I think we both might have misinterpreted each other a bit then. I didn't really mean a person who said the parties were the same, but someone who says they're extreme in opposite directions and I think you misunderstood it as the opposite, so I should have clarified a bit.

But regardless, sure, socially stuff like trans acceptance is generally improving, but that's not really a result of Democrats or their policies, that's a result of LGBTQ people fighting against hate and society at large becoming more accepting. No policy is responsible for increasing social acceptance, it's the other way around. Like another user said as well, it's only socially progressive policies that tend to recieve that treatment too, never big economic reforms. Plus that support only lasts as long as its thought politically favorable, as evidenced by the fact that in the wake of Kamala losing the DNC has been trying to push a narrative that it's because the party is too socially progressive. The alternative is the DNC admitting that neoliberalism is unpopular, so throwing a minority under the bus is much preferable.

Economically, things haven't been getting better for a long time. Food insecurity is extremely high right now, same with rent/housing, the climate is fucked, going go a hosptial can put you in debt for life, and corporations keep amassing more and more money and power. That process speeds up under Republicans sure, but it hasn't been improving much for anyone but the already wealthy under Dems either.

But either way, even if the Democrats wanted to change things the system makes that basically impossible. Trying to change a system only by participating in it is just kinda a flawed idea in the first place, but that's how liberalism does things.

Yeah but that's kinda the point. Liberalism is also right-wing compared to leftists, and even on it's own is pretty firmly center to slighly right of center. Left of center only really happens at social democracies, and they're still not super far left. Obviously someone in the middle of the Democrats and Republicans will also be right-wing, since neither party is actually left of center and the Republicans are currently so far right.

So basically basically Republicans are super harmful to a ton of people and meeting in the the middle of democrats and republicans is still bad, and compromising on certain issues by doing that sort of meet in the middle approach still hurts people right? Don't want to put words in your mouth or anything like that.

Anarchists or other very left-wing people have basically the same opinion on liberalism. It's a very middle of the road ideology that's favors incremental progress but doesn't really make real change on its own, that normally has to be fought for outside the system. The Democrats are less immediately harmful to people, but neither party really does anything big enough to truly help people in a meaningful way and things have been slowly getting worse over time. And just like there are a bunch of policies you wouldn't want to meet in the middle of, there are a bunch of things liberalism supports that are meeting in the middle of something very harmful.

I think the other big thing is the prevalence of the idea that voting for a representative is the most important thing you can do that also wears on people. Whether or not Trump or Harris won, over half the US states are unsafe for trans people, especially kids. Sure things are obviously worse with Trump, but either way for a lot of trans people things have been bad and getting worse for a long time. Same with food insecurity, housing costs, immigration, etc. All of these issues wouldn't have meaningfully improved much with the tiny concessions that Democrats offered, and most would continue getting largely ignored until a Republican takes office and can be blamed.

I'm not saying the parties are the same, one moves us in this negative direction much faster which I why I've basically voted D every time I could, but voting is at most the minimum you should do. Building aid networks and horizontal power and networks to protect queer people or immigrants are all things that need to happen no matter who is in power because either way compromises and the slow advance of capitalism continues to hurt more and more people.

None of this is a person attack against you or anything either, but the way you don't like Republicans for being too far right or centrists for being too middle of the road with fascism/the Republican party are the same basic reasons leftists dislike liberalism.

This is a genuine question, not some sorta gotcha or anything. What's your opinion on the "enlightened centrist" style of centrists in the US? The sort of people that say things like "both the Democrats and Republicans are too extreme."

I've rewritten this a few times with various points I was trying to make, but for the sake of not having a wall of text I'll try to keep it short lol.

For the whole tankie discussion, I saw @LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works mentioned imperialism, and it made me think that the whole rule should probably be reworded imo

The big thing is that it feels like the whole debate is mostly based on semantics, so that should be fixed if possible. It basically boils down to what "tankie" means or is perceived to mean. As written the rule uses ideological labels to try and represent a broader set of beliefs, but the main issue with that is that by picking those sorts of imprecise labels it sort of muddies what specific kind of beliefs the rule is trying to highlight. Especially with tankie (and even more so on Lemmy), lots of different people use it to label very different things. Even if the rules are using it "correctly", there's still enough disagreement surrounding the term overall that it seems worth it to just elaborate more specifically on what it's actually trying to refer to. Doing so helps prevent some misunderstandings that might happen between users and mods as to what is covered by this rule, means that new users who have been incorrectly called a tankie elsewhere on lemmy don't see the term and assume they'll also be banned here, and also just generally makes the rules more clear which is never a bad thing.

