This article is giving them too much credit, frankly. Saying Republican support dropped from “majority to minority” is misleading, bordering on clickbait.

All that happened was support dropped from 55% to 46%. They were only ever barely a majority.

Saying “Nearly half” or “over half” of all Republicans don’t support gay marriage is splitting hairs. They all support the candidates that are against it.

The real story here is that even support among Democrats and Independents dropped a bit in the last 2 years. Meaning the fear mongering is pervasive enough to affect everyone.

He did. The gun was never in her home, she couldn’t do anything about it. It was locked up at his friend’s house because his mother wouldn’t have permitted him to have it.

…what? What are you basing this on?

When the children were small, Wendy and Mike worked various jobs, including machine operator, housekeeper, and cashier.

…

Wendy had become a certified nursing assistant, but she continued to struggle financially. The family was repeatedly evicted.

…

In 2018, shortly after another eviction, Wendy filed for bankruptcy. She developed a gastrointestinal bleed that required hospitalization, and Faith was also hospitalized, after an attempted overdose involving over-the-counter painkillers

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante

No she literally isn’t. It was bought for him by somebody else in another city, where it was kept.

Sure, but she’s also his mother, not a random family member. I’m not going to fault a mother for standing by their child, no matter what he did.

She didn’t let him buy anything, but she couldn’t make him get rid of it because it wasn’t in her house. It was locked up at a friend’s house in a different town.

She was also ill, poor, dyslexic, and a single parent dealing with a difficult child. She doesn’t seem to have much in her life but her children, I’m not going to condemn her for not banishing him from her life. It’s not an easy thing for a mother to do.

I can’t imagine having to move state to keep my job, but having to move from California to Florida especially feels like an outrageous demand. Not just because of distance but because…I mean, are you fucking serious?? Florida? You want me to move from the biggest, bluest, mostly progressive state…to Florida?

There’s no amount of compensation in the world that would make me do that. That’s borderline self-harm.

Just make a throwaway account. The VPNs work fine when you’re signed in.

I know that’s not an acceptable answer for some but if they want to associate your activity with a throwaway account, let them, because they still have no way of knowing which person on the VPN is using that throwaway account.

Let’s not pretend it’s all about “bad actors”. They don’t want masked traffic at all, the “bad actors” gives them an excuse.

And we know this because if the IP was the issue, they wouldn’t let you use the site at all, but they will work fine after signing in. Any of these VPNs work as long as you’re logged into reddit, even with a throwaway account.

I don’t want to dismiss the facts. There are terrible things going on but overall we’re living our best lives at the same time.

You are dismissing the facts, then.

You could only truly believe this if you’re a financially stable, healthy, gainfully employed, cis white man. Because for everyone else in the States at least, life is getting harder. You can cite all the statistics you like about the globe, but that’s not relevant to what people experience in their own lives.

And more importantly, the things that people are depressed about are the things that are getting worse, and on track to keep getting worse. A video about statistics in 2007 isn’t accounting for what we know in 2024 is coming in the future. The outlook is far more grim now.

People have been saying this about social media and the news for a long long time, and every single time they fail to take the context into account. People said this in 2016, too. “Your anxiety is just the media riling you up”. Then the anxiety ended up being a very accurate thing to feel, and in the years after, the real world events caused negative effects on people’s lives.

The world is not a TV show. What happens in the news, what people talk about on social media, no matter how negative it skews, those things happen in real life, not a vacuum. Many of them affect you in ways you can’t even comprehend, and many of them affect you in very obvious ways that some people just seem to want to overlook.

That doesn’t invalidate the negative news, though. I mean, what good news do you think they’re not reporting that makes up for the actual shit going on in the world that has a real, tangible effect on people’s lives?

"Your future is completely fucked, from finances, to freedoms, to democracy, to the damn climate itself.

But, hey, the bees are coming back. For now, at least."

Every time I see people try to blame the media on this, I look at my medical bills, I look at my bank account, I look at the temperature, I look at the cost of housing, I look at the vacant seats where my coworkers sat before they were let go, I look at the election results, I look at my sister who had her right to an abortion stolen, I look at the hateful people that vandalized my trans partner’s car…

And I think, damn…the media sure has some real reach, don’t they? They’re really going all out to make me miserable. I mean, this is some impressive commitment to a narrative. One day I’m gonna break free and live in this reality where “Everything is fine, actually” with the rest of you but first I gotta figure out how the media has me in the Truman Show situation.

