I realized you are hex, are you also Kairos? That’s exciting, and I’m happy to be a part of it. “A sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness and response program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary counter-power” is a great quote that obviously pays homage to Clarke’s third law, and is delightfully pithy and original.

I agree and I’m aware it has negative connotations – it is inseparable from modern methods of administering power. Without records, how can you demonstrate you’re distributing resources equitably? I recognize that my role as admin is basically an anarchist bureaucrat – approving applications, responding to reports, writing reports on progress for the community each month; it’s done digitally now, but it’s the stuff that would otherwise be the paperwork for which bureaucracy was made famous.

Bureaucracy was invented in France during the reign of kings, in hopes that it might quell the frequent revolutionary uprisings. It used to be that the only way you could get a license to do anything was through an audience with the king, or access via one of his courtiers – a role similar to modern lobbyists. This exclusivity of access meant the richest and most well connected were granted corporate charters, business licenses, or land titles, creating extremely stark class division between the bourgeoisie and even the petit bourgeoisie.

The role of bureaucracy (named after the drawers where they kept the mountains of paper this activity generated) was to ‘democratize’ distribution of licensing and grants to everyone based on meeting the same requirements and paying the same fees. It was popular enough to get grafted into the organs of the new republic once one of the uprisings hit the mark.

It was ‘democratic’ in the same sense that electoral ‘democracy’ is democratic - that is, it is closer to the ideal of freedom than autocratic rule. But citizens are still vulnerable to the whims of tyrannical bureaucrats. Even at the local level and at small scale, a bureaucrat can do a lot of damage if there isn’t popular power prepared to resist him.

For example in Chennai, the Zero Rupee was invented to build popular power against a culture of compulsive bribery that is endemic to all levels of the state bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a burden that’s accepted because the alternative is clearly worse, like the French kings of old. But all bureaucracies are not the same, and merely making them smaller or ‘distributed’ does not solve the problems that can arise when they are not open to public challenge.

The primary purpose of distribution centers is to serve capital, and there are plenty of private libraries. In the case of a library or dispensary, a bureaucracy can definitely increase the equanimity of the distribution of wealth in a society, but that relies on both the bureaucrats and the public they are supposed to serve to be willing to fight for that ideal.

I think wider discussion of micro-bureaucracies would be valuable. During the November meta, a member requested some kind of vote on our descision to defederate nazi instances, which I think was adequately discussed and concluded. It stood out to me that the member objected to my description of voting in this manner as ‘bureaucratic’ – a word I felt I was using descriptively, but was interpreted as pejorative. I think it’s interesting that different people have different definitions of bureaucracy.

What is bureaucracy?

Yikes.

That’s awesome! Thanks @solo@slrpnk.net for stepping up :)

No more math!

I think that would be a good idea too. Would you like to play a role in developing SLRPNK’s style guidelines?

I’m glad you said something. I don’t mind so much when pieces that are critical of solarpunk or a corruption of the aesthetic are occasionally posted here because it gives the community an opportunity to define itself against those representations. I tend to skip over them myself though. I think introspection and criticism are core to the Solarpunk ideal, and I’m glad this essay was a fresh carafe of that tea.

Thank you for your efforts to make reading news more accessible to the Fediverse, including frequently sharing gift articles from paywalled publications.

!enshitification@slrpnk.net !fuck_AI@lemmy.world

• Arrests without warrants, brutality
• Teargassing and pepper-spraying journalists, citizens, etc.
• Violating direct court orders
• So much more!!!

Dick Cheney lied about walking so that JD Vance could lie about running.

I don’t think you’re wrong to want to be able to independently verify our reasoning. I think that’s part of the reason it took us so long to ban HC, as they used a absurdity, jokes, and ‘randomness’ to foster a fascist base. I feel it’s not difficult to see if you know what to look for, but the strategy works because it’s not completely obvious. Those who call them out are more easily cast as humorless shrills, and people are more likely to view things from the stereotypical frame of power-tripping gatekeepers over-reacting to a joke, which is what it looks like on the surface to the uninitiated.

