OpenStars

I think that - like porn, receiving catcalls as you walk down the street, and ~~spam~~ marketing solicitations - being able to interact with people who ignore consent should be opt-IN, rather than have to be opt-OUT. I see that you have a valid reason for wanting to hear what they have to say... but for myself I almost left the Fediverse upon stumbling into ChapoTrapHouse, and again another similar incident in lemmygrad.ml. Whereas now, I have blocked both of those plus also Lemmy.ml, and I kid you not, >99% of the toxicity is instantly gone from my feed. The latter also blocks some innocent people too, who may try to discourse with me and not realize that I will not receive a "notification" about it, but I have made my peace with that, since on the whole I do not want to make time for that shit in my life.

On Reddit I used to pride myself that I had never blocked anyone - and as a mod it wouldn't have helped anyway - but now I value my time and sanity more I guess:-). Seriously, it takes a mental toll: it makes you more defensive, more cagey, less likely to speak for fear of being misunderstood and pounced upon, and when you do speak your own answers become more snarky, in closer alignment with even if nowhere near the extreme that theirs does. I felt it was affecting my communication at my irl job, and was ready to leave social media altogether even before Rexodus happened, and I found here. Fortunately Kbin.social showed me a friendlier side of the Fediverse, before it went defunct and I saw the rest. Now, literally every single person that I tell about Lemmy irl gives me dirty looks the next time we talk, citing the high volume of extremist content here, calling for literal and bloody violence. Forcing new users to be exposed to this content as being opt-out rather than opt-in is going to SEVERELY hinder the survivability of Lemmy, much less growth.

Plus, as you've seen, it leads to things like those communities being banned outright, even from instances such as this one that haven't gone the full defederation route. It would be SO MUCH friendlier to simply "label" the content... but that would take extra work effort from the developers, plus who would write up those labels (I think it should be the very communities themselves - but they haven't taken such an initiative so far, e.g. in their sidebar areas, or even to follow the rules that their very own admins commanded them to do) and anyway here we are, so we work with the tools we have. Which are at least better than they used to be, and improving all the time:-). One down-side is that every instance that gets defederated leads to another one receiving a bunch of new alts so it merely shifts the line. Right now that is lemmy.ml, but with so many people blocking them these days it will soon shift to midwest.social, and then from there... As I guess you know, these are people who refuse to follow the rules - even their own - yet demand to be HEARD, the consent of those who do not want to listen be damned.

Blaze knows like 1000x more than me - e.g. they introduced me to that [email protected] community, and afterwards we both keep telling anyone who will listen about it:-). Speaking of, they will tell you the same: check out lemm.ee as a server that basically does not defederate from anyone. I checked their modlog and don't see any communities removed from hexbear.net, and both https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] and https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected] work. If you want something that sits solidly on neutral ground to survey all around you, that one is the hot pick right now. Though it is far from the only one - e.g. another is https://reddthat.com, still another is lemmy.zip, and there's others too. All of those have even remained federated with lemmygrad.ml, as well as hexbear.net. Ofc you can always go visit hexbear.net itself too - either with an alt or if you don't want to vote or talk, without an account. There are many paths available to you:-). Ironically lemmy.ml itself would not be ideal, b/c it has defederated from lemmygrad.ml (I don't know why:-).

196 sounds like a simple misunderstanding, though exactly what we are talking about here: they had a golden opportunity to listen patiently, assess where you were coming from with your question, and if you were "wrong" then to educate you about the situation - to all of which you (as I would in your place) extremely likely would have said THANK YOU, whether they managed to cause you to change your mind or not, for e.g. spending the time and engaging in that proper, civil conversation. Fwiw, I've never heard Ada (the admin) fly off the handle like that, and conversely have talked about being the way I described above instead. So I'm sure it was just a power-tripping mod of that single community - yes we have those here too, that was not merely a thing of our shared Reddit past:-P. I too get weird vibes from it and it is the only - and first - community that I always banned whenever I made a new account somewhere on the Fediverse. I hope that did not sour your experience with the rest of that instance... but if so, it is their loss. Though like my own bad experiences with ChapoTrapHouse and lemmygrad.ml, it is good that both of us did not simply abandon the entire concept of the Fediverse, b/c there really are good people here, even though there's also a lot of noise and children's chatter about as well.

Anyway I am glad that you managed to solve this mystery - of hexbear.net not being defederated, but those certain communities residing on it having been removed - that was indeed seemed quite strange to me!:-)

Oh that's fascinating. Again I did not even know that was possible - it looks like someone, but a mod, NOT an admin? - removed it a month ago, then 13 days ago unremoved it and then removed it again. These must be some new features involving the mod user tools from 0.19.5, bc I thought that previously that was not possible.

Also, the mod log may not be telling the full truth there - bc who would such a "mod" be, like how could there be a mod of Chapotraphouse of hexbear.net from startrek.website? - it does seem rather something that only an admin should be able to do. The totalitarian Lemmy.ml devs routinely hide stuff from the modlog though so it makes sense that this too is merely what it says but not what happened.

It looks like you'd have to talk to the Star Trek admins to find out more.

The main page sidebar says they are at a Mastodon instance though.

@[email protected] Do you know why people on startrek.website cannot see certain communities on e.g. hexbear.net?

I did not think it was even possible to block specific communities from an instance. I thought what Farid might be referring to is a change where some communities are allowed to be set to "local-only", so that only those with an account specifically from that instance can make posts there. Then again, https://hexbear.net/c/chapotraphouse says that its Visibility is set to "Public" (even though I thought they said that they looked forward to changing it - did that never happen?).

Various methods of linking that I've tried - explained in this guide post (btw @[email protected] that is a neat community to subscribe to!:-) - such as https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] does not work for me, and the bang syntax never auto-completes it? Even this kind of searching https://startrek.website/search?q=%21chapotraphouse&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll for the community name does not work either (despite ChapoTrapHouse specifically saying that it should in its sidebar), nor clicking Communities, select All rather than Local, and type e.g. "chapo". So it is not merely that nobody has subscribed yet - this instance seems somehow to really not be aware of that community?

Perhaps this is a (new?) style of "partial defederation", where not the users but the communities on an instance are excluded. But that cannot be right either, b/c e.g. https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] works (it has no visible posts, though that is normal behavior whenever nobody has ever subscribed to it before from a particular instance, in this case star trek, but if one of us subscribed then roughly a day later the posts should be there - for comparison, https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] also works and shows the posts). Though neither https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] nor https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] work. So some communities on hexbear.net seem to be selectively excluded from federation on startrek.website.

To be clear I am not complaining - this is actually a helpful protection against users going into those unawares, as in: if they refuse to mark their communities as local then they should not be surprised when others make that choice for them - though I am curious.:-)

A summary of what happened between Blahaj.Zone and Hexbear.Net

Ada, an instance admin of Blahaj.Zone is extremely welcoming and inclusive - I have always actively looked forward to reading anything they say wherever/whenever I encounter such across the Fediverse, and have never been disappointed so far. They, like the instance overall, are the real deal(s).

Unfortunately, hexbear.net merely pretends to be thus, but like everything else they do it is a farce while their real goal is to be argumentative. They are actually quite open about this if you read past the initial prepared statements (or even read the official sidebar of the_dunk_tank) - on the instance they call it "dunking on" people, or "struggle sessions", and no matter how many users, mods, and even admins/devs they turn away as a result (as that vote post mentions), they cannot seem to help themselves, even outside of their echo chambers where that is allowed & actively encouraged. Even/especially when their own admins beg & plead - and yes, also explicitly command - their userbase to FUCKING STOP... they will not. And so far I haven't even mentioned the brigading... no matter how deeply I delve into this, there is always more.

Defederation is - and should be - always a last resort. That said, it is necessary sometimes, b/c as it has been said the only thing that can never be tolerated is intolerance - e.g. if cancer cells refuse to inhibit their own growth, then it must be cut out for the sake of the rest of the body to live. Also, as you see, it was actually hexbear.net that initiated the defederation from most of those places not the other way around - Lemmy.World did not wait to be offered the chance to be on the receiving end, but for programming.dev, Blahaj.Zone, and Lemm.ee (which was kicked off but later refederated, read also from hexbear) it was hexbear.net's choice, and the reverse defederation was only in friendliness to avoid dangling one-sided conversations where users on their platforms could talk to those on hexbear but the latter would not even know that there was a message awaiting their receipt, and subsequent response - as you are asking about here but in reverse.

Startrek.website and mander.xyz tend to have their own focus and not attract all of this drama, hence why someone from hexbear.net can see the post and also comment on it, but users on e.g. lemmy.world, programming.dev, or lemmy.blahaj.zone would not see that comment. The hexbear user is thus shouting into the void, with respect to those instances, though not to ours who can see both.