To offer the counterpoint:

Local and private communities, if they remain only for meta content, is fine. But if they are used for other content, because they don’t want other instances seeing or interacting with it, it can permit an instance to isolate itself and its content from the rest of the fediverse, while still being able to enjoy all the shared content from other instances. I.e. show me yours, but I won’t show you mine.

Then, if these local only communities are the only places where people on that instance are sharing certain content, it’s breaking the whole idea that it shouldn’t matter what instance you’re on. If instances can remain insular, it starts making more instances attractive based on their size. “If you want to enjoy this content, come join our instance.”

Also safer spaces for groups targeted by bigots

Then they need to ban the bigots. Why should only the people on that instance have access to the safe space? Why is someone from another instance instantly judged as making the safe space less safe? It’s basically saying “come join our instance”, which is, again, going to cause unintended consequences.

This is why federation should have a standard that needs to be followed. Been saying that for a year now.

Instance level administration/moderation has an effect on the democratic system that is the backbone of the entire federation. We can choose not to federate all their actions, but it still has an effect on instance A when something isn’t visible on instance B and instance B visitors can not not vote on it. It skews the outcomes for everyone.

So there should be a standard for federated instances to administer and moderate fairly and honestly, in line with established and public rules.

Agreed, but let’s also be honest about this:

The smaller, less visible alternative communities seldom grow. It’s the classic case of the biggest and oldest trees getting all the sunlight, while the saplings in their shadow are stunted.

We saw this on Reddit, too. Alternative subreddits, usually born out of protest of the moderation on the original, popped up all the time and never grew. Some did, some even overshadowed the original, but that was rare. The algorithm and search results would always funnel visitors to the old one.

Unless there’s an effort made to give more visibility to the smaller and less established alternative, there’s a good chance it goes nowhere.

So in reality the user choice you’re describing is less about choosing between two communities, and more about choosing between a community or a DND group that gets together once a week, but half the people flake out anyway.

Who is “they”? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don’t think people around here spread lies too?

Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that’s not the whole instance.

And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on “lies”, determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.

Besides, you keep talking about “lies” but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let’s not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let’s open some dialogue about it.

But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes. If admins can’t put aside biases and commit to the idea of federation, then it isn’t going to work, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, while making this whole thing less useful and even more confusing for new users.

I don’t know if there’s a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.

Like how there was a damn good reason for the start menu button to be on the button right: you could fling your mouse the lower left and no matter if you did it too far or fast, it would always hit the corner, and be at the start button. You never had to “target” the start button, you simply went all the way down to the left. Didn’t even have to look.

So obviously, they must of had an equally smart, thoughtful reason to put it in the middle, right? That’s a decision born from utility, not aesthetics. Clearly not making a painfully obvious attempt at copying their main competitor.

Honestly? Any of them except the last one. My preference would be 2005-2015, but any of them is better than what came after. Late 2010s was alright, but around 2020 you can really tell UI designers got their marching orders.

It’s all so damn boring and lifeless. Rounded corners on literally everything for no reason other than trend chasing, wasted space and needless gaps between elements, white OR black - rarely anything else, lest it interfere with whatever systemwide adaptive coloring thing is running (even if there isn’t one), boring and lifeless icons/logos, an obsession with “clean” and “streamlined” that effectively equates to the removal of usability for aesthetics, etc. All of it copy and pasted to every single piece of software or app or site.

Its ironic you put Corporate Memphis images next to it in the 2015-2024 section, because that is effectively what this trend in design aesthetic will be remembered as.

Bland, lifeless, safe, focus-grouped garbage, implemented by companies that have reached a point where the innovation is dead, corporate consolidation has effectively destroyed any room for something new and original to enter the space, and the only thing they do anymore is trend chase. Even the slightest bit of originality or doing something different from the market leader may risk the potential loss of a sliver of shareholder profit, and that simply must never be done.

And I swear to God, if I hear one more focus group generated argument about how rounded corners are more inviting or human, I am going to break into your home, and personally change every last single doorway into a hobbit hole, and every window into a port hole.

I think they’re talking about the designs, not the whole decade.

Oh, so /r/drama shitposting is here now? Wonderful.

Give Summit a try. It’s got all those search options, and it seems to work well enough any time I use it.

If you liked RIF on Reddit, it’s far and away the closest I’ve found.