y’know what, I was gonna do this quietly, but I’m drunk, and so this feels like a time to make bad decisions:

When Yiffit closes at the end of this year, it’s probably going to be the end of my time on Lemmy. The reasons are varied (it’s mostly the tankies) but fundamentally, it boils down to the simple fact that I’ve realized that I come here not to enjoy myself or relax, but because I want to be angry at something. And boy howdy, does Lemmy give me something to be angry about (the tankies).

I’m gonna level with the rest of this platform. As it stands right now, this platform consists of the following:

• ~60-70%: Reposts of whatever meme is in the vicinity of the front page of /r/all on Reddit

• 15-20%: Politics (including some of the worst takes I’ve ever seen on the Internet) and memes about the awful takes

• 9-14%: Memes about Linux

• ~1%: Actual original content that interests me

So with all that, why would I stick around here? If the shit I see here is mostly crap reposts from Reddit and shit that I either don’t care about or actively dislike, why don’t I just… go to Reddit and browse read-only without an account, like I’ve found myself increasingly doing over the past 6 months or so?

And as for actually interacting with this place, fundamentally, most of my engagement with a platform comes from the comments. And holy fuck are the comments here absolutely fucking awful. It puts me in a mindset where when I go to this website, I’m mentally preparing myself for a session of “upvote the sane takes, downvote the unhinged bullshit, and debate whether it’s worth replying to the particularly unhinged takes and getting into an internet slapfight (hint: the answer is usually no).” And that’s fine to do for a while, but…

I’m tired, boss.

I’m tired of being angry and scared all the fucking time. I’m tired of arguing and exposing myself to the kind of toxic shit that you would normally hear from the angry drunk on the corner who hasn’t showered off the vomit from his last hangover, and you could safely ignore. And for a place that is supposedly mostly populated by leftists (y’know, the groups you would expect to be relatively accepting of minorities and adopt a “live and let live” mindset), holy FUCK I have seen more hate for furries in the ~16 months of using Lemmy than I did in a decade of using Reddit.

And that’s the other problem with this place–the moderation absolutely fucking sucks. On the one hand, you’ve got literal stalinist admins running Those Instances (.ml, lemmygrad, hexbear, etc.) issuing instance-wide bans for the mildest of lukewarm “maybe harm reduction is good actually” takes, and on the other hand you have mods and admins on the not-fucking-nutso instances so traumatized by Reddit moderation that they’re wringing their hands over “well we don’t want to have the appearance of impropriety and power abuse” while literal, 90s-style BBS trolls run rampant, flooding the platform with shit and making the comments even more toxic than they already are.

Coming from someone who is has a few years of moderation experience, here’s a dirty little secret of moderation: You cannot have an absolute, 100% objective standard. The instant you shackle yourself to the standard of objectivity, you open the door for trolls and bad-faith actors to push their discourse up to the very edge of the rules, testing the boundaries, reveling in the game of “how much can I shit all over your community while staying within the rules?” You HAVE to leave yourself at least some wriggle room to ban someone because they’re a shithead without a 5-page essay justifying why, or you’ll find yourself powerless against the inevitable onslaught of galactic martial artists. You should absolutely have methods to appeal and review moderator actions, and I do support transparency whenever possible, but moderation is fundamentally walking a tightrope of very unpleasant judgment calls that will inevitably piss off someone (if nobody else, the person who you banned and the people who want to see your community burn for their amusement).

Similarly, I think I’m going to wind down my presence on Mastodon for similar reasons. In my time there, I’ve been exposed to some of the pettiest, Mean Girls-esque, high school bullshit drama I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve seen friends scramble to find new instances because some rando neither of us heard of mouthed off to the wrong asshole and got their instance put on a blocklist, I’ve seen groups of people that normally I would love to chill with, swap stories over beers, and generally get to know accuse one another of being racist and/or transphobic, with an astounding lack of grace, forgiveness, and willingness to understand one another’s perspective and actually fucking listen to people. Similarly to my experience with Lemmy, it’s mildly amusing to read up on the latest drama, but one can only spill the tea for so long before they get tired of cleaning up the mess and actually want to drink the goddamn tea.

I’m not sure what I’ll do next, but I think I’m generally done with the Fediverse. Say what you will about corporate, centralized social media–and holy FUCK is there a LOT to complain about–but at least their moderation is less susceptible to the kind of bullshit I’ve talked about here, so maybe I’ll make an account on Bluesky–it seems to have reached a critical mass of furries so maybe I’ll be able to find a home there, at least for a good few years.

