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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Thought it might be helpful to compare the USSR to Wikipedia’s definitions of fascism and communism. These definitions can be wrong or could be different than what they were at the height of the USSR, but perhaps it’ll help with finding common definitions. I’ll admit that my knowledge of USSR culture/governance is limited, so feel free to critique/refute any of my interpretations.

    Fascism:

    Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

    Checklist (hidden for brevity)
    1. +Dictatorial leader: Stalin wasn’t exactly a democratic ruler. Check.
    2. ?Centralized autocracy: AKA: One person has final say over any government decision. Probably, but maybe not depending on your definition?
    3. +Militarism: Definitely had a significant military focus. Check.
    4. +Forcible suppression of opposition: Yeah, that sounds par for the course for modern Russian government.
    5. ?Belief in natural social hierarchy: Does semi-deliberate wealth disparity and nationalistic superiority complex count?
    6. ?Subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race: Sounds likely, but not 100% sure.
    7. +Strong regimentation of society and the economy: Pretty sure the USSR had a planned centralized economy.

    It hits 4/7 pretty firmly and the remaining 3 are plausible.

    Communism:

    is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology… whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state.

    Checklist (hidden for brevity)
    1. XCommon ownership of the means of production of goods/services: Weren’t these state-owned?
    2. XCommon ownership of the means of distribution of goods/services: ^
    3. XCommon ownership of the means of exchange of goods/services: ^^
    4. ?Allocates products to everyone in the society based on need: Wasn’t there significant poverty while others’ were well-fed? If distribution wasn’t tied to labor, then it could be argued this fits, if somewhat imperfectly.
    5. XAbsence of private property: Oligarchs don’t exactly scream “lack of private property”
    6. XAbsence of social classes: Again, oligarchs and poverty
    7. ?Absence of money: Can’t comment on this one
    8. XAbsence of the state: There was 100% an overarching state

    Hits 2/8 at best, but I would be surprised to learn there wasn’t money in the USSR.


  • Yeah, I haven’t been around here too long either, but it feels like something interesting is happening for sure. There’s tons of memes, but there’s definitely also some interesting non-meme content. It’s shaping up to be a replacement for the core of what made Reddit work, hopefully while learning what not to do along the way. I know of at least 1-2 new apps on the way from seasoned 3rd party Reddit devs. Sync (!syncforlemmy@lemmy.world) will likely become my app of choice when it’s available.

    The biggest issue I’m seeing right now is the amount of data we’re asking server admins to store as far as long-term sustainability. In a Lemmy Support community, I saw one admin saying their 1k-user instance was gobbling up an extra GB of disk space daily. I wonder if the devs could overhaul the content distribution system to reduce the number of copies of data stored? Maybe clusters where each cluster is a “core federation” inner circle that shares/mirrors content with each other (basically a pact to distribute seeding the network), then more loosely federated servers that are allowed to view/share data without fully mirroring all relevant content.

    So many subs got shut down, and some definitely were questionable at best, but in it, Reddit organic feel and freedom

    While I agree that deplatforming should be very cautiously and judiciously approached, I will say that there is some content that should be blocked for the sake of preservation of tolerance. I don’t care whether the topic of discussion is legal, I care if it’s ethical. Hate speech has, and does, encourage real violence against innocent parties. When the goal post keeps moving for the sake of attracting investors or silence activism, rather than focusing solely on user experience, we start to see unreasonable restrictions on free communication. With federation and open source software, there’s no way to stop neonazis from setting up their own network, provided DNS is willing to point to them, but that doesn’t mean we should assist in growing their ideology/platform.

    Not to mention moderation was being done by a shrinking number of people and it seemed the echo chamber in each individual sub got worse.

    I wonder if this might be a reflection on increasingly difficult times for many people as cost of living exceeds income? Moderation takes real work. It’s unpaid and generally quite thankless. If would-be mods are bogged down with real-world problems, they’ll have less energy to devote to volunteering.