Block everyone! Block every instance! Block me! Block yourself!

Or maybe… just spend some time using the platform until you start to get a feel for the vibe. If you can bear to listen to opinions that don’t already align with your own, you’ll probably find that most people are pretty chill and discussions are mostly pretty civil. Disagreement is not the same thing as hostility or trolling. I’ve never blocked anything on this platform and I still find it to be miles better than reddit in terms of vibes. Rather than preemptively curating your feed based on whatever someone else’s idea of bad content is, you can form your own opinions. Block if you want, but you can also just… not engage.

Excuse me for a moment while I take this obviously serious post very seriously.

I’ve seen a lot of hysteria around “tankies” since I started using Lemmy and I gotta say I really don’t get it. Yes, there are people here who are to the left of Democrats. No, that doesn’t make them the enemy, or secretly MAGA or Russian or whatever. They just… disagree with liberals. I see opinions attributed to “everyone from a .ml community” that I’ve never seen from any of the actual users. People gleefully brag about blocking swaths of other users, yet I’ve almost never seen any .ml user actually being as toxic as they get branded. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard people say that you are a particularly bad one, but I haven’t witnessed it.

Also, lemmy was created by ml’s right? It’s one thing to have very little tolerance for different political opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to literally just be the gray characters from this meme and still somehow think you’re in the right.

My roommate once got home as I was watching a Technology Connections video on the living room TV, and after listening to the dude explain the detailed mechanics of some common home appliance for 5 minutes, they finally uttered “what the hell are you watching?” But as we sat there for another 15-20 minutes longer, they eventually said “okay I get it now, this is pretty interesting.”

I don’t have kids, but I am so grateful for Ms. Rachel. 🥹

“Look for the helpers.”

I heard that if you’re reasonably informed on Elon’s bullshit spanning the last few years, DOGE, how he’s clearly a Nazi, etc., then there’s nothing particularly revelatory in the doc. I’ll probably skim through it at some point, but it’s nearly 4 fucking hours long and god knows I’ve watched enough Some More News on YouTube through the years to have a pretty detailed mental account of all the ratfucking he’s been up to.

I once got locked in a state of sleep paralysis and managed to call out for help. I said “please wake me up I’m having a nightmarrrre” but in a really scared voice and no air in my lungs, just forcing the sounds out with my diaphragm. It freaked my roommate THE FUCK out. Honestly it was a little embarrassing but they just think it’s a cool story now. It’s kinda funny how our emotional states flipped because they went from “hehe is he sleep talking?” to “WHAT THE FUCK HE NEEDS MY HELP!” and I went from “I’m trapped in an inescapable torment of my own unconscious mind!” to “ok I’m awake now. That’s better.” My eyes were already open but I couldn’t wake up. The instant I saw them open the door I was immediately awake and calm. Meanwhile they were dealing with a major adrenaline surge and took a long time to calm back down.

Would be pretty cool if we could build a crowdsourced network of these that do basically exactly what flock does, but just to keep a constantly updated public database of the location of all cop cars, hopefully with the ability to associate cars to specific officers with names, photos and badge numbers.

We could call them “drove cameras.” A drove is a term that refers to a group of pigs.