Shame. I just ran out of toilet paper.

It's 2026, install a bidet already

Colonialism peaked in 19th century when countries doing it werent liberal democracies. Universal suffrage for men became thing only at the end of century. But widespread demands started in 1848. Before that voting was restricted to income/tax/property.

political system that emerged in the exact places colonialism benefitted represents a political system that emerged out of colonialism

Not all european liberal democracies had colonies. But it is true that those countries that had them, didn't decolonize after liberalization.

so who is this for?

for myself, for example. i want to see more diverse content.

Oh, lying. Well, that makes the most sense, really.

No, liberalism ("liberal democracy" is a bit of a misnomer) did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth century just because you want to pretend it only counts as liberalism when it includes you. As I said in my original comment, liberalism has always used the rhetoric of freedom and equality while enforcing fundamentally unequal and oppressive systems of power. No, it doesn't start being "real" liberalism when non-property owning men get the right go vote (which, source on thar weirdly specific and inaccurate 1848 date? Go look up Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and -30s,, it was something widely demanded from the beginning of the United States). By this merit, there is no such thing as liberalism today, because it isn't an idealized version of itself yet; literally a rationalizing narrative to construct the violence of liberalism not as an inevitability or necessity of this system, but an unfortunate failure of it to live up to the "real" liberal values.

I could tell this was some Euro pro-imperialism narrative before you got to that second section too. This is the kind of historical revisionism they typically deploy to make this brutal system seem coincidental with rather than emergent from the violence they inflicted on the world. No, liberalism does not only need to exist in states that we associate with colonialism (even if it did, it wouldn't be accurate to act like borders stopped material interests in a system of colonialism). Liberalism came from systems that did rely on settler-colonialism for a reason, which is the same reason why the system of knowledge production on race, gender, ability, ethnicity, and humanity that we are forced to engage with happens to construct human life around the imperatives of that system. Could you explain how you're conscious of colonialism while only discussing its system in terms of its most privileged benefactors?

To others who come across this, this user is the exact kind of liberal conservative I'm talking about, and go figure, they're a Euro like I said they'd be.

How do you know?
I'm not doubting, just want to learn.

Yeah, you're right.

All you can do is try to contribute to more chill spaces, but the majority of the activity is going to be nutty people with crazy beliefs endlessly repeating themselves in a circlejerk, because well, they have vastly different priorities in life than more moderate and well-adjusted folks.

Yeah, agree about old forums. Miss that.

But also it did work well on reddit when it was a small niche community of like 10,000 or less users. the problem is growth destroyed most communities on reddit because you can't sustain a niche community with 100,000+ people, it enevitably becomes slop

Right, so if your neighbor feels harmed by you buying a new car, are you going to return it to the dealership to make his feelings not hurt anymore?

Or is he just a weird stupid asshole who needs to get over himself and realize what car you buy is none of his business and has zero impact on him?

You say you are being civil... but what you are doing here is being a condescending arrogant jerk, you're just caching it out in 'polite' terms because it gives you plausible deniability, but you are very much lecturing me on how to behave and further denying my experience as valid or real.

When a woman you know has been raped, do you suggest to her she not get raped again by being more civil to her future potential rapists?

Further, personally, I find it so weird and creepy that you tag people. That tells me that you take shit on the internet way too personally, and project your feelings onto everyone else because you fail to realize other people are not you, and you want to get up in their business, as you are doing here with me. And I don't regard that as 'civil' I regard it as raging asshole behavior, just played out in passive-aggressive terminology. Because clearly I upset your feelings and you can't let that stand, because in the end, it's all about you. Just like weird neighbors who feel the need to 'inform' you they don't like the color of your front door and will sit around and stew and resent you over it... instead of just not caring and focusing on their own front door color. Because they need to control other people due to some weird issue they have in themselves and they hate and resent what they can't control...

And from where I stand, it's so weirdly insane to expect strangers to cater to your own emotional states. I don't go up to random people on the street and demand they listen to me and then threaten then when they get pissed off or weirded out. But people online... do that every moment of every day.

yeah well, that's why the internet was better when it was mostly people of similar dispositions and beliefs.

I would argue that the Internet with all its glorious diversity (including e.g. both kids and the olds) is far better today, yet still the Intolerance Paradox is real.

When no means "push forward harder" that will simply never be okay. People will find ways to avoid it, e.g. by leaving the Threadiverse entirely, which already offers next to no OC so what then do we offer to someone? A hexbear tankie screaming "death to the Western World", apparently (note the extremist "death to", not the calmer "fall of", let's say capitalism, but violent "death", plus the refusal to limit the target to an economic system and instead leaving open the ambiguity of whether that includes every single person living in a nation that practices it).

I don't blame Redditors for noping right out of that...

And fortunately some progress has been made, just not quite enough if someone can be randomly assigned to go to hilariouschaos or hexbear, rather than sent to an instance that is more in line with the recipient's preferences.

which is why being able to block entire instances is necessary... because some of them overwhelmingly populated by mentally ill nutcases who feel entitled to harass everyone who doesn't believe their insanity.

and who think any tepid disagreement with them, is akin to physical violence against their person.

