I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.

Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.

It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community’s values – their community won’t have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn’t pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.

Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called “janitors” on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It’s a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.

Anyone wondering about the grep for balls results around 11:40, it looks like Spotify uses zxcvbn as a password strength checker, which contains some dictionary lists of common words people put in passwords, in order of how common they are.

Hackers will use this as one main technique for password guessing (as opposed to a simple brute force, like “0000”, “0001”, “0002”, … , “9999”, it will probably be faster if we start with “1234”, “1776”, etc.). When I say ‘dictionary’, I don’t just mean English words; the name of zxcvbn itself is an example of a common pattern, one that people think they’re really smart for choosing and super easy to remember and type, but one hackers will obviously be aware of too, just like turning password into P455w0rd1!.

https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn for general info

https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn/tree/master/data has the .txt files

Sure, pity he’s an edgy shit who caters to nazi scum, but I really don’t see how it matters to this situation. Pointing out that Nazis like Linux too is like pointing out Hitler endorsed vegetarianism - that’s not “bad PR” for vegetables, Linux isn’t some corporation paying for celebrity endorsements as a reputation. All that really matters, as far as I see, is that Pew made a large and diverse audience turn their heads away from Windows and Mac towards Linux for half an hour, it’s a rare good thing, and I still don’t like them or really care about them. I’m definitely not going to be sad or think we need to stop this, I’ll just make sure to continue rejecting any reactionary scum who show their faces in the communities.

For quick little clips I sometimes use ffmpeg like that, but if I want to do anything more complicated like optimizing file size (without a known target), I often jump to Handbrake, a graphical interface to FFmpeg.

That script seems pretty neat, I’ll copy it. Gotta love an 8MB copy of Shrek 2.

Yeah I realized my reply was a bit silly so I retracted it, I’m guessing I was a bit late and you’d already replied.

deleted by creator

but […] misogyny gets you banned?

Are you surprised that misogyny gets them banned?

Agreed. When I first came here I thought Lemmy would be open to all points of view.

Lemmy already experienced Wolfballs, the de-facto right-wing instance, which their admin closed once they realized they were hosting a Nazi bar who were actually serious about White Nationalist nonsense and not just joking to “troll the lib snowflake”. We tried it, it wasn’t fun. Free speech absolutism is a pointless idealist approach to society - building a community where anyone can express anything will drive away people who want useful discussions and don’t want to be regularly dehumanized for their existence (not their opinions or acts, but their existence). Diversity of opinion and the freedom to express is productive and constructive, but only up to a point. If someone came on here and persistently and seriously advocated that everyone whose name begins with an “M” should be publicly executed… what’s the point in tolerating that point of view? It brings none of the benefits of free expression. It’s a waste of time that doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. And if it weren’t so silly and people actually did get lynched for having a name starting with “M”, it would be threatening and make people uncomfortable being here. If this “M” example seems too ridiculous, replace it with something equally pointless like “not being straight” or “not being white”, which people do get killed for.

If this site were sprinkled with literal neo-Nazis and child abuse advocates (this isn’t a mythical “what if”, one can go to plenty of “free speech extremist” forums to see these people in action), then would you stick around? I’d go to somewhere else where I wouldn’t have to see that pointless trash. And this isn’t because of some mindless intolerance of political views - I’ve had serious political conversations with actual Mussolini-reading Fascists - but because some points of view are inherently antisocial, willfully repulsive and exclusionary, and they inevitably destroy communities. There’s no material reason to be open to their antisocial points of view, it doesn’t benefit the community or bring useful insight. It’s an abstract right which causes more harm than benefit, more oppression than liberty. It’s a waste of time and space.

Same, for quick-and-easy hobby work, it’s a great tool. Sometimes I will be surprised by looking up a video effect and seeing it can be done in kdenlive.

A few years back there was a bug with my set-up where it would crash when moving clips a certain way, but once that was solved, kdenlive has been smooth sailing for me.

Thanks for sharing the channel, I checked one of those tutorials (I can’t watch more rn) and it’s very well made, putting the end result right at the start, bringing up special considerations like watching for lighting changes or cloud movements in background footage.

By the way, what kind of “TikTok effects” are you talking about? Dynamic transitions and shaky-cam effects, or other things too?

It looks like lemmy.ml didn’t remove it, but their staff are certainly anti-ICE, plenty of posts there for weeks full of outcry.

I can’t see evidence that it’s banned. I’m on .ml and can see it just fine. It would be in the modlog if it were banned.

Thanks for checking, it’s refreshing to see that attitude and care online.

Ah, right. I’m not familiar enough with US law to realize.

It has to be organized for one.

I disagree. Consider racist mass shootings by lone perpetrators. It’s clearly an act attempting to incite terror and tension, many of them make it clear in their manifestos that they’re trying to spark a ‘race war’. But it’s not organized, beyond being the result of stochastic terrorism.

One of my sites was close to being DoS’d by openAI’s crawler along with a couple of other crawlers. Blocking them made the site much faster.

