The terms cult and culture have the same problem(s) as sect and religion. There is no one clear-cut definition, but many competing definitions, most of which are kind of vague or ambiguous. Both sect and cult are usually used in us versus them narratives. If you pick a random person and try to discuss if and why something is a cult/sect or culture/religion you are almost guaranteed to run into unresolvable conflict because you’ll likely have different definitions in mind. The obvious solution is to settle on a common definition beforehand, but that will just cause the next conflict because there are so many and there is no obviously correct one.

People often bring up an aspect of control as the defining characteristic of cults/sects. Does that make all states cults? Does that mean every major Christian denomination was a sect 200 years ago?

Another common definition is that of a new group splitting off from the established group. Does that mean the entirety of Christianity is just a jewish sect?

Most definitions, when applied rigorously, imply that every culture/religion has been a cult/sect at least for some time in the past. And here comes the trouble: Most people from some culture/religion will provide you with a definition for cult/sect, when arguing about it, but will not accept when you apply it to theirs and point out that by that definition it either is a cult/sect, or was 200/500/1000 years ago. Because most people use those terms to denote otherness possibly even in a pejorative way.

In an academic context (for example anthropology or history) the distinction between cult and culture or sect and religion can be useful when a definition is given in the context and it is applied consistently. Outside of academia those terms aren’t very useful beyond instigating people against each other or minorities, solidifying circle jerks, or starting flame wars.

My nonprofessional take on it:

Every culture started out as a cult and all cultures are or have been horrid given the opportunity.

Every religion started out as a sect and all the sects’ and religions’ fairy tales are equally ridiculous when observed from the outside.

The distinction between cult and culture, and sect and religion, has no net positive benefit outside of academia and should be avoided outside of fiction.

I’ve never seen this on the web, Jerboa, or Boost.

𝖄𝕰𝕾! 𝕷𝕰𝕿’𝕾 𝕿𝖄𝕻𝕰 𝕷𝕺𝖀𝕯𝕰𝕽!

So, I think there could be something weird going on with web browser caches.

I’m quite confident, that that is not the problem.

As you can see, there’s quite the gap where several entries should be.

I might be able to see a more updated version of the modlog because I’m a moderator?

Yah, maybe. I thought the mod log was completely public. But, I might be mistaken. I’ll have a look at the github issues to see if this is a known problem.

Weird. I looked into lemmy.world mod log and filtered for them: the latest action shown to me was 4 days ago … maybe a bug in the filter mechanism? Also, the post from yesterday is still visible to me on unilem.org. That seems to be a federation issue though, with posts not reliably getting removed on federated instances. If I look at linuxmemes via lemmy.world, the post is indeed gone. I saw in the mod’s profile, that they posted something concerning moderation, but trying to view that only threw an error for me. The overall lemmy experience seems to be still quite buggy.

TL;DR: You are right and the mod is still active. For a slew of reasons/bugs it looked otherwise to me. But I should have looked more closely.

Anyways, I’ve written to them and linked to this post.

Edit:

I just checked again, to see if I made some stupid mistake. This is the filtered mod log:

And I still see the new post (and the old) which you said was removed:

If I didn’t know better by now, I’d still say that linuxmemes looks unmoderated (at least on my end).

Thanks, I’m not sure how democratic that process is, though ;-)

This is victim blaming.

Only to some degree. The guy is a software engineer and should have known better. I’d agree if it was Jenny from accounting. You could just as well point out “victim blaming” when I called someone a moron for jumping from a three storey building and breaking his legs, because it was neither his intention nor was he aware that it could break his legs. For a software engineer to employ cloud based “smart” devices and then wonder if it backfires is borderline moronic.

I mean, they are fine books!

On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; […]

Yah … that.

Thanks for the pointers. I’ll have to look at that sometime.

I like the idea of a federated network of lots of smallish instances. You’re absolutely right, though, that some flux is to be expected, and evident.

While we’re at it: Villa Straylight is the name of an abandoned space habitat from the same series ;-)

The text portion of your comments and posts lives on everywhere where it was federated. All images uploaded to the instance are gone.

If you’re referring to wintermute, that’s the name of an AI from a Gibson novel. Soo, pretty common among cyber punk nerds online. My name is an allusion to one character from that series, too: count zero.

Well, the administrative account went by “wintermute”. Good luck finding a wintermute online that’s actually them.