scrollbars

I agree. There's a long history of articles declaring Mastodon dead and yet it's still around and working fine for a lot of people. Lemmy and Kbin will probably be similar. Only VC backed sites need a billion users.

I'm sympathetic to what you listed, and it would be nice to see those things come to pass. I'm just cynical about anything that starts to sound like "regime change" after watching the US campaigns in the middle east these past couple decades.

Even though Tiananmen was a long time ago, there have been more recent cracks in the facade like the unrest over lingering COVID zero policies. It's encouraging to know that people do have limits, but I don't know how popular those sentiments are across the broader population.

Haha I can't read a drop of Chinese, but the one that everyone tends to recommend as a gateway is The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Haven't read it yet but I did watch Wandering Earth on netflix, which is based on a short story by the same author.

I also liked seeing that the networking comm was one of the early ones here. In general the local community list from a few days ago left me with a good vibe.

The name was funny and it sounds like the admin has the site running on a decently sized server. Also I saw that someone had created /c/LocalLlama, which is a machine learning sub I used to frequent back on reddit.

Glad to hear, I've been meaning to pick up some Chinese sci-fi myself now that more of that stuff is getting translated.

You can dislike the CCP without hating China, or being fanatical about it. There are people that have trouble with it, though. As an example you could say that the CCP sponsors campaigns of corporate espionage on a large scale to steal technology from other countries. That one is pretty uncontroversial. But some people have trouble preventing themselves from taking it further and making generalizations about how creative the country's citizens are, as an example.

lol this was my exact second reaction, the first being "hell yeah"

Yup, the flip side of the coin is that reddit really has a hate boner for China. The anti-CCP side has its own collection of nutty people, with a lot of the talking points tracing back to the ~~cult~~ nice people that send out all those Shen Yun flyers.

Shit's complicated. That said, banning all criticism of the Chinese government isn't the answer. We need to be smarter about the information that we digest.

spez also just seems incredibly salty for someone that must have everything in life, yeesh

Making some food, loading a cart. It's the weekend!

It's very gracious of you to stand up this instance with your own resources. I'm used to the idea of donating to my fedi home instances, and other fediverse regulars are probably the same way. Just give us the word if you do need donations down the road (ie. for storage upgrades, etc).