Now that is some enthusiasm for the fediverse.

I don’t see much indicating him as a former communist

He talked about it - some variety of Trotskyism IIRC. A bit of a surprise but shouldn’t have been. Tons of former Maoists have been in high positions. Even a neoliberal head of the European Commission (Barroso).

On the supposed virtues of communism, you won’t convince me but I suppose you know that already. IMO the world would have done very well to listen to George Orwell, someone who saw through it all on the basis of up-front experience 90 years ago. That might have saved an awful lot of needless suffering. Or Orlando Figes, who wrote a book whose title says it all: “The USSR: A People’s Tragedy”.

Amusing. And what detective work! Your time is valuable, careful not to waste too much of it.

Personally I’m not especially bothered by sockpuppetry in itself (talking of people wasting their time…). But it’s obviously important to have a plurality of viewpoints. If only they would sockpuppet more creatively!

This seems right. Personally I’m not sure I could roll my eyes harder at the fact that so many people in 2026 are so ignorant as to be prepared to call themselves “communists” - after all the famines, the purges, the 40 years in which much of Europe was struggling to escape (literally) from communism… And then I saw that you, too, call yourself a communist! So I guess I’ll stop there.

Except to recommend you the Ones and Tooze podcast, in which the brilliant host (an ex-communist) recently did a whole series, in great and illuminating detail, on the various communist thinkers. Which I listened to… dutifully.

Out of interest, how do you know it’s sockpuppets?

To be honest I’m genuinely a bit interested in who this might be. I’m imagining a disgruntled Hong Kong exile with too much time on their hands. Also seems likely to be Chinese in that they have a top-down concept of information, not seeing that obvious and relentless propaganda will just backfire with a sophisticated and relatively informed audience. Perhaps I’m being slightly optimistic, but I can’t see how they’ve convinced anyone here that “China bad” who didn’t already think that.

The real issue is that AI bots are making Q&A forums de-facto redundant. StackExchange posted its stats recently, and activity is dropping through the floor there too.

Of course, this leaves the question of what the AI bots are going to do in a few years when they have no new original content to eat. But right now they still have a banquet.

Ironically, the most active user on the current #2 China community, !china@sopuli.xyz, is an absolutely indefatigable anti-Chinese propagandist.

This person, @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org posts multiple times per day, usually quite sensible and well-sourced articles, but always on the same downer subjects (repression, Uighurs, corruption and so on) and never anything that paints China (let alone its government) in the slightest positive light. Since nobody else in this community can match their posting stamina, the end result is a community that, to newcomers, looks like one rando’s “I hate China” blog. Hardly surprising that it’s not a very successful community.

I’ve asked this user to consider dropping the tempo a bit, and been met with defensiveness. I complained in private to the mod, who is completely AWOL, and they didn’t care. Oh well.

This is great but perhaps there’s some other more appropriate community to put it.

Some general thoughts. I have done multiple CMS transfers of large sites involving Wordpress, Drupal and Discourse. No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming. That’s why the simplest option would be to stay as close to Wordpress as possible, using a fork for example to fix to the ethical problems you perceive. Otherwise you’re almost certainly going to find it’s much easier to archive and start afresh, with the compromises that implies.

If you do dump Wordpress, in your position I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo. So much simpler and more secure. But that’s just my opinion.

For a successful community, this one (which I also lurk in) is oddly topic-specific. They must be doing something right. Copy them!

This is what RSS was invented for. Sigh.

PS: https://rssbox.us-west-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/

And we were told cancel culture had peaked.

this place is never going to be good for any discussions where people disagree strongly.

Most users downvote what they dont agree with. Its a circle jerk echo chamber where we all agree or get downvoted.

So true, and so sad. This has been such a disappointment to me, and even a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t realize how badly most people respond to seeing viewpoints they don’t fully share. Personally I don’t get the point of discussion where everyone agrees, but apparently that is quite a rare attitude. So I share your pessimism, but with one glimmer of hope. There is at least one forum which has cracked this problem: Hacker News. The issue being that it’s frequented by exactly the kind of techie Spock-like personalities that aren’t representative of the general population.

That’s fair. The R-site does not have any ATProto clone yet, is that correct? Lemmy is still mostly a ghost town for non-techie discussion. As I understand it, Bluesky is already a moderately successful replacement for Twitter. My general point is that we cannot afford a 3-way struggle between corporate social media, ATProto and the fediverse (i.e. ActivityPub). There just isn’t enough attention to go round.

Great news. What would be useful: a quick primer on what exactly the end user needs to do in order to interact with Bluesky (AKA Twitter 2.0) from a fediverse account.

Disclaimer: IMO Bluesky has eaten part of the fediverse’s lunch and there’s now no beating it entirely, we’ll need to compromise and join forces.

I’m trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.

Agreed. This seems like the lowest hanging fruit, the absolute minimal solution.

Given the emergence of Bluesky and the parallel rightwing echo chambers, the fediverse does not have the luxury of splittism IMO.

This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded “0 comments” is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter.

For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.

Thought experiment. 2 communities:

• /c/one has 15 posts per day, 5 of them with 3 comments, the other 10 with none
• /c/two has 3 posts per day with 5 comments each

Which is the healthier community?