For anyone who’s thinking UK, I’d advise not - we’re about 4-5 years behind you in terms of imminent fascism and whilst there’s still technically a chance to avert it, its very unlikely - especially since Starmer is being even more awful than the Tories.

Re-reading Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” because its the best haunted house novel ever written.

My head canon is that Mulder applied for Blue Rose membership but was too loosey-goosey for Gordon Cole to hire him. Cole would’ve hired Scully in a heartbeat.

As everyone else has said: kidney issue. If its an infection (you should definitely get this checked out), you’re going to need antibiotics. Drink a lot of water - like, a lot - and introduce cranberry juice to your drinking habits (won’t fix the infection but there’s some evidence its preventative).

If its a stone then get ready for the worst pain in the world but also drink a lot of water to help break it up/aid its passage through.

TL;DR - get a GP appointment and start drinking a fuck ton of water.

Hard to see how them choosing to charge money to access their server will affect the future of the project, even them choosing to not run a free for anyone server any more wouldn’t necessarily affect the future of the project because the project is not to provide a free for all server but to develop software. Either way, them trying to find a way to keep the server operating certainly doesn’t mean ‘Matrix is cooked’.

As far as Redis goes, as I understand it, they moved their software away from an open source license. There’s zero indication Matrix are going to do the same thing.

This seems a bit of an odd take. Matrix.org making their server freemium is up to them - charging some users to use the service (not the software) is a way of keeping the lights on. Better that than ads or selling user data. Lots of privacy focused orgs do the same - Proton, Tuta, Mailbox, Mullvad, IVPN. If people also have an issue with Element - don’t use Element, use one of the other apps.

If people are this upset, its not impossible (or even that hard) to migrate to a different server - or host your own.

The only rules that matter are the ones you and your date agree on and largely revolve around where it is you decide to meet. There’s nothing wrong with either of you having a drink if you’re somewhere that serves alcohol. There’s a lot wrong if either of you go on a bender. There’s also nothing wrong with drinking a soft drink too. Or doing an activity based date rather than a food/drink oriented one.

Just communicate openly with each other before the date with an eye towards your dates feelings/perception of safety.

For you personally to use that word to describe or allude to yourself and only yourself seems like something thats totally your call.

I do have to say though that encouraging someone else to use a word that is (or was once) a slur - especially if they are not gay themselves and therefore cannot possibly be reclaiming it - feels like a regressive and fairly crappy thing to do (assuming that they are straight).

Honestly, I am not trying to bait you or troll you or anything else when I say this but if you equate a simple request for context with toxicity you’re clearly not approaching this realistically or rationally.

You might well be right and you’ve been treated very poorly but literally no one on this thread apart from you can ever know that and no one is just going to take someone’s word for it.

Blast it.

If they had developed a centralised bit of software such as Twitter or Reddit you’d have a point. In that case you can’t support one without the other.

On a decentralised bit of software you can support the developers and spend your time on an instance they have no control over. So supporting the developers for development is not the same as supporting any particular instance - thats why a lot of instances accept donations too.

Gonna be that guy and mention an alternative - Schildi Chat available for web, desktop and Android. Its based on the Element apps but with some extras. For example if you use the ‘Next’ variant of the Android app, Spaces work as intended.

Maybe uncharitably, my first thought when reading a post like this is “what shitty thing do you want to say?”.

But I don’t know you so maybe I am being uncharitable.

But you have to realise the fediverse in general is not owned by capitalist orgs with high priced legal teams. Its mostly small teams of private individuals. If someone posts something illegal, including defamatory, in their legal jurisdiction (which is probably not the USA) then they might be on the hook for it too.

Even if you run your own instance if you’re enough of a dick it’ll get defederated or you’ll be banned from multiple instances/communities.

Learn to play nice in other peoples yard. Its hard sometimes but just walking away and blocking is the best option. Sometimes I need to make more effort to do that too.

And you’re not wrong either - they’re still shit excuses for treating people like sexual commodities and thinking its OK to beat/rape/kill them if they don’t give you sex. At some level personal responsibility kicks in.

We live in online world that normalises abusing women gamers on Twitch, DM-ing women in order to hit on them and/or attack them on Insta or whatever, that considers sites like 4chan legitimate humour and where a web search for something like a gym membership can bombard you with scum like Tate.

Add to that the hit that people’s socialisation skills took during lockdown, governments around the Westernised world normalising hate and violence as legitimate ways to get what you want and then dangle in front of them the fictional lives influencers flaunt on Instagram, TikTok etc and tell them they too could have that life if they do this that and the other oh and by the way, its totally fine to abuse women to prove your masculinity because you, as a man, are owed sex by women.

All these reasons like ‘men are lonely’, ‘gender roles are different’ - yeah they play a part but lets not pretend this shit hasn’t been coming for a long time and men being sad they have less role models is no excuse for the rationalisation of violent hate that’s on display.

Yep it is.

“I’m from India and the word “commie” in my country is referred as a far left,”

Communism is its own thing. Whilst its not exactly inaccurate to describe it as far left, there are also lots of far left people who are not Communists.

“Why? Do they ban you if you fight like a redditor in the comments?”

That depends on the Community (subreddit) you’re in and the instance you’re using. They might, they might not. But the reason I said it is because people joining Lemmy solely in order to get into fights with people is not what Lemmy needs.

Tenacity is a decent (not perfect) Audacity replacement.

Lemmy is a piece of software. Its two main developers are communists. The software runs on many different servers (instances) that are mostly not communist and the two developers do not enforce any political ideology on the use or users of Lemmy (and couldn’t even if they wanted to, which they clearly don’t). There are two or three instances that are communist.

That said, if you’re from the USA I’d hazard a guess that the word ‘commie’ to you is probably a person slightly to the left of Bill Clinton. At the moment, the entirety of Lemmy does lean slightly left and is generally progressive which is a refreshing change to the constant brain numbing right wing shitholes most mainstream social media sites are.

I’d urge you to not go looking for a fight. Just ignore, block and move on. This isn’t reddit.

She is a successful author. She’s never been a great author. Great authors know how to write with originality and imagination. JKR merely took a handful of fantasy and British empire tropes, put them in a blender with ideas ‘inspired’ by vastly better writers and with the help of a PR team, created a marketable franchise.

Along the way, she became consumed by an utterly irrational hatred which is now creating a horrific world for the people she targeted with her marketing money.