For anyone in the USA, I highly recommend the Discuss.Online instance - it has a great server and admin team, as evidenced by its fantastic uptime stats, plus is quite welcoming to casual discussions. I bounced around a couple of different instances before making this one my primary home and have had zero regrets since.

Also if anyone wants to see a peek of what’s coming up in the future, while it’s just shy of being fully ready for the masses yet, PieFed is an amazing project that will soon enough overtake Lemmy. It already has tons of features that Lemmy lacks - like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, an absolute ton of customization options, and much more - even if there are a few still missing in reverse (like “searching” for content, user account tagging, the ability to preview a message prior to sending, receipt of notifications is quite buggy… - for early adopters though, it’s almost fully functional, especially for someone experienced in knowing how to fall back to Lemmy when necessary).

There are lots of exciting things happening on the Fediverse lately!:-)

Other reasons to avoid, besides those already mentioned here, include that you will not be allowed to say things offhand about countries such as Russia or China or North Korea with your same account even in communities located on other instances. You either comply FULLY, even when elsewhere, or else you are banned from the entire instance. You can read more about such practices in communities like !fediverselore@lemmy.ca.

Also a lot of other “not extremists” have blocked that instance altogether, so besides having access to your community able to be yanked out from under you at any time (far more than usual I mean), you also will miss out on interactions with those other people. You will be willfully choosing to remain inside of that echo chamber, which is such to a significantly higher degree than the vast majority of Lemmy overall, and legitimately much higher than even Reddit (no joke, again, read for yourself the stories in that and other communities). Whereas if you choose a community not on Lemmy.ml, then you can still interact with people from that instance, just elsewhere.

Also, you could be told that the mod hopes to kill you someday. Sadly, I’m not joking there either (some selected quotes: "nono I don’t want to shoot for pointing that it’s a game, I want to shoot you because…”, and then later tripling down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”).

See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/22359447.

Fortunately you will never know what happens when you walk into the likes of !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net (especially from a post appearing in All) and dare to reply to a comment, because that entire instance has been defederated from yours.

It kept happening to so many other people, that eventually the admins simply gave up on it. Which is a good thing imho, bc I for one almost left the Threadiverse entirely based on such interactions - I don’t need that noise in my life:-) - and therefore can guess that many others actually did (plus they say exactly that, over on Reddit).

You can read some of the drama here if you like:-).

If LW helped you migrate from Reddit to the Threadiverse until you knew more what you were looking for and could find a true home in lemm.ee that meets your needs better, then both of them sound awesome at their respective roles to me.:-)

I’m surprised to hear about the slowness issue - I think this is the first time that I have, though I am definitely spoiled at Discuss.Online that has such a great technical admin (he also is the one who was developing Sublinks, before life and a baby intervened:-). Is lemm.ee much faster than lemmy.world for you?

Tbf there is legit fear in the USA that Trump will start to place bans or at least watchlists on social media outlets that Musk does not make money off of. Then again, I thought that LW wasn’t really associated with the USA in any way besides having a bunch of users from it, and anyway you have found a perfect solution to the problem - if they don’t want it, go somewhere else that does allow what you need.:-)

Personally I would go with Monthly Active Users, e.g. since Hexbear has managed to run off a good fraction of its users over time (which lemmy.world is in the process of doing as well).

This puts sh.itjust.works as #4, which it’s been for a good long while, above Lemmy.ml and Hexbear and nearly all other instances.

Link, but the URL does not preserve the options shown, so you have to resort by Monthly Active Users.

I briefly considered it but… the rest of the world is likewise devolving into fascism & totalitarianism, and anyway there’s problems everywhere. None of us live forever - that’s not even an option - so instead our choices are only how we face life and death. And I don’t feel like giving in, even if I (literally) die on this hill, these are my people and I will help as much as I can until I cannot anymore.

Absolutely NOT. Most of us have both friends and family members on both sides of this. Even neutral people are going to get roped in, even if only by the loss of someone else that we know. The pandemic showed us just how interconnected we all are - whether we acknowledge that, or even want to be, or not.

