WELCOME!

Hello, and thanks for joining us during this exciting time in the fediverse!

It's been less than one month since I created this community, and somehow it's grown into a thriving community with >17k subscribers (~15.1k on lemmy.world, ~1.9k on the next few largest instances combined).

When I left that other site and created this community, I did it because I liked the sub and thought it would be fun to replicate (plus I was procrastinating, and I wanted to have something better to procrastinate with in future). I didn't realise it would grow so big so fast. Which brings me to my main point today...

NEW MODS!

We have a mod team now - please welcome (I hope I'm doing this correctly) @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected] ! Together, the four of us will ~~control the narrative by deleting posts/comments that don't fit our worldview~~ ~~abuse our power by banning whoever we don't like~~ hopefully do absolutely nothing cos y'all have been pretty nice so far.

(Also I was going to send out a group message to all the mods first but I realised lemmy doesn't have the ability to do group messages. So for some of the mods this may be the first time they're seeing their fellow mods. Maybe we need some sort of way to communicate? idk I'm pretty new to this lemmy thing and you can tell I'm a real professional here)

Anyway, keep doing what y'all are doing for now.

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[EVERYTHING BELOW WAS IN MY PREVIOUS PINNED POST, SO IF YOU READ THAT, FEEL FREE TO SKIP THE REST OF THE POST AND GO SPEND YOUR TIME (UN)PRODUCTIVELY ELSEWHERE]

NAVIGATING THE FEDIVERSE

If you’re new - no need to have a detailed understanding of the fediverse. Just dive right in, and you’ll learn the rest along the way.

Step 1: Join an instance. Don’t overthink this, any one is fine. You're going to hear people talking about server uptime, defederating, and a whole bunch of stuff. If you're interested, that's fine, but if not, just politely nod and smile, then blindly point to a random server and join it. Think of it as an email provider - there are slight differences, but you can send/receive emails to (almost) anyone with any provider. I recommend lemmy.world and lemm.ee

Step 2: Find communities. Click on “Communities” and change it from “Local” to “All”. Subscribe as you see fit.

Step 3 (Most Important): Post! Contribute wherever you feel like.

“WHAT CAN I POST?”

As the sidebar says, anything that involves “conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request”. This is usually to the detriment of the requester, but I recognize that may be hard to judge all the time.

For now, this includes text posts, images, videos and links. All I ask is that the “malicious compliance” aspect should be apparent - if you’re making a text post, be sure to explain this part; if it’s an image/video/link, use the “Body” field to elaborate.

For now, posts/images about events that did not happen to you or anyone you know is fair game, as long as it happened. Fiction writing is a good skill, but not encouraged here.

You’ll notice that I said “for now” a lot. That’s because I wouldn’t be surprised if the rules changed over time. If we do change the rules, it will be done in consultation with you guys, and with advance notice. Which brings me to…

FEEDBACK

I (and the mod team) would love to hear your thoughts on how we can make this a better place. If there’s anything you’re unhappy with, or if you just have suggestions, please post them in this thread. If you prefer, you can also message any one of us.

OTHER COMMUNITIES

Remember how I said we wouldn't abuse our power? I'm adding a shoutout here to two other communities that are totally awesome because I created them:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Feel free to join and participate if it’s of interest to you!

Cross-posted from https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/143612

From mashable r/pics has been "forced" to transition to NSFW by "following the policy".

I'm in property management, specifically maintenance (I know landlords bad but I don't own the property; just my job). I got a letter from the city informing me of a violation because they couldn't inspect a vacant apartment. See, they scheduled a property wide inspection for the whole property awhile ago and they couldn't get into this apartment. Two weeks later I get this letter that we're in "violation" and don't rent the apartment until they can inspect. Well, the paperwork arrived late (their fault) and the apartment is already re-rented. So we could potentially be fined because that makes so much sense. Sorry for the longish backstory. I'm now going to send the inspector, and everyone in the department including the director, an email whenever we get a vacancy at any of our properties. Probably I can make a program to automate this. We manage 70 complexes, 2000 apartments. Enjoy the emails.

This is a story from my dad.

During a recession he applied for a small personal loan for a few thousand dollars from his bank. He had excellent credit, was a homeowner, stable job, yadda yadda. His loan approval should've sailed through easily.

