I half agree but also I think with every extra step reddit takes like banning people for upvoting posts that mention Luigi we see more people interested in a freer alternative.

What lemmy needs is some new use cases reddit doesn’t have, I’ve been thinking about making an adversary debate platform that basically just offers a different format to a thread designed to make understanding events easier. Also I want to try making gamified chat modes where the main image is altered based on agreement or disagreement in the thread, basically an info graphic of the thread.

I’d love to make some game experiences on it too, I was thinking of a similar collaborative experience where user interactions in the thread alter the main image gameboard - would be great to use the existing floss infrastructure to make something open and fun.

And lock down the computer so it can’t use a bootdisk, lock out programs that can be used to circumvent locks like steam, browser plug-ins, and other VM stuff…

That’s the bit about this I hate, I do think porn can be dangerous especially for people who aren’t emotionally and intellectually ready for it but these systems do the opposite of help.

Teens are curious, letting them sneak a peek at pornhub doesn’t have much risk but forcing them to learn how to accesses backroom porng R ** from seedy discord groups or similar puts them in actual genuine danger from preditors and exposes them to far more intense and possibly illegal porn.

In my friends kids school there was a situation with a girl that had an iPhone she’d been sent by some guy on roblox, rumor was she’d ‘earned it’ when playing at a friend’s house with less strict parental supervision. It’s already hard to stop teens putting themselves in danger, especially with so many bad people out there preying on them.

Until project 2025 changes things federally

The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.

A huge portion of religious people believe that homosexuality is an especially dangerous sin because it’s a social contagion, they see the increased popularity of gay things and the decreased respect for religion as a clear sign that the devil is winning and faithful, godfearing society is collapsing. To an extent they’re right, modern views on self determination and respect for others is anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years - to the faithful it’s like saying the sky is pink or fish live in trees.

There are of course now grifters using homophobia to draw people into their political ideologies but it’s generally people from homophobic families in homoohobic communities that get drawn into it, it’s easy to forget that when you see a twenty something year old kid making homophobic comments it’s likely at his age his dad was going ‘queer bashing’ for fun with his friends and certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to beat up a gay person in a bar or in the street if encountered.

Even big artists like Eminem had deeply homophobic messages in his music, now that’s backtracked and he’s friends with Elton - this isn’t entirely because he’s grown as a person but because at the start of this century it was unconscionable that rap or hip hop could be anything but homophobic. School kids used the word ‘gay’ to describe uncool or disliked things so commonly it was even part of my own vocab despite being raised in a progressive and accepting family in a liberal area.

Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime but it’s not universal, a lot of religious and conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.

Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.

It’s a hugely complex issue for me, I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is. Forcing things too hard can be painful for those unready which causes resentment and reaction but holding back and allowing non-violent homophobic behavior to exist in our society is hurtful to those struggling to find snd accept themselves. (For example being 17 and trying to reconcile popular music explicitly talking about how your unexplored sexual desires are disgusting, realizing you have to make the choice between humiliation and self denial - and this is probably a big part of other emotional troubles which can lead to rejection of otherwise sensible social norms leading to unhealthy drug use, self endangering behavior and other things that still have lasting damage to my life to this day)

I don’t know what will solve these complex issues in our society, maybe making certain concessions to mildly homophobic sections of society would stop driving them into full on culture war crusaders? Maybe highlighting that it’s not only possible but probable to be gay and boring would help ease the anxiety? I actually kinda think straight pride type events and companies pandering to heterosexuals could be normalized and accepted more - not in a way that pits them against everyone else but more of a everyone gets a party kinda way. Stop heteros feeling attacked or at least make those who want to paint that picture looking silly.

It’s sad to admit but humanity is naturally kinda selfish and shitty, bigotry and group thinking is as natural and easy to us as breathing while compassion and understanding takes effort and the right circumstances to flourish.

And isn’t this the one people keep posting the dramatic headline without mentioning the damage only lasted until sunrise?

Yeah it’s funny because they give themselves away so easily by refusing to admit positive social and personal effects and magnifying absurd arhuments against.

Like the other reply I always see them push the genocide ones, of course if you get into details they freak out because the accusation is kinda stupid - lemmy by design couldn’t do the thing they say Facebook should to have stopped the genocide so if you believe it’s valid and use lemmy you’d be being super hypocritical - but of course they don’t care, they’re reaching for criticism not actually trying to understand it.

It’s kinda scary really how little people care about reality, it’s the same thing on Facebook with the boomer conspiracy stuf, phones bad, kids not manly, and all that stuff. They’re not looking for truth or trying to make the world better, they’re trying to find excuses to feel superior.

Yeah this is basically the older generation vs video games, the one before that against movies, etc, etc…

As people age they resent the world changing, they assume everything different is bad because it’s easier to accept than the thought of aging into irrelevance.

Lemmy is full of people knee-jerk hating anything new; social media, ai, and every new thing younger generations do. It’s dumb but people are often so.

We do need to address certain toxic traits that are bringing things down, hyper negativity is the default as well as intense partisanship to the point where anyone with a slightly unpopular opinion is instantly labeled as an troll, bot, or agent of dark forces - you can see it a dozen times just in this thread.

There is no debate here because anyone who doesn’t follow the groupthink is chased out, the news is super biased because of this but it also spills over in to everywhere.

I think there are too many people that think they should be the dictator of lemmy, we really need to start up voting good posts and useful content rather than knee-jerk down voting.