AbnormalHumanBeing

I get it, especially for users that have always been more on the lurking side (and this isn't judging, that has always been the majority for any platform) - it can be a bit empty. As someone who has been here since 4 years ago (now I'm on a new account on my own instance), the first two years of that basically just visiting every few months out of curiosity, I can slowly see more diverse communities popping up recently, beyond the established strong points of Lemmy (FOSS, Politics, LGBTQ+ memes). And this time, unlike the first Reddit exodus, I have more confidence in them not immediately dying from lack of conviction and activity.

But of course, the sheer gargantuan user count of Reddit comes with many advantages. For many obscure topics, there will still be enough people, that a sufficient amount of "super users" congregate to provide content and moderation, so that lurkers can usually participate and still post sporadically. The latter is of course also a giant advantage, millions of people posting occasionally still provide lots and lots of posts and comments. And of course, it will take a long time and more fuckups for Reddit not simply being "the default" if you want to create a forum for a community around something. (Also, waaay too much of our knowledge is on that platform, we carelessly gave answers to help fellow humans, and now the answers are on Reddit for them to appear in countless internet searches, and for them to do with as they please.)

Where Lemmy currently has its strong suits is enthusiasm of parts of the user base, fewer issues getting noticed at all among the millions of (bot/re)-posts, and where there is activity, I've usually seen it panning out being able to handle actual discussions. (Though, lets not kid ourselves, of course the Reddit-like structure also still encourages circle jerks. I don't even think that is that large of a problem, but it's a reality.)

If you feel you end up having the energy to keep a community alive through dry spell, sure, be the change you seek, but it's okay and understandable if you don't want to invest the energy and work (at the moment). In that case, just stay tuned, check out the communities that pop up in all/scaled or all/new for interesting ones currently getting more traction, the Threadiverse will take a long time before it can replace a giant like reddit, but it has a few good stones for its sling up its sleeve.

Maybe I am, part of being in a bubble is, that it is hard to properly know that you are. Although I think I prefer the term "to live in ideology" - because it is perfectly possible to consume lots and lots of different, real-life sources, and still delude oneself into believing things, by only viewing them through a distorted lens. But I do see what you mean, and my answer has been: That was also the case when socialist movements first formed, needing to go through a phase of disillusionment with the former French Revolutionary period, as well as Utopian Socialism first developing as a multipronged movement/collection of ideas, until the realities of class struggle shaped it in a specific way. For example: Yet immature phenomena like the Luddites or the Silesian Weaver's Uprising were indeed necessary steps, for further developments later on.

I also cannot say as much about the state of things in the US, outside of internet chatter and mainstream news, that much is true.

I had a talk about this with a friend a few years back, who essentially made the same argument as you did, because all he saw was things getting worse. I think that observation isn't wrong, and will probably remain true for years, probably one or two decades at least. All with political confusion, further vanishing of the middle class and increased barbarism within politics. But it's precisely because things will get so unbearably bad, globally, that I think a material movement opposing it will appear again - successful or not - because that has always happened in history.

Concerning the younger generations: The apathy is precisely a thing, that is also upheld by ideological structures making organisation impossible, by basically making the very thought of being hopeful in any way seem foolish. I don't know if it ultimately will be foolish - but I do know, this sort of pessimistic current has been one of the main ways the status quo defends itself. (See for example Ẑiẑek's famous interpretation of the "coffee without milk/coffee without cream" joke - about how what is presented as not within the status quo is essential to how the status quo presents itself; Similarily with his exploration of how ideology nowadays tends to work by not believing yourself, but deferring to people believing for you - "I myself don't have superstitions, but the others do, so I shouldn't try to exert influence over society that, it would be futile/disrespectful.") Thus, I, of course, don't know how it will pan out either, but I do remain convinced - it's basically impossible to have the total collapse of many essential structures as we, in my opinion, will have/are having, without a dialectically growing answer in the form of a new material movement.

And besides that, younger generations also need some time to escape utopian, childish interpretations, one way or the other - not just in the way movements develop historically, as I mentioned in the first paragraph - but also, how people develop and mature with age.

I did, and from what I heard, it is a big myth that the results were actually as useful as the first assessment on discovery of them had been. Later studies have, as far as I know, been much more sobering as to the "usefulness" of the data acquired there.

The website you link also immediately shows the problem (even in presentation, presenting them quite sensationalist, immediately highlighting, that there is no possibility of neutrality in assessing the results): The "cruelty for cruelty's sake" in the conditions of the experiments cannot easily be removed from the results. Making the data in the end only useful for very specific circumstances, and hard to untangle. Lets take venereal diseases for example - it ultimately shows how they spread and interact in conditions of forced mass rape under conditions of extreme squalor, as documented by people not engaged in proper double-blind environments. The usefulness of that is not as high as the myth surrounding Unit 731 or Mengele's experiments might suggest - and as your linked website also shows, there is a material interest in selling that myth of "forbidden, evil experiments resulting in knowledge".