But because of the recession, the bank was trying to be extra careful about loaning out money. A loan officer called him to review his paperwork, and asked him what he was going to spend the loan on.

Dad was pissed. He said it's a PERSONAL loan, and it's none of their business what he's going to do with it. It's personal.

The bank dude was really nice, he explained the situation and said he's just doing his job. He had to fill out paperwork, one of the spaces required that he writes what dad was going to do with the money.

Dad said, "Ok, when I get the money, I'm going to take it all out of the bank in cash, go home, open my window and throw it all outside."

He found out a few days later he was approved for the loan.

Great work by the mods. They maliciously comply with reddit by posting an open letter reminding subscribers to tag NSFW appropriately on their content and especially point out that if folks forgot to do this then this will force them under reddit's own existing rules to go NSFW.

[REPOST]

This was back in the '80s, my first job, working as a maintenance man at a local hotel. I'd been working there part-time since I was 16 and when I turned 18, I got a notice to attend jury duty. I picked a week and I let my boss know.

The owner of the hotel found out and sees me in the hallway and tells me that I need to do "whatever it takes" to get out of jury duty because he needs me at the hotel that week for a large dog show, and if I'm not at work, I'm fired.

When I get to jury duty, day 1, I get selected for a week-long trial, and the judge asks jurors if there's any reason we cannot serve on the jury. They go around... When they get to me, I'm nervous, never been in court before and too scared to lie.

Cue malicious compliance.

I tell the judge that the owner of the business I work at will fire me if I'm not back today and said I needed to do everything I can to get out of jury duty or I'm fired, other than that I'm fine serving. The judge looks p*ssed.

The judge has me approach the bench, asks for the name of the owner, location, etc. Then he hands the court officer a paper and says something to the officer. I'm told to return to the jury box. About an hour later (still selecting a jury), the officer returns with the owner, visibly shaken, in handcuffs and walked to the front of the judge's bench.

The owner is standing in front of the judge. The judge asks him questions which he apologetically tries to worm out of.

Then the judge instructs him that I will be here for jury duty, I will serve as long as I need to, and he should NOT do anything to retaliate against me -- and that the judge is filing charges and will be instructing the clerk to check with me regularly and if, for any reason, I am fired or face any disciplinary action at work - he will hold the owner in contempt, violation of a court order, and a bunch more legal stuff. He will spend time in jail thinking about how important jury duty is.

Then the judge makes him apologize to me, in court!

I made it onto the jury and I served the week. I reported back to work the following week. I expected some blowback, but I never got fired, none of my shifts were changed and I got paid for my time in jury - I didn't ask why I got paid.

The clerk did check back a few times and I was told to call the judge's clerk's direct phone number if anything happened. It was awesome, I was pretty much bullet-proof and worked until I saved enough to go back to school.

TL;DR: When I got my first notice for jury duty, my boss told me to get out of it or I'd be fired. Being the scared 18-year old that I was, when the judge asked if any of us couldn't serve, I told him what my boss had said. The judge had my boss dragged into court and threatened with jail time. I ended up serving on the jury and getting paid for the days I missed at work.

How do you properly conjugate "Reddit" in Latin? First, you need to know if the proper noun, "Reddit", is male or female and base the conjugation of the verbs in the sentence on its gender , just as in Spanish or French. Reddito? As in "Carthago Delenda Est"? At first, it seemed easy to just use "Reddito", since Carthage was a city and Reddit is a community of sorts. The I realized that Reddit is no longer a community, but a hostage situation. What gender to use, then? Surely the ancient Near Eastern peoples had camps where they held captives or hostages during negotiations. Hostage trading was big business for them. My father in law is a retired Latin teacher, maybe he can help me parse this out.

Some exceptions seems to be accepted as long as it involves Wales and France (Wales being Pays de Galles in French).

That applies to newcomers too. For example, if you want to lock a thread, simply comment "!lock".

So in just one week, we’ve grown to >7k subscribers (~5.3k on lemmy.world and ~1.2k from the next 5 largest instances), which is way more than I expected.

I've been modding this community alone, and it's been fine - we haven't had many issues so far - but I should start looking for mods before any issues arise.

