I’m personally kind of a prude and am uncomfortable with oversexualization but I don’t think this puritan, regressive path is the way to go.

the thing to remember is: it’s perfectly fine to be uncomfortable with some things–this is a normal part of existing in spaces with other people and it’s important to set boundaries for yourself. but in general it’s also not necessarily someone else’s problem to tailor their online existence to your discomfort.^[1] it’s good if they respect your wishes of course, and especially if you’re close with them it’s probably worthwhile to see if they’ll respect some of the ones you have. but with exceptions for the most heinous content it is mostly going to be/should be incumbent on you–at least as possible with the tools at your disposal–to curate your online experience so that you’re not exposed to that stuff.

that’ll happen when you are on pace for the worst team in modern baseball history (although they’re on a winning streak so i don’t think they are anymore–they’re now simply putrid instead of “worst to ever do it in a long, long time”)!

every time i look at Texan urban planning, i die a little inside. most US urban planning is bad, but it’s so uniquely bad in Texas that it’s not even funny, and there’s almost no way to systematically improve it short of nuking the suburbs and starting over because of how bad the sprawl is

Are memes ok?

in moderation, yes!

Graeber is basically “must read” as far as i’m concerned; for anarchists and would-be anarchists, i’d say a comparable figure is Peter Gelderloos.

on the more obscure end, i’ve found the bibliographies of Walter Rodney and Amílcar Cabral to be quite good; perhaps not broadly applicable to modern socialism, but both definitely profile worthwhile international and historical perspectives (Rodney with Caribbean, Guyanese, and Black socialism; Cabral with the liberation war fought in Guinea-Bissau against the colonial Portuguese) that shouldn’t be forgotten. since they’re lesser-known you probably can’t find their stuff in print, but most of their works can definitely be found on libgen

In the meantime, do you have any suggestions for a provider to host such a space?

hmm, good question. i’ve paged other people who i think are better able to socially or technologically answer this one than i, and hopefully they’ll be able to direct you and others toward something

this is just another effort by another city to chase unhoused people out of an area, rather than, oh i dunno, building a mother fucking housing complex.

the bar is actually much lower here technically, because an easy solution would be to just provide the service generally. you don’t even need housing to solve this specific facet of the “problem” (although nobody should be homeless and we should build housing and rehouse them, to be clear!)

The residents don’t want the homeless hanging around outside the library and turning off the wifi would reduce their incentive to be there.

i mean bluntly, sucks to be them? but get over it. homeless people are people too! the obvious solution is to provide them with social services first if this is the objection (which, to be clear, it generally isn’t–it’s that homeless people exist and aren’t out of mind)

this is less of a dichotomy than i think is described here, though: almost all people in the second category were at one point people in the first and end up there because the support described in the first category disappears. when you become homeless, that frequently means you lose almost everything–and it’s really, really hard to build up from nothing in modern society because the expectation is that you have money to survive, and there’s only so far people are willing to pay your way forward with that expectation.

(there’s also the reality that even if you have something, there’s only so long you can make that last without a job–and for a homeless person getting one can be functionally impossible, no matter how menial. housing is also catastrophically expensive, so even if they clear the job hurdle once they’re down, the housing one may be likewise impossible to clear. this treadmill is a big part of why so many people become visibly and persistently homeless)

I’m no doomer, but realistically, I think the best the left can hope for in 2024 is a vocal challenge from outside the DNC as any challenge from within would surely be muffled. In 2028, I’m all for a hostile takover FWIW.

yeah, i’m hoping in the 4 years between now and 2028 someone on the broader “left” is truly able to take the mantle from Bernie and become the front for all of the stuff he’s been talking about–and in between that time the broader left is able to build up unions and connections within the unions so there’s some sort of apparatus that can be tapped into by a candidate in 2028.

i’m also not under any pretenses that electoralism is the be-all-end-all, but right now it’s the reason there’s a broader American left worth thinking about. even if we wanted to mostly or entirely abandon electoralism (and i don’t think it’d be good to abandon that domain entirely, personally) we just don’t have influence outside of the electoral arena like we do within it–and we don’t have much electoral influence to begin with!

