The why (ICE) is pretty clear. I was really more interested in where - how widespread is this?

Because honestly, the silence is chilling. It feels like the day is being smothered in this blanket of lukewarm fear.

Someone needs to go back to the Arcane University and retake Enchantment 101:

Salute from the old skool! And oh my brother, does the internet archive have a treat for you…

There’s also an astroturfing campaign against it as well over there - I’ve noticed a lot of bot comments and bullshit when I post links to here from there.

They’re not gonna use it as a prison. They’re going to use it as a toehold to try and intimidate San Francisco with a standing military presence on the island. Don’t get me wrong - they will imprison people there, but it’s about getting a base for ICE right outside the loudest sanctuary city in the nation.

Alcatraz was built as a military fort and lighthouse, designed to control all maritime traffic into and out of the Golden Gate, long before it was used as a federal prison. That’s what’s really going on - they’re making sure they have control of the second largest port on the West Coast.

IF YOU WERE A REAL MAN IT WOULD ALREADY BE A WETWALL

Per Starfleet regulation 80085FUQ-CRSHR-023, an interactive, slappable version of Ensign Crusher is to be placed in every public starship venue:

Your post is now in compliance with Starfleet regulations. Thank you and have a nice day.

Shit, you triggered my reddit PTSD. I’m having flashbacks…

Lemmy the software’s reputation has become conflated with the reputation of lemmy.ml, which promotes an authoritarian center-left viewpoint that regularly denies documented genocides. This is unpalatable to many end-users.

As such, unless the two are separated clearly and lemmy the organization disavows its involvement lemmy.ml, the overall reputation of the software will degrade, resulting in less use, less money for the developers, and the eventual collapse of the lemmy infrastructure.

Voat is an example of a great software package that became completely tainted by the (developer moderated) site to the point where you can’t mention it in polite discourse any more. Not exactly the same circumstance, and in that case it was taken over by right-wing racists, but the dynamics are very similar.

Your reading is correct, and in my experience, it makes both the mods and devs happier when their roles are entirely separated. It insulates the dev team from getting distracted and having their time consumed by the social dynamics of site drama, and it keeps the mod team from getting bogged down in technical issues, allowing them to focus on the audience, not the technology.

Point of corvid order - if it’s shiny, it can’t be trash.

lemmy.ml is an important testbed for new releases at scale. Many many issues have been caught by the dev team deploying there. lemm.ee too for that matter.

In general, it’s considered bad practice to use a live site for testing dev updates, but I can see the value in having this available in this case. However, if they want to use a live site as a test bed for new features using a large audience, then they should ensure their moderation team doesn’t allow the reputation of the instance to become what lemmy.ml’s has. The fact of the matter is that it’s become toxic branding to the overall Lemmy effort, and is actively undermining the dev team’s efforts by impacting them financially.

The only way I can see to do this is at this point is by ceding their involvement in lemmy.ml to another team and rebranding join-lemmy.org as a software package, not a political statement.

So all the discourse around lemmy.ml has made it clear to me that Lemmy’s primary org has fallen prey to a key problem I’ve experienced running multiple social media sites and seen in my professional life as well.

And it boils down to this:

The tech guys are trying to be moderators. These are two entirely separate jobs that need completely different types of people to successfully execute the role.

Tech folk are brilliant in their subject, but often terrible at understanding people, social dynamics, and the limits of acceptable discourse. Their profession requires them to spend enormous amounts of time alone, which limits their real world experience, often to a crippling degree.

Good moderators (what used to be publishers and editors in the days of print) are those who understand people like tech folk understand SQL. They understand the multiple layers of subcontext that can be derived from an innocent sounding statement, and they have an innate sense of social dynamics and what is of interest to their audience. They also know how to speak to their audience and promote good content.

Most importantly, they understand that they are the gatekeepers of the publication’s reputation, and safeguard it by being as impartial and fair as possible… a lesson the moderators of lemmy.ml have clearly failed to learn.

The only way to solve this dilemma in Lemmy.org’s case is this:

1. Separate the mod and dev teams. Devs should not mod, and mods should not dev

2. Abandon or spin off lemmy.ml to folks not on the dev team - the fact that the instance is run by members of the dev team taints the reputation of the entire project and infrastructure. I do believe in free speech, but in this case, the reputational damage lemmy.ml has caused to the financial state of the dev team is too great to ignore.

3. Lemmy.org needs to clearly state this delineation and prevent the official dev team from running instances officially attached to lemmy.org.

If this doesn’t happen, I think that donations will continue to decrease until the project starves. There is great value in what the dev team has done, but unless they abandon lemmy.ml and focus entirely on development, I think this project will fail financially unless another dev team with a better rep takes their place.

At first I was like:

…then I saw this:

And began to realize that things were about to get bad…

I didn’t realize the drama, the pathos:

The good times:

…and the bad:

After much contemplation, I realized there was only one meme I could post in defense:

Either that or you need to stop drinking gasoline…

Haven’t done it myself yet, but here’s the docker install guide… seeing what your username is and all…

Gen X here. There has been huge shift in office culture, and the generational shift from boomers out of it has led to a completely different experience, with the biggest shift being in the decrease in overt misogyny and outbursts of anger. Most of my worst bosses were from this generation, including one individual that would literally start screaming and hitting the wall when something went wrong.

Their generation is marked by a lack of impulse control and a deep inner rage that can often be triggered by trivial inconveniences. They also seem to have a vindictiveness to them that I never really understood, holding grudges far past their expiration date. This is in significant contrast to their parents’ generation, which, for all its problems, always seemed to treat us Gen X folks kindly.