The reputational damage is a good point, its extent is kind of lost on me as I'm not very involved in the wiki circles but obviously this is gonna hurt it and isn't easy to scrub off as the vandal banned ProleWiki users like you, Forte and OP, doing so as a supposed authority of Leftypedia.

Since Aussig and Parabola are banned, I doubt Leftypedia would stand up again.

Aussig, apart from whatever they did on the discord, was pretty irrelevant to the actual wiki. Account created April 30, made a dozen edits, then for whatever reason RedParabola promoted them. I don't know if they're a sockpuppet, or friends or negotiated something on discord, whatever, but they're a "literally who?" before today.

As for Parabola, they made a bunch of contributions but the wiki won't be much different without them, just a bit slower. It's not like they were critical to the site. Like you and that admin said, probably Wisconcom anyway.

In my month staying in there, it is a gold mine of bullshit

I believe that. An archivism project I was in a while back was victim to petty discord drama causing two different coups and ending up getting the whole thing nuked. I can't help but see it as a drama site for any project-based chat, attracting people who just want to climb to the top and become lords of tiny fiefs.

For what its worth, the leftypedia staff have just removed the discord server from their site, as being "no longer affiliated with Leftypedia users". I'm not sure what to make of that since I stay away from discord like plague.

Looks like the site staff have banned Aussig and made an update post: https://wiki.leftypol.org/wiki/Leftypedia:Community_hub

edit: And disavowed the Discord server.

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Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

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>do community service

>get sentenced to community service

Great system.

For me, it was the palmy beach.

And I'll have you know that I'm still under 30 and do regular back extension exercises!

I've done that. You just bring something appropriate to carry it in.

Although now that I live closer to a smaller grocer, I just walk twice.

A beautiful slick theme, and Xonotic in the launchpad. This desktop looks like a good time!

I would personally try and make the window panels darker to match all the parts seen in the first image.

Thanks for the detailed reply :)

I agree with all your points, it is misleading and potentially harmful to use a strong term like spyware to refer to all of those things, without further context. I guess I'm still used to a couple of tech circles where people would jokingly throw 'spyware' around to describe anything and everything, so I didn't realize how misleading it really is. Especially when it's applied to things like automatic updates, which only the most extreme security models consider more of a risk than a security feature.

That website is [...] full of verifiably false information

Could you please provide and example or two? I wish to verify it, since I didn't notice any last time I checked the site.

they act as if any and all [unprompted] connections a browser makes are automatically bad and “spying”.

They're very clear that this is their approach (bold text on the home page). Even if you disagree with their definition, that doesn't make the site bad. And there are many valid situations where a threat model should be this strict, consider anti-government activists in any country.

They even claim that Tor Browser is a “spyware”.

It says "Not Spyware". https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/tor

Firefox gets a high rating on default configuration.

The next line explains that with custom configuration, it becomes Not Spyware.

Honestly, brigading is still a valid thing that can exist here, but yes, people don't realize that if a post gets popular on a popular federated instance, people who appear like 'foreigners' (for lack of better word) will jump in and flood it. It looks as if a brigade, but it's entirely organic, non-malicious, unorganized and unprompted.

I'm not sure how to classify things like 'dunk tank' posts, where someone on an instance will say 'lol look how dumb this post over there is'... it's not really calling a raid but many people will go to the source comment and dogpile them. And sure, that's just part of being a public website, but it's a bit easier with federation to go over and interact, just like it is moving between subreddits on reddit.

'Authoritarianism' is a bullshit vague idealist concept that can't be linearized into 'more than', 'less than', 'most' or 'least', and make any sense.

The USA throw people in prison for decades and enslave them for being a victim of the drug trade. They have one of the largest proportions of imprisoned population in the world.

They also allow socialists to own guns and propagandize, to a larger degree than most countries.

Liberalism is complex, contradictory and idealist, so terms like 'authoritarianism' are basically meaningless to apply to the real world.

There's a big difference between banning addictive industries and oppression. There's a big difference between 'a government not letting people do something' and 'oppression'. There might be a case that this way of eliminating tobacco usage, by just making an addictive substance illegal, can be cruel if there isn't adequate social support alongside it, but banning smoking by itself isn't cruel, malicious or arbitrary.

I think there are some reasonable arguments for not criminalizing tobacco, and that this is a silly ineffective way to approach a chemically-and-socially addictive issue, but it is harmful to health for the user and others, society and therefore economics. And this can't be rationalized away by 'it's someone's own free will' when it's chemically-addictive, socially-ingrained and still being marketed to vulnerable teens. And, keep in mind, the medical costs of this are socialised, so it's not like the person smoking pays for all the consequences. It's a systematic, non-trivial problem that significantly affects people who do not choose to partake.

With all that said, fuck the 'war on drugs' style of criminalization. It just creates an illegal market and fills prisons, and in some countries with a similar system to the US, creates a legalized form of mass slave labour.

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the big bog

I didn't read the news, apparently it is being fixed in 0.19.

That's good to hear, I haven't kept up with development in the last few months.

I didn't think of that, but I don't see why they would need to be converted to raster first. The standard server image conversion tools should be able to take in a vector, if memory serves me.

If one can get past the 20 most invasive, tactless, eternally-online members of Hexbear and Lemmygrad, they're generally great places. Unfortunately, those people are the main ones getting attention and alienating people on other instances.

It's disheartening whenever I see a legitimate chance to teach someone something and a Hex account just makes an absolute malicious shitpost that isn't even worth calling a dunk. That, and a couple of highly-active users in particular who will consistently take the worst possible interpretation of a post and insist anyone who disagrees is a bad actor. Sankara would roll in his grave if he could see those post histories.