There is an unstuck button. It’s in the bottom left if you hit esc iirc. I’ve used it a few times.

Yeah, sorry if I wasn’t clear about that. Here’s another post with some unrelated drama that mentions a few of their known alts:

https://lemmy.zip/post/32584584

Edit: Accidently hit send while I was drafting this, so sorry if you saw it before when it was chaotic.

You really want every post you’ve ever voted on archived forever by every instance on the fediverse? You don’t see any deeper security or privacy concerns with that?

Well, with that history someone could certainly see small impressions of me, like what I like and dislike and how much I engage with different topics. I could only see that being used against my account in these ways:

1. For targeted advertising
2. To shame me to other users
3. To ban me from a community/instance for wrongthink essentially
4. To train AI to better impersonate real people

1 seems unlikely to be an issue anytime soon just with the way the fediverse is set up. Unless the host of my account is the one sending ads, the only way to direct ads to me specifically would be through another user account either DMing me or replying to my comments/posts, and I could just block and report that user.

2 and 3 would be more practical concerns, except with or without public voting, they already have a better insight available. Just by looking at my profile, a user can already see my posts/comments, and those are going to reveal much more than voting ever would. So I don’t see public voting making this more of something to worry about.

4 is feasible, as votes are much easier to digest than comments/posts, but really AI is probably already at a level where it could vote like whatever kind of person it intends to imitate already. And honestly, any particular individual’s contribution to big data is going to be almost negligible.

I don’t see any real life consequences for me based on my user voting be publicly available. If someone did want to harass me irl, I would need to first give away enough revealing information so that they could identify me. And in that case, once again, my comments/posts would surely be what would incite them, not my voting. So long as issues are limited to virtual me, I can easily make an alt on the off-chance my reputation in unsalvageable or something.

The tracking with PieFed you described does seem impressive, so I guess the benefits I mentioned earlier aren’t as relevant. I guess I should admit I personally like being able to look at people’s activity and make judgements about them. So seeing their voting history helps satisfy my own nosiness. 😅

I like public voting. Yes, it can be abused by powertripping mods, but it also makes detecting bots and brigading much easier. That’s going to be increasingly important as the fediverse grows.

Annie’s brand has some vegan mac and cheese options if you need a Velveeta replacement. There’s a good chance major grocery stores would have that. I haven’t been impressed with the flavor personally, but you could probably just add a bit more plant butter and vegan milk to get it more rich and creamy like Velveeta.

Aldi has some vegan options for cheap if there is one near you. The Earth Grown taco filling resembles ground beef a lot in my opinion, so there’s a lot of things you can add it to easily. They also have plenty of pasta options and things like potstickers that you can just stick in a microwave. I’ve been enjoying some of their meatless meatballs with marinara on toasted bread lately. They also have shredded dairy free mozzarella and chedder that can be good melted (otherwise the texture and aftertaste are off-putting for me).

Trader Joe’s also has a lot of frozen vegan meals in my experience, especially Indian stuff. Most of it you just stick in a microwave/air fryer/oven. They also have a “21 Seasoning Salute” which is a variety of spices and I like to add it to all kinds of things.

And there’s stuff like vegan pizzas, chicken tenders, and burgers that you can get through a lot of brands at plenty of grocery stores. I like them, but you do end up paying more for them compared to what they are mimicking.

Keep in mind that a lot of flavor for things can come from sauces and spices that you use with them. Even a small amount of something like vegetable/olive/coconut oil or stir fry/pasta sauce can save something that would otherwise be bland.

Sunshine has a history of power tripping, and is able to avoid attention for it by using alts. As Beaver, they put the lemmy.world vegan community in trouble with admins over that vegan cat food drama, then later banned respected members of the community for “downvoting vegan comments”. They were ostensibly de-modded when another mod spoke up, but if memory serves they actually still had their Sunshine alt on the mod list months later.

True, but it’s still nice when there’s an easy link. Thanks for doing it for the rest of us here. I wish people would include it in the post more. I like to see the context for myself, not just descriptions of it.

This is the description for the community:

A community to discuss everything Palestine.

#### Rules:

01. Posts can be in Arabic or English.

02. Please add a flair in the title of every post. Example: “[News] Israel annexes the West Bank ”, “[Culture] Musakhan is the nicest food in the world!”, “[Question] How many Palestinians live in Jordan?”

List of flairs:
[News] [Culture] [Discussion] [Question] [Request] [Guide]

Nothing there suggests criticism of the Palestinian government would be unwelcome. If that is the case, they should clarify that rather than just removing content with effectively no explanation. The comment was otherwise sympathetic to the Palestinian people, and with this to go on I would just be confused if I were in OP’s shoes.

Look at their comment again. They said the Israeli government has essentially been brainwashing and abusing its population for it own ends. Does that sound like a collaborator?

There should be justification for moderating someone’s posts/comments, and it should be more than not liking what they are saying. This person made a controversial take criticizing governments only and honestly said it respectfully. That should be allowed.

The first and third are intuitive observations to the point students should be aware of them even if they haven’t given them much thought before. The second might require a bit more consideration but even then it’s easy to point out how heavier things take more force to move as a simple example.

Coming up with some of the formulas in Physics by yourself would be hard but at least for kinematics it’s easy to observe relationships. You’ve already been using their ideas your whole life, you just start describing what’s involved in what you see and do all the time.

People seem to be saying YDI with arguments that essentially come down to OP being wrong/ignorant. But even if that’s true, it’s not actually relevant. Most of what they were saying was just sharing their perspective, which by default should be allowed. If it’s a bad take, downvote or argue in the comments or whatever. A comment should only be removed for things like being rule-breaking, something intolerable like CP, off-topic, doxxing, spam, ban-evasion, or perhaps a flagrant example of bad faith or personal attacks to the point of being harassment.