Right, so I hope this perspective from across the pond helped see how things are… tense over here.:-)

I would not say that - for one thing we have nukes - but while there is much room for subtlety and nuance, there are aspects that are not entirely unlike a third-world nation…

But more to the point, while the direction that the country is turning into may be that way, the current status of living for most people is quite high. Though that too gets more complex to measure b/c if you talk about e.g. a boomer, then Americans have one of if not the highest standard of living in the world (I might be wrong about that, but it’s at least “high” I think?), whereas e.g. a gen-alpha has significantly less hope for their own future.

Although the latter could change rapidly with a change in e.g. housing pricing, or more relevant, changes in laws that would allow newer housing units to be created (b/c they are sources of income for people who already have multiple homes, there is an incentive to disallow new ones to be created that would lower the value of their equity, thus leading to restrictive markets catering to that segment of society).

In any case, it is most definitely a time of turmoil. One side is fighting to offer aid to e.g. hurricane survivors, while the other side is calling for literal war and bloodshed of the other. This tends to put a damper on conversations with the latter side.

As an American myself, perhaps I can help explain this. We are more divided than ever before, with one side literally spouting neo-nazi propaganda (and both sides aiding genocide), and many of us expect if not quite a full-on civil war, then at least some kind of “Constitutional event” akin to the January 5 riot at the capitol to take place in the next few months.

Though whether that ever comes or not, our democracy has already fallen. For one thing, the recent(-ish) SCOTUS ruling a few months ago allows the President to literally assassinate their political rivals, fully legally, with very little oversight (I’m not aware of the particulars tho), thereby giving them (whether they ever choose to use it or not) the powers of a totalitarian dictator. And this barely scratches the surface of what all is going on with our judicial branch…

And for another, every single year Congress refuses to pass a financial budget, instead kicking it forward for months at a time as they bicker about the details, though more importantly, one side considers this obstructionism a “victory” - and this same side is the one actually putting out the call for a full-on Civil War, no joke. And this as well barely begins to scratch the surface of all the brokenness of our legislative branch…

And too the over-turning of Roe v. Wade, like the handling of the pandemic, has scared people. The same person smiling sweetly across the table as you eat Thanksgiving dinner (American holiday celebrating the “discovery”, prior to the slaughter of the “Indians”, by the “Saint” Christopher Columbus) is the very self-same one who if you die in the next couple of years, they were someone who helped make it happen. As in: if you don’t want an abortion, then don’t get one, but preventing others from getting not only “abortions”, but from removing things like cancerous masses in the uterus or even already-dead, necrotic and rotting fetus left-over material, b/c of someone’s fucked-up definition of what an “abortion” is. Someone who btw does not have an M.D., a Ph.D., a J.D., or any other kind of professional degree that would lend towards understanding what a “fetus” is or is not, and instead rants and raves spouting nonsense about “Jewish space lasers” and the like.

This shit is literally life and death for us. School shootings are real - and not merely limited to schools, but also shopping centers, theaters, and the like. Heck, the former president has already had two very inept assassination attempts already. We are a nation in turmoil, having already received what looks to be a fatal wound, and now just waiting to die and/or see whatever will come next. Our votes barely matter, as regardless of who we put in, the wealthy elite control them - e.g. 90% of people want some form of responsible gun control laws, yet time after time voters put people into place who will enact them yet it never happens, those people going in get bribed or blocked and then never manage to get it done, thus leaving our children to be sacrificed to the alter of greed. And ignorance. And especially obstinacy.

But setting aside all of the above, conservatives tend to be not very “fun” to talk to. I don’t even mean true “conservatives” but rather what ended up replacing most of them, first with the Alt-Right that replaced socioeconomic conservatism (e.g. progressive conservativism from the Bush era gave way to the likes of Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz) and now with the Trump-focused Maga (+ the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green, and outside of politics people like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan). If you watch Innuendo Studios’ The Alt-Right Playbook you can see a large litany of “tactics” used to control and twist every conversation, which often do things such as ignore most of what the other person said while hyper-focusing on a singular aspect that they then twist and distort to unrecognizable proportions before preemptively claiming “victory”. Seriously, I’ve genuinely had better conversations with 5-year-old children.

That doesn’t mean that people “like” the Democrat, left-leaning party, with its neoliberal attitudes of only pretending to care about the common man while instead enriching the wealthy, it just means that many people - especially educated ones such as we see more often on the Fediverse - “dislike” the Republican, right-leaning party, with its neoconservative attitudes of only pretending to care about the common man while instead enriching the wealthy, oh and also killing people (e.g. blocking abortions) on top of that.