The conceit of HC is that it’s a ‘free speech’ zone, and that anyone can say anything, including things that happen to be fascist or support fascism. That’s not the case. Alice is the admin, this is her censoring criticism of Charlie Kirk’s deification documented in PTB. She enables her moderators to be just as censorious when it comes to pushing a right-agenda.

It’s worth reading up on the strategy of absurdity, particularly in regard to the banned Reddit community Frenworld. This is a community whose bread and butter was thinly veiled anti-semitic jokes and holocaust denial wrapped in cutesy images of frogs and clowns speaking in childish slang.

When contacted by this reporter recently and asked to comment on the content, shortly before the banning of their community, founders and moderators of /r/frenworld denied that the subreddit was linked to the right wing at all, let alone the far right, and said its content was harmless.

The impulse to give the benefit of doubt is a good one, to not ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but ultimately if nazis are at home on your platform, the end result is the same regardless of intention.

This is not the totality of the evidence, but I feel like it’s enough to demonstrate why we came to this conclusion.

deleted by creator

I came to SLRPNK.net from Beehaw.org, and while I think they do a lot of things right, I don’t think disabling downvotes is one of them.

While Beehaw members can’t downvote comments and posts on other platforms, visitors to Beehaw are able to downvote posts and comments on Beehaw and made by Beehaw members. While people on Beehaw can’t see these downvotes, they are visible to people off-Beehaw all the same.

I think downvotes are a useful way of getting a temperature reading on a comment. With it gone, it puts more stress on other methods of responding to bad comments, those being reporting comments to the moderators, and replying to the comment with a statement of disagreement or rebuttal. Both methods of reply are moderator-intensive; moderators need to reply to reports in a timely fashion, and contradictory replies often devolve into slap-fights, which also require moderator attention. A social media experience is judged by its signal to noise ratio, so removing or dampening uninformative or irrelevant dross helps the gems to stand out. Moderation is key, and moderators are the weak point in any social media design. Good ones are difficult to find, moderator skills are difficult to teach, and it is an easy task to burn out on.

Beehaw does a good job of seeking out moderators and limiting their community list to keep the moderation task more manageable. Even with those in place, the moderation task is too great to keep up with the demands of federating with a site like Lemmy.world, which lead to them defederating from the largest instance early in their existence. I haven’t kept up with their internal discussion in a while, but I get the sense that it is still a constant struggle.

Allowing members to downvote takes some of the work off of moderators. Judging quality in posts is a difficult task, and downvotes can provide useful information. Downvoting permits a more nuanced access to the wisdom of crowds. Sometimes the best response to a comment is to downvote and move on. Even in cases where an obvious rule-breaking content is eventually removed, like in the case of a racist comment, downvotes provide not only censure to the commentor, but solidarity with the people and groups targeted by their attack during the interim before moderator action.

Downvotes can be abused, and can communicate confusing information, like when a locally-upvoted post is torpedoed by downvotes primarily from a single foreign instance. I think giving moderators access to granular voting information in their communities was the right choice for Lemmy, and I think giving public access to statistical breakdowns of vote origin in comments and posts that reach a threshold of votes could be useful as well. I think even without technical improvements to mitigate these drawbacks, removing downvotes causes more problems than it solves.

Beehaw’s world news is a great source of general world politics. There are also regional instances with their own political communities that can give you a local perspective on world events, like

• !uk_politics@feddit.uk
• !europepolitics@feddit.org
• !australianpolitics@aussie.zone
• !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca

Thanks, fixed!

Thank you for your quick action. I’ve updated the comment.

Thanks for starting this discussion. I’ve linked this post in !meta@slrpnk.net.

We’ve compiled an informal and incomplete list of servers we federate with who also federate with maga.place. Federation by default is considered best practice, so none of these admins have intentionally endorsed a fascist instance. I hope this post and the linked threads are informative in making your own decisions.

• Discuss.tchncs.de – @Milan@discuss.tchncs.de @erAck@discuss.tchncs.de
• Lemmy.vg – @nume@lemmy.vg @admin@lemmy.vg
• Lemy.lol – @iso@lemy.lol @QuazarOmega@lemy.lol