yes.

feelings are not love. the yare feelings. love is the actions you take.

it doesn’t exist. but i work for a company that does real work.

somewhat. early reddit was a lot more mainstream. it was mostly a link aggregator for news stories in its early days and subreddits were not really a thing until later. i started using it in 2007 and it was much different by 2010.

the dominant ideology was also libertarian and auti-authoritarian, not extreme leftism of various flavors that are pro authoritarian. there was very much a lack of controlling the narrative and language policing… that didn’t take hold until mid 2010s as the reddit ‘scandals’ caused the admins to start cracking down.

life is reductive. it’s not my job to have ‘empathy’ for militant losers who sit around flipping between whining about their lives and then engaging in violent political fantasizing about how they will kill the non believers to the communist cause to usher in the utopia.

because most lemmy users are extreme leftists who think everyone is a fascist. i am a facist and a nazi according to lemmy. and think think nothing of harassing and banning anyone who doesn’t agree with them. at least here i can on be banned on the .ml or extremist instances, not lemmy wide.

if there is anything i’ve learned, online or not. miserable people hate anyone who isn’t as miserable as they are and will harass and insult you for not being miserable just like them.

for example, i like my job. this makes a lot of people immediately hostile to me when they find out because they hate their job.

i don’t see any of that. just normal porn that is blurred.

most small business in my city are vanity businesses supported by a wealthy consumer base who will pay 6 bucks for a lb of flour to virtue signal their status and wealth. or stuff like the lesbian book store, the knitting/fabric store, the ‘gift’ store full of useless trinkets like a paper weight that’s $200, etc. these shops are empty 90% of the time, but they aren’t being run for a profit, they are run because some bored rich person wants to run a business for funsies.

outside of that, very little legit small business left. very few mom and pop operations and the ones that are left are closing up, or use political corruption/bribery to keep competition out such that they are a monopoly. the closet is probably hardware stores, salons, and dry cleaners, other ‘i need this today’ type of businesses.

most ‘small business’ is stores/retaurants that are run by corporations but pretend they aren’t. like in the square by me there are 7 different bars… they are all owned by the same corporation. they just have different decorations and some different items on the menus but are 70% the same.

yeah, zero of my niche reddit interests are here.

i never got banned or harassed in those communities. i got banned/harassed from my city subreddit over politics and pointing out how entitled and crazy a lot of the posters there were. but the mods love the drama so they encouraged those posters.

reddit was niche until the 2016 elections. that’s when it really started exploding and you started hearing abotu it in the mainstream media and boomers had heard of it.

because the interface is archiac, and the majority of topics are extremist.

normal people see the front page of lemmy and they see a bunch of weirdos going on about linux, communism, and trans stuff.

any of the big threads with 100s of comments are full of crazies going off about violence and hate towards mainstream political positions and lifestyles.

i am ‘mainstream’ and i have to block multiple users per day because i get constantly harassed by nutcases telling me how evil i am for using windows/mac, being a socialist democrat, and driving a car to work. if you disagree with the militant doomer wannabe revolutionaries you’re not going to have a good time here.

You mean I’m not a delusional internet revolutionary who thinks using Linux and making internet comments is going to bring about a communist utopia? Yeah, I’m one of ‘those people’.

Only person making your life miserable is you.

Yeah it has. It’s been way worse, actually.

But don’t let history get in the way of your doomer beliefs I guess.

The world has always been this way. You just weren’t being doped on it 24/7 via your phone. There has always been war, corruption, and abuses of power.

It’s a lot easier to think the world isn’t ending when the news is a 30m broadcast once a night, or a news paper each day, vs endlessly consuming algorithmic rage bait calibrated to stimulate your fear response.

Nobody is sending anyone to camps bro.

Might help if your talking points were delusional conspiracy nonsense.

it’s not about making sense.

it’s about absolving administrators of accountability. when someone violates the policy they just point to it and claim there is nothing they can do, it’s beyond their control.

who do you think sets up these polices? the admins themselves.

lemmy is too small to have active niche communites. the only active communities are the general ones.

that’s cool, but the vast majority of people don’t. for them it’s about whether you are on their team, and how pure your loyalty to their team is. discussion and discourse are violations of that purity.

the issue is that ‘political’ people inject their politics into everything, and want to put every comment and commentator into the prejudged boxes they regard as right and wrong.

they don’t care about what anyone says. just about passing judgement and feeling superior.

the issue is that people who are wrong thing everyone else is wrong.

just like on lemmy every communist/anarchist thinks anyone who does agree with them is a nazi and if ONLY they would read the manifestos they’d see the light and truth of their beliefs… meanwhile also whining about religions folks who do the same things.