I’m glad to see he’s moving to the Green Party and trying to build a leftist 3rd party coalition run.

i’m unfortunately not super enamored with the Greens either, tbh–they’re not exactly a competent party in their own right, nor did the 3rd party coalition approach go all that well for Howie Hawkins in 2020.

speaking as a user for a moment and not as an admin: i do think this is a good idea for the site and community as a whole, and i’d like for us to eventually be able to accommodate stuff like this.

but speaking as an admin and not a user: …the main issue (besides specificity) is that we’re grappling with how we can responsibly facilitate any kind of mental health-focused community on here. in our current position, i don’t think we’re capable of doing that, nor do i think we’ll be able to any time soon. this is why we balked on anything closer to that space than [email protected] and [email protected], which we think mostly avoid what we’re worried about. (even then, we have three mods covering the first and i regularly keep special eye on the second.)

you’ve probably noticed that we really care about making sure our community and everything about it exists responsibly and ethically–and that also applies here. there are very real, immediate harms that can be caused by irresponsibly moderated health and mental health spaces and we don’t want that. but ensuring stuff like that doesn’t happen takes a lot of work and we’re just not in a place where we can do that work or promise we’ll get around to it.

while we also appreciate that people out there would volunteer to moderate such spaces, we’re also not in a place interpersonally where we can trust someone to watch over such a community. we’d ideally want legitimately qualified people to watch the space, and we just can’t promise that kind of thing. this obviously isn’t just a matter of pruning hate speech or getting correct information about how to take care of a plant–bad information in a (mental) health context can irreversibly harm or kill people. (and obviously there’s potential threats of violence, self-harm, and/or suicide that are really opened up to being expressed in such communities that must be handled with care. we’ve been fortunate to not deal with something like this yet.)

all this to say: this something we want to be able to have on the site, but i hope everyone can understand why this is a thing we’re not able to right now, and probably won’t for awhile.

this is symptomatic of how genuinely subhuman American society at-large treats homeless people, even though it is trivial in American society to become homeless. one wrong bill, one bad week, or one day of being in the wrong place is enough–and yet it is completely accepted that something of that sort happening to you places you into a class unworthy of rights and basic services afforded to others. it’s absurd!

probably yeah; i do think it’s a little US-centric for my liking and a little sparse on ideological content (i want it to be sort of agnostic overall, ideologically) so improvements from the crowd would also be helpful here

The best thing Beehaw can do along those lines is to have clear, comprehensive guidelines about defederation; enforce them consistently; and be ready to update them when unforeseen variations arise.

yeah, we’re in a very early stage but already rethinking some of our priors here thanks to federation and the lack of granularity with tools we have at our disposal

I’d be interested to know if there’s a strategy in place to ensure there are no super moderators on Lemmy. Or at least, not on Beehaw.

speaking for Beehaw: mods are currently (for practical and purposeful reasons) only limited to one or two communities, so we’re not worried about accumulation as on Reddit.

Is that an accurate understanding of the situation? If so, good to hear. Great to see landlord co-ops not getting any traction on further parasitizing communities

that’s correct. Maine DSA got this on the ballot last year as part of a slate of reforms they wanted in the city and while most of the others failed, the one which established this cap passed with 57% of the vote!

without downvotes as a tool against crap like that, what have we got? is it against our instance’s “be nice” policy to tell nazi punks to fuck off?

nope! we’re not going to ban for telling a TERF or nazi to eat shit or whatever. we as admins do try to be nice where possible, but you as a user really aren’t obligated to be because that’s dumb lol. you can also report it to us and in general we dispatch users who are like that as possible (although sidenote: if it’s a post off-instance and you report it, unless the user is really, really bad we probably won’t do anything immediately because we just can’t keep an eye on every possible bad actor.)