The sad fact (imho) is that new visitors to the Fediverse will never have any of this explained to them - instead, they have to do something like personally make the mistake of replying to a post in ChapoTrapHouse, found by sorting your feed by All rather than Subscribed, and then after WEEKS and WEEKS and WEEKS of batshit insane responses that do not end despite zero response back from said user, they finally will know what to expect from hexbear.net: overall (as a pattern) they enjoy argumentation, do not constrain themselves to that process being logical or the statements to be factual, but they sure do enjoy the "dunking on" process, so long as it is delivered from them to others, though obviously not in return. And from the other side, users of hexbear.net will notice how very few people "react" to their posts made in those communities they can see outside of their instance - essentially for them the Fediverse contains fewer users, from their perspective. And then from our side, we see the drama between their sides, more so than even they do themselves.

Lemmy.World is the largest instance, and they preemptively defederated from hexbear.net a year ago, citing several examples of user comments that they wanted to protect their own userbase from.

Many other large instances have done similarly - another one is programming.dev (statement), although in their case if was merely to prevent one-sided conversations after hexbear.net defederated from them. The funny part of that story is how the admins took a vote, which indicated an unwillingness to defederate (27 to 19) but then did it anyway:-).

Anyway, many users of hexbear.net have made quite the reputation for themselves around the Fediverse, to the point where MANY instances felt the need to defederate from the entire instance (think: Truth Social but claiming to be leftist). And at this point, many users on it seem proud of that or at least consider it part of the cost of traversing the wider Fediverse using an account based on hexbear.net.

It was always the first community I blocked whenever I made a new account across the Fediverse.:-) But some people enjoy it so that's great for them.

Calendar, remind me to ask StackOverflow tomorrow if I can ~~parse HTML with regexs~~ get someone else to do my class homework for me?

TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚​N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

Sweet, my summoning spell worked!

So that they can browse by "All" and not (have to) see it. If you only browse by Local instead, or for whatever reason had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone, then there is no reason to block this specific community.

Since browsing by All can allow you to see new communities that you didn't know about, and especially sorting by New you can see content that often gets passed over - like poetry communities - a lot of people try to curate their feed not by building up a Subscribed list, but by filtering down from All.

Mostly [email protected], or some others (tho much smaller) by a similar name. I think there was one one Reddit too, which migrated here.

Okay but... what is the "purpose" of anything at all? Like, what does Facebook "do"? To its CEOs & stockholders, and to a vastly lesser degree the programmers, it manufactures money, with an input of electricity and people's time & attention spans. To the end-users though, it's a place to both send and receive, the former mostly cat & child photos, the latter seemingly, numerically speaking at least, vaguely nazi-like propaganda, including anti-vaxxer conspiracy nonsense ultimately paid for, some say, by the Russian government. Which brings up another sense of purpose: to distribute someone's "agenda", either of actual information, misinformation, or even straight-up disinformation.

Therefore I doubt very much that someone will manufacture sentience and consciousness for the ultimate purpose of placing into a household appliance... but if someone were to do the former, and then found that it's cheaper to simply hack away the sentience than to build up a new AI model without sentience included - let's say 10 minutes for the former, compared with perhaps 10 hours for the latter - but then oopsie they messed it up, and the machine may not be able to speak coherently when talked to, yet it still dreams when it is powered down in the master's nighttime or while they are away on trips that could still happen?

Who is to say what is the purpose that any higher being may have created us for? Perhaps our sole purpose is to simply exist, yet that is why those conditions were created - "don't murder, don't steal, don't rape your neighbor's property oops I mean wifey-poo, ...", all of those just flat make sense. Especially to a bunch of uncivilized, barely coherent ancient people's who didn't even wipe their butts after they pooped. Seriously, consider how many of those "religious rules" were things like "clean your ass", "when you see mold, fucking DESTROY it before it spreads", "don't drink pig's blood (b/c of ~~Salmonella~~ uh, I mean b/c I say so)", and it goes on and on "just just kill someone b/c you want to, but sometimes you know, you gotta do what you gotta do, so like here are the specific conditions that you are allowed to: self-defense, if they killed a friend of yours first [but NOT if they manage to flee to a certain "sanctuary city", UNLESS you manage to capture them outside of the walls of that city, and then it's all good] - but not just ANYONE can kill them, only the direct family members of those that were harmed", etc.

So whether this was like a time traveling situation, or aliens, or even just things that fucking made sense but people wouldn't do them unless/until they were wrapped up in "religious" language, whatever it is, there is a lotta good - yes as well as a lotta bad - inside of those texts. And most important of all: it wasn't meant for us, but rather them, those for whom the idea of washing their hands prior to eating was a really bizarre concept. If we are going to set ourselves up to be judges of someone else, then we need to hold ourselves to a REALLY high standard, and fully understand the implications of that. And - this is just my pov you understand - I think that means that we need to go beyond labelling something as merely "good" or "evil", and see deeper beyond it.

