Oh wow yeah, I did not think about it but… perhaps this meme was too hopefully optimistic even?! Wow. :-|

That’s a really good illustration but also I wanted to point out that it’s not merely some people choosing to be exploitative - though there is no doubt that the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos and the Musk are that way, ofc - but rather the system being geared to allow or even encourage thus.

e.g. Donald Trump failed at everything he did in life, and according to one analysis would have “made” 8x more money 💰 if he had simply left it in the bank 🤑 untouched by all his various bankruptcies, including somehow casinos that are basically money printers 🖨️.

They played the game sure, but someone made the game, and we all choose to watch it happen and do next to nothing about it.

Well hacqtually most Reddit mod hats seem to have a smaller brim, like so:

So this person might just be in a disguise of some sort! 😜

Maybe in the future, these memes might start to mean that it’s safe to go outside in such heat (reduced from the northern summertime)!

Live with their parents. It’s doable to “survive”, it’s just that someone cannot “thrive”, i.e. live the American Dream, or have health insurance, thus getting back to your point about survival, although that’s generally considered a separate thing than income, bc e.g. someone could be on their spouse’s health plan.

And then there are all sorts of tricks to go below minimum wage too… including having more black people locked up and working in for-profit prisons than were ever used as slaves; or Waffle House’s trick where someone only gets a base wage of like $3.25 an hour and then while the minimum $7.25 per hour is guaranteed, in order to get more than that they have to make up the difference with tips (on what is <$10 meals).

But how do you help people when (a) things like the electoral college and gerrymandering exist, (b) preachers say from the actual, literal pulpit that God commands to vote Republican, and (c) those areas vote conservative not only for themselves but also apply that to the nation at large, e.g. keeping Mitch McConnell in power, and making abortion illegal in those states.

TLDR: it’s how they choose to live. And they might be about to fight an actual civil war to extend those “rights” further.

Yeah, that does help - e.g. if people started defederating lemmy.ml, then all the Hexbear users that went there after being defederated from many popular instances would make alts on other platforms and it would be much harder to avoid their continual trolling:-).

And yes I’ve previously had several quite pleasant conversations with people from lemmy.ml, though I have now managed to leave them behind by moving to PieFed.social where I can block the entire instance. I will block many innocent users that way but… I am okay with that, compared to the alternative of having to put up with each new one that comes along and harasses people. Many people of conscience are fleeing that instance anyway, and the rest have most definitely been warned so it’s their choice, but I am not letting their recalcitrance dictate my own choices in turn:-).

There was a great mini-series we had going on in Lemmy about this… I can’t find any of it now though. So this is the best I can do on short notice:

Edit: ooh, here’s one of them:

-conservatives

This post does not present the requisite context, which is that this community is a bit special in comparison to others. Read the sidebar text where it explains more how the mod wants people to use it differently. On Reddit there were some others like that, e.g. CMV, and had different-styled icons to help people realize that - before the days where people just expected every single sub to function identically so that they could bother not reading the sub rules before posting or commenting in it.

e.g.:

Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.

I suppose it depends on how bad it is. e.g. if it’s a community for “videos”, and someone submits one with unmoving text that is basically an audio file, you could downvote it then for not matching.

Some software - like PieFed and some Lemmy apps - have automated features that rely less on human moderator intervention and more community feedback, to either auto-collapse or even auto-hide replies with downvotes below user-set thresholds. You can ofc disable these, but if you want them… they are there for you. Also they are immediate, as opposed to waiting until a mod wakes up and finds time to render a decision on everything reported since the last time they checked in.

I believe so, though I cannot find great examples to prove it. e.g. [email protected] exists but is empty. Then again, I saw similar occurrences with my old instance, Discuss.Online, when nobody had yet joined [email protected]. So I joined it, waited a day or two, and then all the posts showed up - this is the way that communities used to have be federated, before Blaze went around to virtually every instance and joined almost literally every community to make it already happen for people:-). Anyway, Blaze seems to not have done that for PieFed yet, so I will do it myself.:-)

Yeah it’s probably client-side. Boost… that’s good to know, thanks!:-)

Do you do it individually, or use like an app or something? Bc the Lemmy instance block does very little - only blocking communities but not users from that instance.

PieFed btw allows user blocking of any custom instance you want though:-) - I just switched to it today and think I am going to be happier here. It’s not quite as polished as Lemmy, but on the other hand I don’t see true user-level blocking ever being added to Lemmy no matter how long the wait. So I decided that I was tired of wading through the garbage rooting for treasure, and just decided to block it all.

Do you might if I ask how you accomplished that - by using some app? Or did you just mean the standard Lemmy instance block, which blocks only communities hosted there but none of the users especially their comments everywhere across the Fediverse?

PieFed allows custom user instance blocks, of whatever instance you choose, and I think Mbin at least used to (although I also saw a bug report saying that it doesn’t work right now). And Tesseract on dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe have specifically defederated from lemmy.ml, but I was curious what other methods would work as well.

Fwiw, I just abandoned Lemmy in favor of PieFed. It allows you to block whatever custom instance you want - in my case Lemmy.ml - it has “categories” of communities so you don’t have to browse on All, it has a “reputation” feature that puts icons next to users doing patterns of extremely obvious trolling (like a <1-month old account with negative karma - note that such are not “banned”, merely “labelled”, so that you can make your own determination of what to do or not about such), and it has a fairly polished interface. It has its quirks, like searching for a user is different than searching for posts, but it keeps improving all the time and the developers are extremely receptive to feedback.

Unlike Lemmy, where 0.19 was supposed to allow user filtering of instances, but what was delivered in 0.19.3 fell far short of desires, then 0.19.5 rolled back what little protections had been previously offered. At this point I don’t think you’ll ever be able to block all users from lemmy.ml, so long as you remain where you are. Lemmy.world admins could do it, but it seems highly doubtful so long as certain communities such as [email protected] are located there.

Lemmy.cafe and Tesseract on dubvee.org have defederated from lemmy.ml though. And maybe some apps allows user-level defederation I dunno. So those seem to be your options - which aren’t a lot but at least they exist!:-)

PieFed allows you to block entire instances. All of the users, all of their posts, everything.

Otherwise as people have suggested, it is just dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe.