European. Polite contrarian. History graduate. I never downvote reasoned opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine (which may be why you got no reply). Low-effort comments with vulgarity or snark will also be ignored.
Don’t be discouraged. Personally I don’t have the energy any more to endure the abuse of the mob (these “leftist” ignoramuses whose obsession with “Zionism” leads them to support literal fascism) but it’s important that somebody makes the points you’re making.
Meta gave up on the idea, effectively
From their perspective: not enough users to be worth the bother.
Now that is some enthusiasm for the fediverse.
There seems to be a better name for what you are talking about. Fair point about Oceania though, that’s as uncontinental as Europe.
stopped after I finished my MSc in Geoscience
This snarky argument from authority is redundant given that the facts are extremely easy to understand and outlined in the Wikipedia article I cited.
The biggest gap between Africa and Eurasia (PS; we agree that Europe is not a continent) is the Mediterranean sea, and it is getting smaller. That does seem relevant.
geologically, an ocean is in the process of opening up in between
Hardly. Africa is converging with Europe and the Med is being crushed. It’s only moving away from Arabia.
In which Asia’s and Africa’s claim to “continent” status looks suddenly shaky, and Europe’s completely laughable.
The Russian “11 time zones” fallacy. At the north pole you can get 24 time zones into one square meter.
I don’t see much indicating him as a former communist
He talked about it - some variety of Trotskyism IIRC. A bit of a surprise but shouldn’t have been. Tons of former Maoists have been in high positions. Even a neoliberal head of the European Commission (Barroso).
On the supposed virtues of communism, you won’t convince me but I suppose you know that already. IMO the world would have done very well to listen to George Orwell, someone who saw through it all on the basis of up-front experience 90 years ago. That might have saved an awful lot of needless suffering. Or Orlando Figes, who wrote a book whose title says it all: “The USSR: A People’s Tragedy”.
Amusing. And what detective work! Your time is valuable, careful not to waste too much of it.
Personally I’m not especially bothered by sockpuppetry in itself (talking of people wasting their time…). But it’s obviously important to have a plurality of viewpoints. If only they would sockpuppet more creatively!
This seems right. Personally I’m not sure I could roll my eyes harder at the fact that so many people in 2026 are so ignorant as to be prepared to call themselves “communists” - after all the famines, the purges, the 40 years in which much of Europe was struggling to escape (literally) from communism… And then I saw that you, too, call yourself a communist! So I guess I’ll stop there.
Except to recommend you the Ones and Tooze podcast, in which the brilliant host (an ex-communist) recently did a whole series, in great and illuminating detail, on the various communist thinkers. Which I listened to… dutifully.
Out of interest, how do you know it’s sockpuppets?
To be honest I’m genuinely a bit interested in who this might be. I’m imagining a disgruntled Hong Kong exile with too much time on their hands. Also seems likely to be Chinese in that they have a top-down concept of information, not seeing that obvious and relentless propaganda will just backfire with a sophisticated and relatively informed audience. Perhaps I’m being slightly optimistic, but I can’t see how they’ve convinced anyone here that “China bad” who didn’t already think that.
The real issue is that AI bots are making Q&A forums de-facto redundant. StackExchange posted its stats recently, and activity is dropping through the floor there too.
Of course, this leaves the question of what the AI bots are going to do in a few years when they have no new original content to eat. But right now they still have a banquet.
Ironically, the most active user on the current #2 China community, [email protected], is an absolutely indefatigable anti-Chinese propagandist.
This person, @[email protected] posts multiple times per day, usually quite sensible and well-sourced articles, but always on the same downer subjects (repression, Uighurs, corruption and so on) and never anything that paints China (let alone its government) in the slightest positive light. Since nobody else in this community can match their posting stamina, the end result is a community that, to newcomers, looks like one rando’s “I hate China” blog. Hardly surprising that it’s not a very successful community.
I’ve asked this user to consider dropping the tempo a bit, and been met with defensiveness. I complained in private to the mod, who is completely AWOL, and they didn’t care. Oh well.
This is great but perhaps there’s some other more appropriate community to put it.
Some general thoughts. I have done multiple CMS transfers of large sites involving Wordpress, Drupal and Discourse. No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming. That’s why the simplest option would be to stay as close to Wordpress as possible, using a fork for example to fix to the ethical problems you perceive. Otherwise you’re almost certainly going to find it’s much easier to archive and start afresh, with the compromises that implies.
If you do dump Wordpress, in your position I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo. So much simpler and more secure. But that’s just my opinion.
For a successful community, this one (which I also lurk in) is oddly topic-specific. They must be doing something right. Copy them!
This is what RSS was invented for. Sigh.
And we were told cancel culture had peaked.
With this attitude you’ll get the journalism you deserve, alas.