As e.g. the famous (an avid atheist apologist if that matters) philosopher Daniel Dennet did, in his book "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon", where he argues that religions helped mankind get over the earlier tribal, then nationalistic thinking process. e.g. you might be from Rome and I might be from Gaul, but if we are both "brothers" - not by blood, not by tribe, not even by nation, but by some other shared bond, in this case religion - then let's not fight and rather find a way to coexist peacefully, perhaps even more fully together? (as in help out in the fight against nature, or other non-us groups that may attack either of us separately, but with allies we stand a better chance, b/c Apes Together Strong:-P)

But anyway, as I mentioned earlier, even Jesus was staunchly anti-religion in the form of being anti-hypocrite, so getting back to your point: as humans, we've already created full-on living organisms for our pleasures. This is not sci-fi, we've done it since 1978 when we engineered a bacterium to carry the gene for human insulin. And you can for sure bet that those bacteria that did not uptake the gene were destroyed, aka killed, plus any batch that later loses it would also be killed (as would the large majority of those that do NOT lose the gene too, just b/c it's easier to fuck them up and re-make new ones than to recover them all in the bio-chemical cyclical manufacturing process). Okay, so that's not so much "creation" so much as "artificial modification", the same as we've done for e.g. dogs for millennia, just quicker, but we are getting closer to doing stuff de novo all the time - like inside a computer I mean, b/c even if we manufacture DNA we'd still be merely copying what nature has given us, just more abstractly in that case. And you know that when we do arrive there, we'll step over that line in a heartbeat, without a second's pause or hesitation as to whether we "should". It's just who we are.

Therefore, like everything else, any judgement that we pass - onto "God" or whoever - is also a mirror, reflecting how we judge ourselves. WE are evil, aside from any religious nomenclature, bc I'm using your very own terms here: "Creating life for the sole purpose of subservience is horrible, add on the threat of damnation for disobedience and that would make you, yes, evil" - and I'm saying, we've been doing this since at least 1978, and that's purely talking about genetic engineering, whereas if you include a wider definition that includes e.g. what we've done to dogs, then we were very likely doing that before we became Homo sapiens. (Caveats: we cannot create sentience... yet, nor create it de novo, again yet, but again, it's only a matter of time before we do one and then the other, in whatever order.)

A "God" though, might be evil, or might not be, but either way it's bound to be... "different", from who we are? Unless, arguably worst-case scenario, it's the same, and then we're fucked. And I think that's what scares people - thinking that "if God were like me, what will He end up doing to me?" (assuming He's real ofc, even just as a hypothetical thought experiment, though all such thought experiments are that way so this one is no different in that regard) Therefore, this will sound weird, I find the Bible kinda offering hope, that a creator God is not like us - He is so much more brutal than any human that has ever walked the earth yes, but strangely... less brutal than He could be, aka less brutal than either you or I would be - nay, already are. Just look at the computer programs we are conversing on - one single misstep and we'll kill this MFer and reboot it, without any hesitation whatsoever. If that makes us, or rather reveals that we are, evil... then that's that, but we aren't going to like... stop or not do that or anything. We show no love to things we consider "lower" than us, no matter how kind we might be to those of us in our same "tribe" or "category", especially when we think that someone is watching us, and therefore might be rewarded - hey, it's just monkey behavior, we can't avoid our heritage and it does no use to deny that, even as we struggle to rise above it, pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. So why should we expect any different? B/c our parents took care of us? But "God" is no parent. B/c society offers us "rights"? God is again no society, or at least not one on this Earth.

Though if God were like The Matrix, then He could be a network of computer AIs, existing in a higher "dimensional plane of existence" or however you would say that in a non-bullcrap-sounding way, totally within physical principles you know what I mean? Or if God were an intergalactic society, which like half a million years ago cast proto-humans down to have to start over technologically b/c of some prior infraction, like stealing an emperor's apple or whatever, then in either case such a "God" actually could be a type of society, irl? Or in that movie "Knowing" with Nicholas Cage, I don't know if there was a "god" but there were alien beings who looked kinda like angels and took a few humans away when Earth was about to be destroyed, mimicing the myth of the biblical story of Noah's ark. In all of these cases, notice how we are the ants while "God" is the human boy looking at us through a magnifying glass. Except there might be a real-world scenario where that's somehow less untrue - e.g. the infamously militantly atheistic show Stargate, where "God" was a society of higher-dimensional beings who parasitically like leeches predated upon the thoughts & prayers of their followers. Or like in Babylon Five, the Vorlons were like older kids in the playground, attempting to influence human society so that they could be used to fight in their ancient culture wars against "the shadows". Honestly we have no clue what's out there, "above" us, even if only slightly like in the technological sense, waiting to be discovered?