100 agreed, except that Lemmy's "instance block" is so horribly misnamed as to arguably represent disinformation.

What "blocked" users can't do to reach you:

• Write posts in communities located directly on those instances

What the so-called "blocked" users can do:

• Write posts in every other community across the entire Threadiverse
• Write comments - even directly to you
• Tag you by name
• Send you DMs
• Both of which are allowed to trigger notifications, so they can effectively ping you whenever they want, and this can last for WEEKS and WEEKS unless you block every single alt that they have, which ofc is impossible since they can spin up new ones faster than you can block each one

i.e., "blocked" users have (far) more rights to speak to you than you have to not be spoken to. This is incel shit. I know that Lemmy was created when its devs were banned on Reddit, but at some point it would be nice if Lemmy were to grow up beyond those beginnings, and make something real that could last. Instead, most people nope right out, never come back, and bad-mouth us all here to anyone who will listen... and we can't really (successfully) argue against that bc they are correct: this place is toxic as hell, unless you expend considerable time & attention blocking each and every user account that engages in such behaviors.

Which I suppose is our own fault, those of us who did not quite realize the extent of the truth of what "become ungovernable" meant (in fairness, many of us joined Kbin rather than Lemmy, at least at first). And they (e.g. hexbear and hilariouschaos) do deserve a place to talk amongst themselves - that's not the part that I object to. I just wish, personally, that it would be opt-in, or at least have a viable means of opting-out.

But I guess we all still do have that choice: we can remain on Lemmy, or we can leave (e.g. switch to PieFed, its fork PyLova, or Mbin). Though for many, who want more content than the entire Threadiverse offers, even if that choice becomes less and less easy over time, they will remain on Reddit.

Which given the graphs shown in the webpage mentioned by OP, I believe is what is happening. People come here, check us out, then leave. The effect of the Intolerance Paradox is very very real.

it actually takes more energy to launch stuff into the sun, than to launch it out of the solar system. just saying.

Oh, lying.

Why rudeness?

I'm not spreading any pro-imperialism narrative, where did you get that from. Its a fact that european empires colonized world when those states were feudal. Before that during middle ages there were settlers from german lands towards the east. Probably inspired lebensraum ideas. And I bring up 1848 because during spring in that year many revolutions happened with liberal demands. And empires existed before that.

Liberalism came from systems that did rely on settler-colonialism for a reason

And the reason is? I don't quite follow.

Could you explain how you're conscious of colonialism while only discussing its system in terms of its most privileged benefactors?

Maybe because I'm from central Europe?

One common idea of birth of liberalism is that it comes from industrialization. But this doesn't hold because Russia and China are perfect counterexamples. I was more convinced that it comes from evolution of Western Christian philosophy. I read some french author for supportive arguments and an indian anti-colonialist one which also supports this argument but of course from the opposite.

So all in all I would rather examine philosophical currents in Europe when trying to understand liberalism.

As for colonialism. Being product of feudal logic makes great sense to me

The rudeness is on account of the arrogance and pro-Euro misinformation; well deserved. Please produce a single source. You're talking like you have a working understanding of these things, but are saying things that are fundamentally incorrect historically and within discourses of political philosophy.

I'm starting a few Fediverse only photo challenges. Don't know if I'll fall on my face or not, but if you don't try you won't ever get anywhere.

Then go make it!

Fwiw, PieFed allows you to do all that from one account with its Topic Areas, which are user-customizable and shareable. See e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft and https://piefed.social/topic/news.

i'm not gonna do it alone

Thanks, I'll look into that.

PieFed has a ton of features that Lemmy lacks. Like user and post flairs, polls, and those aforementioned user-customizable and shareable Topic Feeds. It's worth checking out, just to know what's available!

Well im glad this chart helps you find more people

I for one would like to community to stay as it is – small, but with a more meaningful discussion, similiar to hackernews. Lemmy and the wider Fediverse should be a reliable contender to the commercial platforms, and people like us who want an alternative.

User was banned for a day for this comment.

Reddit is killing itself. It really didn't have to do anything but let X & Insta & TikTok feed into it. It has a better structure for daily use that isn't quite so toxic.

But instead they are letting Mods go crazy, Admin-bots that blow up your account with no explanation, user-bots that spam rage bait & other low effort LLM slop, and so on. It's a dying platform that should be thriving. The first place people find after searching "Less toxic Reddit" is fediverse, so of course it's growing.

Oh and for some reason shoehorning in games? A product that tries to be everything becomes nothing.

I think it would benefit from growing - the volume of content & discussion it just too small to support niche topics. If you want to talk about things other than the top ~30 topics, you will be waiting days for any form of response.

I don't know what a corporate account is. May be I'm one. Not sure.

Edit: oh! You meant them. But still. Was is a corporate account?

It’s a double edged sword you’re waving. For example while gay acceptance has dropped in the last decade, the major opponents to immigration are happy to collude with white-power hate groups.