OP’s comments were none of those things. Someone said that the ban was referencing instance rule 1 rather than community rule 1 but that still wouldn’t apply. OP was not racist (or any other prohibited -ist). Essentially they have been saying the dominant powers in both Israel and Palestine have been exploiting their people and maintaining a culture of hatred to the other side, and that doing so is bad. Again, you may disagree with that assessment but it’s not racism. They were careful to direct criticism to particular political groups and individuals. The residents of the countries were presented as victims, as deserving of sympathy as anyone else in an awful situation.

PTB

True, but there is thought to be a finite amount of matter + energy, which cannot be created or destroyed. And since it is spreading out from an original dense point, it stands to reason that there would be a vacuum area that it has not reached yet.

I took a look and I see their point. Rule 3 sounds like there’s effectively a black list of known unreliable sources. And even then, it sounds like there would be exceptions based on the mods’ discretion. I wouldn’t expect a blanket ban on blogs from reading that.

Personally, I think requiring a reputable source for an article is a good policy for the community, at least when one is available, as in this case. And it does sound like it is being enforced objectively. We are in an age where information is weaponized and fake news and engagement is manufactured maliciously. It makes sense to be skeptical of sources with no reputation on the line.

But I do think the requirement should be clarified in the rules better to match what it means de facto. If nothing else, it would simplify things when someone complains again in the future. And including a list of repeat offender sites could be helpful so long as it’s clear that it is not exhaustive. Just mentioning that MBFC is used to judge sources could reduce the amount of unreliable posts in the first place.

For reference, these are the rules I see:

Rules:

1. Be civil. Disagreements happen, that does not give you the right to personally insult each other.

2. No racism or bigotry.

3. Posts from sources that aren’t known to be incredibly biased for either side of the spectrum are preferred. If this is not an option, you may post from whatever source you have as long as it is relevant to this community.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article title.

5. No spam, self-promotion, or trolling.

Instance-wide rules always apply.

The UN hasn’t explicitly called it genocide, but if you assume China’s motivation is to reduce their population, it seems hard to argue its actions wouldn’t qualify. Widespread arbitrary imprisonment and certainly forced sterilization would meet at least condition 4 of their requirement. The Genocide Convention’s definition is below, emphasis mine:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

You could argue they don’t actually intend to reduce the Uyghur population, but it’s hard to accept that a surge in the Xinjiang region’s sterilization rate and the birth rate being cut in half over the course of three years are just anti-terrorism measures.

For me, not the case. I absolutely hate coming in to a comments section and all the discussion is relegated to inflammatory comments about OP. Just discuss the content, people. I do not go into news stories to see the users’ personal preferences about how often they see each other.

Yeah, I don’t like seeing people be rude to each other either. That doesn’t mean such comments should be removed though. As long as it stays civil, I would expect mods to let people say their piece. News communities especially are likely to stir up reactions in people, so mods should be cautious about what’s considered rule breaking, lest they be accused of censorship or being partisan.

I’ve said it before: It’s trivial for me to block one inflammatory user. It’s not easy for me to block like thirty people complaining about that one user instead of them just downvoting to oblivion and moving on.

I get that, but I also think a lot of people having the same complaint about one particular user suggests it may be worth paying attention to.

Or make a meta petition thread. Like there’s so many other options that actually keep the utility of the community and its discussions intact.

I agree that a meta post is a good idea for something like this. Normally reporting should be enough, but this is something difficult to describe in individual reports and should be shown to the community as a whole, not just mods. But I would still say meta discussion about a community’s content seems fair game for a comment section under a post that serves as an example of your complaint. Comment threads are conversations, and this is the sort of thing that will come up naturally.

I don’t see why Ghyste should have been punished here. Their comments were critical of the actions of Cat, and encouraged skepticism for their motives. Ghyste had inflammatory wording, but that doesn’t seem enough to warrant action. For the record I don’t think posting a bunch should be something that needs correction even if it does dominate a community 's feed, but complaining about one person driving discussion by themselves is certainly reasonable. If a decent portion of those posts do end up having problems like misleading headlines or bad sources, then maybe action should be taken, but that should be up to mods to judge. I’m more concerned that it sounds like they regularly delete accounts as soon as people start calling them out and pick it back up on a fresh one, since that sounds like ban evasion or legitimate bot activity.

Off topic but you would add a second addendum with “PPS” which means post-postscript. “PSS” would be postscript script, which doesn’t make sense.

Yes, you shut them down. That doesn’t require you to dehumanize them. Someone inciting violence against a minority group for example would also be banned I’m sure. The paradox of tolerance is simply solved by limiting the freedom of the intolerant. There are plenty of ways to do that without pretending the offender isn’t human. Honestly, resorting to that line of thinking is very much what Nazis do.

But Ada says they had been talking about it in that comment. They let her know they were thinking about migrating, and Ada supported their decision. Then someone from the 196 mod team let her know when they were working out things with LW. 196 mods did drop the announcement without giving Ada a head’s up, which is definitely bad, but by that point she knew the migration was being organized.

This seems like a big overreaction to me, so I see it as a clear PTB. I dislike the idea of banning people based on history in other communities, other than to check if they are a bot or advertiser or something obviously malicious. Trolling could mean something as simple as being sarcastic, and glancing through OP’s history they seem to be a real person who believes what they say, even if they can be quite rude about it.

But the upvote/downvote split suggests the community is more divided on this.