This is exactly where I am as well. “I just don’t want to pay for them” is so real lol.

Sweating person choosing between 2 buttons meme

• Choice 1: “Trump 2 started the genocide”
• Choice 2: “Anti genocide people yelling at Biden and Kamala over their genocide caused Trump 2”

I’ve considered it! I do already subscribe to a lot of communities there. It feels like the only thing I’m really missing out on is the awesome emojis they have access to

Gotta have a requirement for people to upload an avatar when they make an account (and make the avatars a little bit bigger). Something about old forums seemed like a little village/community because you don’t have to rely on “nametags” (i.e. reading people’s username), but rather, you just know people by their avatars. I can still vividly remember people’s usernames and avatars from an old forum I’d go on when I was a kid. (yes, I know I don’t have an avatar. I’ll do it eventually lol)

I do think lemmy, at least on my instance and the communities I have subscribed to, seems pretty joyous already. It’s not fake-happy like instagram and it isn’t doomer-posting ragebait like reddit. For years, I felt stuck in a social monoculture I didn’t really feel comfortable inside of. There’s a struggle here and some people put a LOT of effort into their messages to more clearly explain their side. I’ve probably “saved” more messages here than I ever did on reddit just so I can look things up when I get a chance or use for reference later. It’s pretty amazing! It’s the first time I’ve felt hopeful about a social forum in a long time.

[now’s the part where I do the thing you said not to mention]

To make lemmy as a whole joyous instead of individually joyous servers that all despise each other, there must be a solution to the political conflicts between the servers. People who lived in the USSR would reminisce about how kind people were to each other back then and I think that probably would follow the same logic in online communities. To make lemmy truly joyous, we have to have a global revolution for the working class.

I think any slogan can and will be twisted no matter how edgy or verbose it is. Black Lives Matter got twisted. From the river to the sea got twisted. Turning ACAB into a 2 paragraph ordeal to try to prevent this also alienates the normies and also fails at being a slogan at that point. For what it actually seems to be trying to do: agitation- it does pretty well. We have more than enough evidence if a normie wants to argue with us about the phrase ACAB.

If police as a unit are defenders of this system, they individually are class traitors.