until there are no more imperialists, which includes and is often, in ordinary language, represented by NATO. If you interpret that as support for Russia, there’s not much left for us to discuss.

I stand corrected. I’ve only browse a few communities so that was my impression, but what you say makes sense.

aren’t around for actual intelligent debate

You’ll find that Hexbear users are all for intelligent debate between themselves, other comrades, and even with liberals when said liberals are willing to listen. From the post on Hexbear that sparked the dotworld defederation:

Please read and respect the rules of the community instance in which you are posting/commenting. Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda.

Sounds like there is a strong push for intelligent conversation but others aren’t willing to have it.

It’s not possible to be ‘left’ in any real sense of the term and not be ‘anti west’ in some form because west is structurally an ongoing regime of genocide and exploitation.