So yeah. I might get downvoted to hell for this, but I don’t really fucking care at this point. It’s all gonna be gone in a few months, and so will I.

I mean, you don’t have to go full-blown fursuit and conventions if you don’t want to. Most furries never actually bother with fursuiting–speaking from personal experience, it’s hot as shit (especially outdoors or in summer), you can barely see or hear anything, and if you wear glasses they’re prone to getting knocked off your nose or fogging up so badly that you can’t see anything. Many fursonas exist exclusively in artwork or stories–either commissioned or self-drawn–and even that’s optional.

You don’t even have to actively participate in the community if you don’t want to. Many furries are passive members who just follow artists, lurk in streams or group chats, occasionally leave a comment on a submission, and generally exist in furry spaces. Literally the only requirement to be a furry is to say you’re a furry!

Honestly, don’t stress yourself out over it, and keep an open mind. It might not be your cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine–there undoubtedly is a large sexual aspect to furry, and lots of folks (especially folks who are cisgender, heterosexual, have a less relaxed view about sexuality, etc.–not to say that you can’t be a straight male furry, but there are a LOT of gay/bi furries) may find it to be a dealbreaker. Ultimately, furry has its roots in the nerd and geek communities, back when being nerdy or geeky was something to be bullied over, and it still shows it today.

Furry is a community that has a disproportionate number of LGBT+ folks, neurodivergent folks (especially people on the ADHD/autism spectrum), and other marginalized groups. Among many things, this means it revels in being proudly and unabashedly weird, both as a celebration of itself and as a defense mechanism against becoming overwhelmed by the kinds of business interests that would love nothing more than to push out all the sexuality and weirdness to provide a safe space for advertisers to shovel their slop down our throats.

If that sounds like something you’d enjoy being a part of, then I’d suggest checking out some places like the furry_irl subreddit, looking up streamers under the furry tag on Twitch (Skaifox, WhiskeyDing0, etc.), maybe make an account on FurAffinity, and look up furmeets or conventions in your area you can attend. You might not like it, or you might find yourself joining the best community I’ve ever been part of.

Yeah, definitely. Furry encompasses basically anything that’s a non-human anthropomorphic creature. I’ve seen fursonas based on birds, sharks, dolphins, turtles, rhinos, dinos, frogs, hippos, orcas, dragons, reptiles, plant creatures… hell, there are alien species like sergals and avalis, anthro/machine hybrids like protogens, and even entirely robotic characters.

It’s just called furry because furred species are the most common, and the original community that splintered off from sci-fi conventions in the 70s and 80s and grew through fanzines pre-Internet largely used furred species for their characters. (“Fun” fact, the early community had a lot of skunk characters, which is why one of the first derogatory terms for furries was “skunkfucker.”)

Believe it or not this is exactly how most furries make their fursona

What, asking experts who have studied a topic and has forgotten more about systems of governance and effective anti corruption efforts than I’ll ever know is somehow bad now? The fuck?

Yeah, it’s a fantasy, and an extremely off-the-cuff, low-detail, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if list. In reality, I’d probably either shut up and change absolutely nothing while I figure out the power structures, or I’d just work out a payoff to quietly step down and leave without a fuss.

assign everyone a government mandated fursona

Freak the fuck out.

Pull back from Ukraine, Crimea, and Georgia, and negotiate an immediate ceasefire.

Call as many political scientists and scholars as possible and get their advice on how the fuck I can design a reformed system of democratic governance that is robust enough to withstand the inevitable attempts to undermine and corrupt it.

Find the multitude of stashed billions from the various oligarchs and seize it, use the money to invest in overhauling Russian society–improving infrastructure and education, improving the standard of living, etc.

That feels like it’s rather besides the point, innit? You’ve got AI companies showing off AI art and saying “look at what this model can do,” you’ve got entire communities on Lemmy and Reddit dedicated to posting AI art, and they’re all going “look at what I made with this AI, I’m so good at prompt engineering” as though they did all the work, and the millions of hours spent actually creating the art used to train the model gets no mention at all, much less any compensation or permission for their works to be used in the training. Sure does seem like people are passing AI art off as their own, even if they’re not claiming copyright.

I’d give strange new worlds a pass as being better than Orville, but yeah, it’s definitely the exception to the rule.