So, this has actually been one of those things often claimed, you may have heard of it or maybe even thought it yourself (I certainly had the thought as an edgy teen). Stuff like "For all the horrors, they probably did make some progress with experiments in concentration camps" or similar things.

Now, beside the point of it being unacceptable to do so ethically - the stuff done there was also quite useless. I currently can't do the work of searching for and gathering all the sources again, but to my memory: the cruelty and dismissal of humanity made the "results" of those "studies" mostly useless garbage, saying nothing at all worthwhile for science, and being clearly tainted ideologically.

Because, while you may think that in some "ideal" world, you could have neutral research on unwilling humans, the reality has always been, that the conditions needed to get humans to do such experiments on other humans, necessitate the kind of ideological distortions, that mostly make the results useless in the end. There's simply not enough psychopaths that are also willing to do proper, frustrating, hard-work-necessitating, non-self-aggrandising research - and to get non-psychopaths to do it, you need an ideology that ultimately removes their neutrality and the neutrality of the research.

The only things I remember being deemed "useful" and "properly" done from a scientific perspective in the recovered "studies" were things like "lethality of grenades by proximity to the explosion" - something that is questionable to begin with in value and that can also be determined with sensors of different kinds - as well as "effects of massive hypothermia and frostbites" - which as far as I remember basically just confirmed what has been estimated from case studies in a broader way, as well as animal studies (the latter, admittedly, have their own legitimate controversy).

Sad, but, yeah, that is more than understandable, the whole database migration alone would be a massive headache to get right, I think.

Being a clever bastard with a gangster mindset, of course Putin would have been paranoid one way or the other, so that won't change much I think. But things like that happening - no matter if it will end up being explainable as a proper accident or a failed assassination attempt or whatever - tend to undermine the mythos of being invulnerable and always 3 steps ahead of the game, that people like Putin want to disseminate about themselves. That's my current hope in the political climate.

When setting up my own here, I was debating to go for PieFed because I like the underlying features - but having had no sysadmin experience before, I went with Lemmy due to better documentation. But I am thinking about switching - can you "migrate" your instance, or did you just set up a new PieFed one and abandon the old Lemmy one?

That's fair criticism, and I guess that is something that happens in my psyche as well. But the thought process is basically:

The communist movement of the 20th century had been pushed back by a mix of Social Democracy succeeding in mitigating class conflict in the West, world market structures creating conditions for the exploitation of internationally cheap labour in service of upholding the global profit rate while still maintaining high living standards for the big Blocs, the conditions after WW2, where so much had been destroyed, creating opportunities for massive growth and basically 0 unemployment for a few decades - and the hope of the Soviet Union maybe actually being a viable solution directing class struggle into imperialist bloc-think instead of political struggle for the working class itself.

The Social Democratic welfare state is basically in retreat across the board, from what I gathered, even in its traditional places of strength, like Scandinavia, it develops more exclusionary mechanisms. One of the main reasons of this happening is related to point #2, that the global net profit rate has been in crisis since the late 70s, which prompted neoliberal politics (and ultimately also the crisis that furthered the collapse of the Soviet Union due to their dependence on the global resource market). At the same time, international, cheap labour has become less ubiquitous, mainly due to China developing a new, massive middle class, which removed a huge chunk of that cheap labour, and which is now also becoming a player in the kind of economic imperialism the west had been doing to uphold its own balance. (Note that China is now starting to face its own crises as well, as that period of growth begins to stagnate). The Soviet collapse also shook things up, removing what in hindsight turned out to be a false hope, but percisely the removal of a false hope opens up the room for a new one.

Thus, the underlying class conflict is erupting again, and from that, political organisation is necessarily as well. Say what you will, but there suddenly were phenomena like "socialism" being a genuine word even in US political discourse. There's currently disorganised flailing around of politics without an underlying organisation and consciousness, as that old middle class is dying to serve the profit rate. The way I see it, we are in the chaotic times of growing problems and suffering (also exacerbated by the climate catastrophe), but those problems and suffering have always also created the contradictions and conditions for change. The very fact that fascism is organising is in my eyes a symptom of the upper class reacting to a new, burgeoning class struggle.

Now, I have no crystal ball to see what will happen, no one does. (And I'd like to stress: Pessimistic positions don't, either. Just because there is a current in our ideology upholding the status quo to immediately dismiss anything remotely hopeful as impossible.) But it seems clear to me, that the material struggle between classes is very real, again. And the tools have all still been there, if anything, the internet actually increases international organisational capabilities.

I think across the world, you have the phenomenon of the younger generations being less interested politically in the old status quo, while material conditions continue to get worse and consolidation of capital does so as well. In recent elections here in Germany, the younger generation has been as split as never before, between leftist movements on the one hand, while their support for fascism was about the same as in the rest of society, and the old centrist parties had shrunk to a clear minority in their support, as one example.

No matter what it will be calling itself, I indeed think it is inevitable, that there will be a new movement of international struggle, that will fit the bill of "communist" - the really existing movement in opposition to capital and its tendency to create a growing class of people that own nothing beyond subsistence but their labour power to sell.