Maybe something like:

Support or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome.This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, nazism, etc."

I feel like that covers the problematic stuff from any type of authoritarianism. Could even be safe and make it something to the effect of "Support or defense of authoritarianism, regardless of the state, is not welcome..." to make sure it's explicit.

I definitely agree with being against states/state oppression. I think the main problem is just that someone doesn't actually need to self identify as a tankie to feel excluded by the word. If someone gets a bunch of angry comments on .world calling them a tankie when they definitely aren't, then even if this community/instance is trying to use it in a different, more accurate way it still has the possibility that they would feel unwelcome here. When the prevailing way tankie gets used by the rest of Lemmy is incorrect, then that usage kinda becomes the first thing people will associate it with when they see the term somewhere else on Lemmy.

I think for official rules tankie is vague enough that it's better to just be explicit in what is actually against the rules like what's already there with the "no genocide denial" and "no authoritarianism" lines. Adding "no tankies" on top of that just leads to a less clear definition of what sort of behavior is actually against the rules imo. Since everyone has different ideas of what someone being a tankie means it's not always just the authoritarian aspects that get lumped into the definition but sometimes the leftist aspects too.

Obviously none of this is to say that authoritarianism, genocide apologia, or anything like that should be allowed. I'd just personally like the rules being more clear about that explicitly instead of muddying stuff unnecessarily by using tankie.

Polygender!

I had to look it up the first time I saw this meme too lol. Prideflags.org is super useful to try and reverse search for a prideflag. It doesn't have this one but it tends to be the first place I go to if I don't recognize a flag.

I like the anti-authoritarianism and no genocide denial rules, it's just the term tankie being used specifically that feels like the biggest issue imo. It's misused so often that it kinda ends up excluding a decent number of people. Someone doesn't need to self-identify as a tankie to feel excluded, just getting called one enough by others for expressing anything left-wing can do it. Its not that I think any of the mods here would use it to wrongly remove stuff like a .world community might, but for people who don't know as much about Lemmy/196 it wouldn't be surprising for people to assume that because they get called a tankie on world that they wouldn't be welcome here.

And definitely agreed human rights violations and genocides definitely shouldn't be defended regardless of what country did them, but I think since we already have the no genocide denial rule those should be covered anyway.

I'll also say I'm in support of removing the "no tankie" rule. I'm all for anti-authoritarianism, but with how often tankie gets misued on Lemmy at large having the rules specifically use it always kinda felt like just a potential avenue for removing general left-wing stuff. Not that it has been used for that on 196 necessarily, or that it will be in this community, but it still feels like tankie is a loaded enough term that just having more specific rules is better.

Like you said sectarianism sucks, and right now in the US at least it I'd say solidarity is more important than ideological differences. I'm super anarchist, but if a ML is also attending protests, building mutual aid, and fighting for immigrants and trans people then who am I to exclude them when currently the more support the better. (There are arguments for why this viewpoint is wrong or right, and whether solidarity with authoritarianism in fighting existing power structures is counter-intuitive or not, but it also doesn't feel like those arguments apply as much in something like 196 imo.)

(Also 100℅ agree on adding misogyny. Obviously the list of prejudices isn't exhaustive or anything but misogyny is a big one and it feels like it should definitely be there.)

I'm definitely a fan of sending a dm explaining why action was taken to the relevant user. In that sort of spirit would it be a good idea to include the username of the mod in the message for the modlog? With how hard it can be to try and figure out which mod did what action it can lead to misunderstandings, and trying to make that more transparent could be good. Would also help show if a particular mod is abusing their position or something (I don't think it's super likely you all would do that on purpose, but still).

I hate how quick world is to mass downvote, accuse of being a russian troll, or just straight up remove comments from people who express any sort of actual left-wing opinion. Reading through that whole comment thread there was nothing you said that came across as trolling. Its kinda exhausting how many people take any criticism of the democratic party as being support for Trump, or believe voting is the most important and only way to change anything. I get closer to just blocking world entirely every day tbh.