I don’t think most people would mind debating a real conservative though? One who was respectful and perhaps even kind? Especially if they stuck to factual argumentation rather than made-up “alternative facts” bullshit. It’s just that those are so exceedingly rare as to barely exist these days. But look around - I have seen entire communities devoted to such things, and as you pointed out there are entire instances that are dedicated to them as well. Also there’s Truth Social, X, and most mainstream news sources that at least offer that POV a platform - e.g. the second presidential debate with Kamala Harris lacking real-time fact checking, thereby letting Trump say just whatever he wants at any given moment. Truthfully, I do not feel that “conservative” POVs are in any way in danger of dying off. Though that does not mean that it is welcomed into every single spot across the entire internet either.

Conversations must be held in good faith. Conservatives often refuse to do so. Hence, the defederation has little to do with them being “conservative”, and much to do with them being “toxic” (although those two things are not entirely unrelated…).

Meh, I’m not worried about myself, so much as whether the Fediverse itself will survive. Every single person that I’ve recommended it to irl comes back in our next encounter with how much politically extremist - and violent - rhetoric is used. Chapotraphouse is the least of the Fediverse’s troubles, though it too is one of them.

Overall though they seem connected: not wanting to defederate from either lemmy.ml with its constant calls for guillotines (I mean… not that I don’t understand the reason for such:-) or from hexbear.net, mainstream users are being turned away.

And since like 90% of Fediverse content is made by a couple handfuls of people, I do worry about our long-term sustainability. Oh well.

Hehe, they dunked on me when I first joined Lemmy, and accidentally responded to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse, while browsing on All. Never having heard of it, I had no idea what it was.

I said something to the effect that at least Biden was keeping gas prices down, and they DID NOT LIKE THAT ONE BIT!!! It was weird to keep opening my notifications and continue to get replies for WEEKS and WEEKS after I stopped responding (I forget if I deleted the comment even - normally I never do such, especially if I am wrong b/c it helps to preserve a record for posterity, so at most I would put text in strikethrough format and add an Edit statement).

And that’s on me, for going into their space and not even posting but still commenting in a post. Although… we do not control others only ourselves, and isn’t it a bit on us if we federate ChapoTrapHouse, thereby feeding users across the entire Fediverse this content? Like literally, if an instance offers CSAM, then even though hosted elsewhere we would be the ones in trouble for feeding their data to our users.

Anyway, whether their dunks are successful or not is besides the point - they at least like to talk about people in a negative manner, as they themselves claim is their purpose for existing.

The self-started purpose of hexbear is to “dunk” on people. That’s not a bug - it’s a feature. We need not be shocked, Shocked I say, SHOCKED when they do what they said that they will.

It would help immensely if a label could be applied, so that people do not wander over there without first being warned. Not that it’s mandatory, but it’s like porn: fine if that’s what you wanted, though a bit surprising if not.

Why is that - wouldn’t you be working against solar gravity? Like you don’t have to get them there quickly, just launch them in some orbit that will decay and be taken in?

Is this losing son?

Excellent breakdown imho.:-)

My highest karma item has about 200 upvotes. Let’s see, theirs… Holy crap I didn’t even know the numbers went that high!? 🤗

Preemptive: take what I’m saying with a heavy grain of salt, obviously and as always.

The true liberals will vote Dem no matter what - Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, hell this group would vote for Pete Davidson at this point!

The true conservatives… same, mostly. Unless the liberals advanced someone like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney, who may be able to chip into that? (This is when we finally stop pretending that liberals have any options in this race, midway between neoliberalism and outright fascism.) Bc just like Dem != liberal, but differently, Repub != Trump-er.

There are probably like 5-100 people in the middle somewhere, but bc they live in swing states somehow determine the course of the entire nation. Would this be a time to be risky and advance AOC - as a young, passionate, genuine person, since the votes of neither liberals nor conservatives are likely to be affected either way? Except the old money probably worries too much that they could not control her, whereas both Trump and Biden have been vetted in this regard.

Okay but… worse than Biden is already doing?

At this point is there anyone, anyone at all, who isn’t merely voting for “not Trump” on the “left”?

Conversely, there are a few on the right who actively like Trump.

And there may be a handful of people - in key spots though - who may vote for a younger candidate?