How strong it will be, how it will pan out in the end - that will be decided by us and our actions. But the political necessity of asking questions of property relations and class, that exists and will become more prevalent, I am sure of it.

Ah, okay, I was indeed missing all the snark, lol

We’ve never tried a pure and proper capitalistic movement either.

Genuinely confused what you even mean there - because, yes, we did. Like, to the extent "proper" makes sense - "pure" is nonsense that only makes sense for ideologies, not materialist movements. I assume there is some intentional snark to it? I may be missing some signalling there, AuDHD and all, but I think it is worthwhile to explore that idea, regardless:

What do you think the long and arduous, sometimes brutal, sometimes liberatory, stuff was, that happened in the early modern era? Where property relations and the mode of production changed from Feudalism to global (back then at first colonial) markets and industrial capitalist wage labour? That is also precisely, why I think a material analysis of the Eastern Bloc is so damning: They had wage labour, they traded on the international market, they even had hire- and fire at factory gates at times, with a more decentralised economy than more consolidated western economies at times (managers competing against each others for state resources) - even though their ideals said that that should not happen. Not for lack of their purity or ideological drive, simply because the material and historical conditions panned out like that for those entities.

That is what I am getting at: "Pure" does not make any sense, it's ideological nonsense, IMO. And "proper" only means - being a material, real political force. If you go on general strike, the effects of that at first don't care for ideology at all, they are immediate. (further organisational capabilities are still important, though)

I think that's something we sort of lost in ideology, especially since the 80s - thinking not from the perspective of "ideal -> reality", plopping an ideal on top of reality (and failing, and getting more brutal in failure) - but instead "reality <-> contradictions within reality", where there are developments stemming from the way we produce, we distribute, power manifests and we, more broadly, interact with the world, and then resulting from that, failures and contradictions building up, leading to eventual, revolutionary change over several key, historical events. (That often fail repeatedly at first. See how republics and democracy faired in the 19th century after the French Revolution, where the common consensus for a long time was basically: "That can only result in new mass terror and a new Napoleon - or, if at all, maybe work for a low population, rural settler state like the US")

As an aside: That does not mean, vision is completely unimportant, or anything, just that vision is itself is not useful as an ideal to strife for, but just a tool for changing along what is necessary and possible materially, and organising for that.

To provide a materialist explanation the way I understand it: From my perspective, that's because there has been no proper communist movement in the sense of how Marx put it - a really existing historical movement as material fact in the political space - for many decades. (I, personally, do not think the Eastern Bloc fit this role after the 1920s, where it developed a state-capitalist turn due to their material conditions, e.g. having to industrialise, advancing from feudal-like structures, trading on the world market, etc. - cue the infighting over that interpretation.)

So "leftists" instead were just fighting against each other on a market of attention for resources - the dynamics thus becoming those of ideology, often religion-like, instead of material politics. Morality, purity tests, cult-like structures - all that shit was (is) common, because the material position of many groups was (is) - no matter how they would like to describe themselves - not really in opposition to capital all that much. It was in opposition to any other group for members, donations, attention and cultural hegemony within the "sphere of leftism" within the status quo, so to speak.

But at the core, I think that the mode of analysis has always been correct: One of class dynamics, one of property relations, one of production and distribution. So, the clever lots of the majority of leftist currents have been correctly Cassandra-ing for a long time now.

And right now, I think we are very much witnessing a proper, materialist crisis, the breakdown of the liberal status quo, social-democratic management of class war through the welfare state retreating - thus, I think necessarily, there will also emerge a proper communist, materialist movement again, which will hopefully direct the infighting over resources and members within the status quo, to proper political struggle again. (Not that the former will completely vanish, but I do think, it will slip into the background more). A material movement again, instead of an ideological one. One where it isn't that much about what -ism you call yourself, or what flag you fly, or what newspaper you recommend to your friends - but one about how to get the political power so that you and your neighbours don't get worked to death in labour camps and capital ceases to exist as a material force.

Seit ich da auf PT all-in bin, schaue ich tatsächlich nur noch alle paar Tage für ganz bestimmte Kanäle auf YT. Und ich bin so einer der Sorte ADHS-Menschen, die immer irgendein Video auf ihrem zweiten Monitor laufen haben beim Schaffen, also hat die Aussage schon ein bisschen Wert.

Will nicht so tun, als wären auch nur annähernd genauso viele und hoch-produzierte Inhalte auf PT oder so, aber es sind aus meiner Sicht mittlerweile halt schon einige sehr gute Kanäle, und es hat viel von early YT - einiges charmant-bizarres ist auch dabei, u.A. weil Geld- und Famechasen noch deutlich seltener ist.

Werde auf jeden Fall weiterhin mein Bestes tun, Inhalte auf !peertube@lemmy.world zu verbreiten. Kein Algorithmus (jenseits von so was wie "gerade trending") heißt: Inhalte müssen wieder social auf Social Media von Mensch zu Mensch viral gehen.