I’d admit the software design offering search suggestions as HTML links didn’t exactly help (this is a FOSS software used for hundreds of sites, and this issue likely applies to similar sites) but their rapid speed of requests turned this from pointless queries into a negligent security threat.

I just hate authoritarians on either side who suppress free speech

There’s an interesting point to make about speech, moderation and social media platforms, including those that make up Lemmy.

The bottom line is, there will always be some limit to speech on platforms for them to fulfill their purpose, and you just need to figure out what limits you’re fine with. There are some “free speech extremist” platforms which allow almost everything - they’re invariably and inevitably just filled with spam-bots, literal pedophiles, neo-nazis and people unable to hold a conversation, because they get kicked off from all the other sites and no-one else can enjoy being around them for long. I say this to emphasize that a vague ideal notion of ‘free speech’ isn’t a helpful perspective to apply to a real society. Even the US legal system, famous for its First Amendment to the Constitution, has explicit suppression of speech, and other countries will have their own laws, so a platform is at legal risk for hosting any violating speech, and most admins won’t go to prison to defend some shitposters they’ve never met.

It’s also important to consider that many of these instances aren’t “general purpose” but are made for a purpose or an audience. For example, an instance or community focusing on bicycles and cycling might sometimes discuss cars but it has no pragmatic reason to tolerate repetitive time-wasting trolls yelling about how cars don’t have freedoms anymore and that bike riders are destroying their daily commute, or repeating easily-debunked misinformation like saying that adding one more lane will fix a road. These aren’t new ideas, these aren’t useful conversations to the community, so the community will moderate and censor to allow actually useful conversations to thrive. If they want to engage in a more challenging conversation, there’s plenty of neutral ground around.

like those who overtake and control your beloved communist system

You say that as if there isn’t broad speech suppression under capitalism, even the most liberal (as in liberty) states like the USA. The bottom line is, all states work to suppress revolt. The main difference is that capitalism’s suppression is a systematic effect of the owning class exercising private and legislative power, rather than a one-party government system directly suppressing counter-ideology. For a real example, university students in my country are threatened with expulsion (a punishment with serious financial and career impacts) for speech against Israel and their university’s ties to it, and in the USA, this has already resulted in the attempted deportation of a permanent resident, not to mention constant police suppression against such protesters and university staff in plenty of countries. Look at recent (and historical) anti-protest laws in capitalist countries.

But for a more general analysis, mass media control effectively turns most significant avenues for speech into private platforms ruled by the owning class. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Manufacturing Consent (or at the very least, skimming the Wikipedia page) which explains the main five factors which filter news and media away from ideas which benefit the worker class and towards the ideas and ideology of the owner class. This is society-wide speech suppression, just not through legal means. You mentioned how reddit is suppressive, and if the same is systematically (not coincidentally) true for reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and all the other sites with an audience large enough to matter at scale… freedom of speech in this society is more of an idea than a reality.

Under capitalism, the ultra-rich class have similar powers to the one-party states of a Leninist states like China or Cuba or the former Soviet Union, it’s simply more indirect - the owning class own all mainstream television, film and online news companies, all mainstream social media platforms, and frankly, most federal politicians. Politicians at that level have almost no chance of election without the support of the owning class, who can give them funding, media air-time and the propaganda they need to win a national popularity contest, so make no mistake, they’re beholden to the owning class. This is one part of how companies can pressure politicians to benefit them instead of the people they’re supposed to represent.

but hey “that’s not real communism”, right?

Haha, that’s a whole thing, and it’s not just some excuse: it’s referring to real ideological disputes, just like those who claim crony capitalism “isn’t real capitalism”, or the USA’s recent authoritarian turn “isn’t real capitalism”, or that a regulated social welfare state like the Nordic Model “isn’t real capitalism”. What the heck is “real” capitalism if capitalist economies like the USA or the Russian Federation don’t count? Same for socialism and communism, silly people claim only their school of thought is the “real” version. The classic “No true Scotsman” fallacy at work!

We’ve just been talking about Leninist states, not any of the other forms of communist ideologies such as libertarian communism aka. anarcho-communism. An anarcho-communist will sincerely claim “it’s not real communism” because it establishes a state. Like you, they hate authoritarians, and so they want to eradicate “unjust hierarchy” altogether, and the state-driven approach of China, Cuba and the Soviet Union is unacceptable to them.

As for the supporters of those Leninist states, their viewpoint is that these states are a tool to transition from a capitalist mode of production to a socialist mode of production. None of these states claim to have reached the socialist, let alone communist, mode of production yet. So while they do believe this is communism (that is, the social movement towards establishing a communist mode of production), it very obviously hasn’t established a communist society (that is, one which has obsoleted economic classes, the state and money).

If you don’t like left-bias, you’re going to hate it here. Lemmy is literally created by communists.

https://github.com/LemmyNet : owned by Dessalines, Nutomic and SleeplessOne1917

Not sure about ‘far far extreme’, but firmly left. The front page speaks for itself.