And therefore it's hard to judge, in the absence of knowledge. Though we CAN - and SHOULD - judge those who hypocritically abuse religion, to e.g. diddle little children, and prevent abortions thereby KILLING innocent people. But that's different - that doesn't require any sort of "understanding" of any magic man in the sky, only real people, really here on the real Earth. We can discuss more about "God" if you like, being "evil" or whatever - I kinda love getting deep into that topic, as you can see:-) - but importantly, even crucially: it's irrelevant, when the task at hand is to go after those who don't even believe what their own books say, and ignoring those, hurt people. Just like Jesus, in absolute peak irony:-).

Household appliances aren’t living beings.

I mean... not currently, no. Star Trek - standing on the shoulders of giants like Isaac Asimov ofc - does a fantastic job of exploring a variety of scenarios where they are, examples including Data in TNG and the holographic doctor in Voyager. But the main reason that humanity has not (again: yet!) created "living" appliances is lack of ability, though we seem to be fast closing this gap.

When we do, how will we relate to them then - will we demand their service? Force it? e.g. would you give your toilet a choice to flush or not? Perhaps you would, but only after having given it the ability to feel pleasure whenever you (as the Master) use it? Even if so, what if it decided, despite that, to never flush again? Or conversely, perhaps its the act flushing that gives it pleasure, so it flushes constantly all day long, using up your corporate-sponsored daily allotment of water - what do you do then? You NEED a toilet still... but this one doesn't work. Also this one is using up resources that you also NEED (in order to live yourself). Or maybe you are so wealthy that the loss of one toilet doesn't matter, but then again the loss of a large number of toilets, who I guess talk to one another on the internet in this example, would be too great to bear?

"God" is not the only one who is rather brutal - we can be quite brutal ourselves. Therefore we expect it of others. Conversely, if you believe the bible - that's not an accusation, I'm just saying it's good to consider multiple POVs - then humanity is brutal b/c God was such first, and that was a trait inherited in the copy process.

The Abrahamic god is evil.

I advise thinking beyond such simplistic terms but... by your definition, yes. e.g. when he reportedly punished I think it was Joshua for not killing every last man, woman, and child from a village - including toddlers + even those still in their mothers' wombs, & even the animals too - as the invaders took over the land that they were pillaging, but were not ruthless enough.

People forget that the original name for God is not "the santa-claus/easter bunny who brings good gifts (chocolate!) if you've been good all year long", or even "Jehova" but rather what translates essentially to t̶̳͠h̷͓̔e̴͆ͅ f̵̼̽e̴͆ͅa̵̛̦r̴͍̓, like He was some eldritch monstrosity (b/c to those primitives, He was!). For someone who actually believes in God, unlike the numbnuts fundies, they are - or at least should be - terribly afraid of Him. All the more so when they make shit up and talk in His name. Jesus may have come as a lamb (translation: gently), once, but even the New Testament makes mention that He will return later as a lion (translation: killing everyone on earth). For the sake of argument, just imagine that if it were to be believed, I picture it sorta like the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the aliens are like "okay, the earth is mine now, gtfo!":-P Which is just about the furthest thing from "nice" as you can get!

Anyway, He is indeed reputed by the original texts to be quite brutal, therefore the people engaging in revisionist history of what they claim to believe in are idiots living in a fantasy dreamland of their own design. I presume b/c it's more comfortable that way, since nothing whatsoever is demanded of them, especially in Christianity but also not much was asked in its predecessor Judaism either, mostly just sacrifices every time you are bad (even/especially if it was intentional). Which tbf seems to be human nature, common to all religions + atheism alike:-|.

Conversely, cells that grow despite being told not to are referred to cancer, and computer programs that refuse to listen to the OS are called variations of "undead" (unless its intentional and then then it's a "virus" or "trojan" or "worm" or some such).

So fuck religion, and especially those perverts who twist it around to feed their own ends at the expense of others - even Jesus said that much, on both counts - but philosophically I wanted to point out that this is an improper comparison between a marriage, with presumption of equality, vs. a very much unequal relationship between, if we are talking Christian, a creator and their created beings, or more broadly a higher vs. lower being. e.g., who among us doesn't get mad at our household appliances & tools if they do not work precisely as we want them to, every time?

i.e. while there are some fantastic arguments against religion or more specifically Christianity, chief among them being hypocritical-as-shit fundies, this is not one of them imho.