I'm all for this, obviously the housing crisis is caused by a bunch of factors but really no one should own a second home until everyone has a first. Providing more free/affordable (and actually high quality) housing is also important, but preventing people who don't actually live somewhere from buying a house that will sit empty or be rented out to tourists for a majority of the year is a good thing and seems like a great starting point to try and tackle the airbnb problem specifically.

On the default lemmy ui at least, it looks like icons tend to be either ~20x20 when they're the small circle in the actual post, and 120x120 when they're in the community view as the 2 main sizes, and 24x24 also shows up in the community list section. Figured I'd mention some sizes in case it helps anyone designing an icon!

Yeah those are basically my thoughts too lol. Even if it ends up not working out the process of trying it will still be good since it'll give me more experience. Those aspects you're wary of are also definitely my 2 biggest concerns too. I think (or at least hope) that with the rules I'm thinking of for how trust is generated it would mostly positively effect behaviour? I'm imagining by "rewarding" trust to recieving positive replies, combined with a small reward for making positive replies in the first place, it would mostly just lead to more positive interactions overall. And I don't think I'd ever want a system like this to punish making a negative reply, only maybe when getting negative replies in response, since hopefully that prevents people wanting to avoid confrontation of harmful content in order to avoid being punished. Honestly it might even be better to only ever reward trust and never retract it except via decay over time, but that's something worth testing I imagine.

And in terms of gaming the system I do think that's kinda my bigger concern tbh. I feel like the most likely negative outcome is something like bots/bad actors finding a way to scam it, or the community turning into an echo chamber where ideas (that aren't harmful) get pushed out, or ends up drifting towards the center and becoming less safe for marginalized people. I do feel like thats part of the reason 196 would be a pretty good community to use a system like this though, since there's already a very strong foundation of super cool people that could be made the initial trusted group, and then it would hopefully lead to a better result.

There are examples of similar sorts of systems that exist, but it's mostly various cryptocurrencies or other P2P systems that use the trust for just verifying that the peers aren't malicious and it's never really been tested for moderation afaik (I could have missed an example of it online, but I'm fairly confident in saying this). I think stuff like the Fediverse and other decentralized or even straight up P2P networks are a good place for this sort of thing to work though, as a lot of the culture is already conducive to decentralization of previously centralized systems, and the communities tend to be smaller which helps it feel more personal and prevents as many bad actors/botting attempts since there aren't a ton of incentives and they become easier to recognize.

I've been thinking recently about chain of trust algorithms and decentralized moderation and am considering making a bot that functions a bit like fediseer but designed more for individual users where people can be vouched for by other users. Ideally you end up with a network where trust is generated pseudo automatically based on interactions between users and could have reports be used to gauge whether a post should be removed based on the trust level of the people making the reports vs the person getting reported. It wouldn't necessarily be a perfect system but I feel like there would be a lot of upsides to it, and could hopefully lead to mods/admins only needing to remove the most egregious stuff but anything more borderline could be handled via community consensus. (The main issue is lurkers would get ignored with this, but idk if there's a great way to avoid something like that happening tbh)

My main issue atm is how to do vouching without it being too annoying for people to keep up with. Not every instance enables downvotes, plus upvote/downvote totals in general aren't necessarily reflective of someone's trustworthiness. I'm thinking maybe it can be based on interactions, where replies to posts/comments can be ranked by a sentiment analysis model and then that positive/negative number can be used? I still don't think that's a perfect solution or anything but it would probably be a decent starting point.

If trust decays over time as well then it rewards more active members somewhat, and means that it's a lot harder to build up a bot swarm. If you wanted any significant number of accounts you'd have to have them all posting at around the same time which would be a lot more obvious an activity spike.

Idk, this was a wall of text lol, but it's something I've been considering for a while and whenever this sort of drama pops up it makes me want to work on implementing something.

One rule I think might be a good idea is that mods aren't allowed to moderate their own posts/comment chains. Not that it's really been an issue on 196 in the past afaik, but there are some communities where the mods will get into an argument with another user and then remove comments for incivility or a similar rule which obviously has massive potential for abuse. Assuming there are enough mods where it's not an issue to do so (which seems very likely based on the number of people interested in moderating) preventing situations like that entirely seems beneficial.