If you have an interest in modding, please message me or comment below, and I'll reach out to you!

EDIT: thanks everyone who responded, I've got enough responses now!

Moderators flood feeds with pictures of TV comic as they fight owners’ plans to go public

Edit: Replaced the cat tax with a still image.

So this is a tiny and very mild malicious compliance on both mine and a neighbour's part. Might be boring for not-cat-owners (or most people) to read.

Me and my neighbour have cats, and we both live in condominiums some floors above ground level. To keep our cats safe, we both had installed balcony cat nets that covered the whole of the open part of the balcony so that our cats can't fall down and get injured. When the condo's board (much like an HOA) members changed to a majority of retired older people, we got threatening notices demanding that we remove our nets as they were against the rules. The nets were apparently considered ugly eyesores and "as blights upon the community".

So we perused the rules, and discovered that the rules indeed specified that any nets spanning the balcony must have the board's permission (which they would not grant), and we're sadly not allowed to glaze the balconies to close them. However, trellises and privacy screens were ok. So my neighbour inquired about clarifications of the rules and got the following official responses: -Any trellis material (even metal wire) is allowed, as long as it is not classed as a net and does not cover more than 50% of the open parts of the balcony -Any kind of mesh within the trellis, such as fabric, privacy screens, wire or fake/real climbing vegetation is allowed.

After double checking with the municipality's building permit office to see if hardware cloth type meshes would qualify as a trellis and not as nets, my neighbour put up a hardware cloth that covered half the open space and reinforced it with chicken wire. We put up a wooden trellis that covered half the open space, and reinforced it with wire to cover the gaps.

Now, apparently the combo of hardware cloth and chicken wire on my neighbours balcony led to rust fairly quickly just over the spring, it doesn't look pretty. The board members were seething about the even worse eye-sore, but we were in the clear rule-wise. They gave us specific official permits from the board to put up the plastic cat net again, but he has dug his heels in about the rusty mesh combo. He even got balcony flower boxes made of corten steel, and clad his "trellis" with clear plastic to annoy them further.

I don't mind, our cats are safe with the current solution. But seeing the board members seethe every time they pass by the yard and see our balconies feels quite satisfying.

Cat tax provided.

Here's a shorter story of malicious compliance, again from when I was working front desk at a value/budget motel.

After working at a front desk for a while, you get used to all kinds of guest interactions and don't take it to heart. Some guests are more talkative, some are just curt. I never get bothered either way. I know some people came off a long drive and just want to sleep, and don't particularly want to talk to me, that's fine.

During check-in, I have a standard script that I use for every guest. It depends on the hotel, but it's always something like "Here's 2 copies of the room key, turn the key clockwise, it sticks a little so wiggle it a bit. Your room is on the left/right of this corridor. The ice machine is down that corridor. Breakfast is available from 7am-10am at the lobby, check-out time is 11am. You can adjust the heat in your room using the knob on the wall, but please don't leave the windows open while running the heat."

I usually say all that while holding on to the room key, and then hold out the room key and offer it to the guest once I'm done. However, I had this one guest who seemed to be in a particular hurry and did not want to listen to my script. After my first sentence, he reached across the counter to grab the keys from my hand and turned around to walk away. This was the first time I had encountered that, so it caught me off-guard for a bit. As I recovered, I started to say "uh, sir-" to try and catch his attention before he left.

Without turning round, he said "I've been here before, I know the drill, I don't need to hear anything else you have to say."

Ok that I get. The problem was, I saw where he parked his car, and he missed a sign in the parking lot that said not to park in one specific area because construction would be starting soon. The sign was posted on the side of the counter too, but nobody reads those unless I point it out to them.

I said "Ok but-" and was promptly cut off by a "Goodbye!" as he walked out of earshot.

The next morning, the contractors came by. Naturally, they used the space reserved for them in the parking lot and built a little fenced-up area to store materials.

The next evening, the same guy comes over and complains that the contractors blocked him in that morning, and he had to wait 15 minutes for them to open the gates and let him out.

I said to him "Oh I was trying to tell you that yesterday sir, but you said you knew the drill, and so I assumed you saw the sign posted in the parking lot and the sign beside me, and I didn't want to waste your time any more."

He walked away without a word.