The fuck is wrong with you? Why do you give a shit about what people enjoy? That’s pretty weird, bro

What evidence is there that gen AI hasn’t peaked? They’ve already scraped most of the public Internet to get what we have right now, what else is there to feed it? The AI companies are also running out of time–VCs are only willing to throw money at them for so long, and given the rate of expenditure on AI so far outpaces pretty much every other major project in human history, they’re going to want a return on investment sooner rather than later. If they were making significant progress on a model that could do the things you were saying, they would be talking about it so that they could buy time and funding from VCs. Instead, we’re getting vague platitudes about “AGI” and meaningless AI sentience charts.

Jokes and (valid) worries about how many men are still supporting this dumpster fire aside… A poll like this has got to be setting off the fire alarms at Trump campaign HQ and I am giddy as hell to see it. The last time Democrats came this close to winning the overall male vote was 2008. If this margin holds out we could be looking at an absolute blowout (or at least as close as one gets in today’s climate). Shame the Senate map means we won’t get a 60-seat Senate, though…

I actually had some thoughts about this and posted this in a similar thread:

First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist’s entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice–the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else’s work.

Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn’t really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you’ll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There’s a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain’t because they find the subject interesting.

Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else’s style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it’s still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.

Fourth, there’s a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist’s style in order to leech off their success, it’s extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim’s livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist’s output.

And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people’s artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you’re claiming it’s your own original work. The only way it’s even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says “this is traced artwork for practice, here’s a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this.” Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it’s much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?

You literally haven’t, except maybe by sticking your fingers in you ears and going “NUH UH”

but go on king

Here’s the point since you clearly missed it:

If Brave gets even a moderate market share, Google will continue to mess them around like this as they really don’t like people not seeing their adverts.

Ultimately it’s software, so the Brave devs can do pretty much whatever they want, limited by the available time and money. Google’s influence extends to making that either easier or harder, it much the same way as they influence the Android ecosystem.

Brave may not be particularly affected by this change, but that’s besides the point. If Brave starts becoming a viable threat to Google, Google can easily start making changes to Chromium that target Brave and breaks the changes they make, just like they targeted uBlock Origin and broke it with manifest v3. Brave might be able to work around these changes, but it costs time and developer labor (i.e. money) that would have been spent elsewhere, and if Google makes things hard enough on Brave they could be forced to abandon the project.

The only way I could buy it is if it came out that it was faked, but their plan involved keeping the gunman alive so he could spout fake-leftist buzzwords and they either didn’t realize that the secret service shoots to kill, or forgot to clue them into the plan ahead of time.

This shit right here is why I hate to argue about labels or whether someone is/isn’t liberal/leftist/centrist/conservative/whatever. At best, they’re an extremely vague, ill-defined, hyper-individualized label that means different things to different people. One person says “I’m a leftist,” and they mean it as “I’m a progressive Democrat who supports heavily regulated capitalism, labor unions, LGBT rights, and am pro-choice.” Another person says “I’m a leftist,” and they mean it as “I’m an anarcho-communist who believes billionaires should forcibly redistribute their wealth, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about LGBT or minority rights because they’re a bourgeoisie distraction from class consciousness.”

I don’t care about your label, I care about your policies. Those actually tell me something about you.

I personally did read it that way, but I will concede that perhaps I was being uncharitable.

Regardless, I have seen people explicitly questioning whether it was faked elsewhere, and it makes me cringe every time. Talking about this serves literally zero purpose–it makes the left look crazy, any alternative explanations that make Trump look bad fall apart under the barest scrutiny, and it just serves to keep the assassination attempt in peoples’ minds. There are literally hundreds of other things to complain about Trump over, talking about this doesn’t help.

I think the mod v. user viewpoint is why moderators are so cagey and timid about banning the Usual Suspects. I remember when mods actually followed through and temp banned one of them (iirc it was givesomefucks?) and pretty much all of Lemmy lost their collective shit. If you just read that one thread, you’d have left with the impression that Lemmy mods were a bunch of far-right, protofascist, power tripping assholes hellbent on silencing dissent.

The lesson I took from that episode is that Lemmy has a sizable, vocal minority that either agrees with what the Usual Suspects are saying, or at minimum don’t think it’s banworthy. They might also think there needs to be a bright line rule violation (and either don’t recognize or don’t care that every good troll is well-versed in skirting the rules and gently pushing the line, but almost never clearly steps over them).