If you want to look at things from a different angle, you could also consider signing up for Mbin (fedia.io, kbin.earth) or PieFed (piefed.social, feddit.online).

I guess it might make sense for some people, not for others. It does allow you to see things from a little bit of a different angle, especially in the all feed.

I’m not American thank god, but it matches the experiences of American women I have talked to about it. And it matches experiences of European women I’ve talked to. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it held true other places as well.

The amount and nature of porn being consumed obviously affects people’s expectations everywhere it is happening. I’m sure this argument does not apply to secluded tribes in the Amazon or whatever, but that’s just not what I’m talking about here.

Large portion of [any given] society.

Of course people have shaved since they figured out how to do it, and there have been trends throughout history. But good luck finding another moment in history where a large portion of society thought there was something wrong with an unshaved private part, regardless of gender.

A colleage of mine working in the same field recently made a Bluesky post that I found interesting. The kinda stuff I’d share on a good day.

He got four likes and two shares - one of each came from me through Bridgy Fed. I very rarely get that little on Mastodon.

He has almost 800 followers there. I have less than 200 on Mastodon.

My takeaway is that Bluesky has this potential for posts to get pushed into every feed, but if they fall through the cracks of the algorithm they might go completely unnoticed. So you end up changing how you post in order to please the algorithm, losing yourself in the process.

Mastodon just feels chill to me. And I’m bridged, so I can always go viral on Bluesky anyway, I just won’t be all that aware of it.

Dude, your concept of failure is my dream. I’m happy here.

I disagree with your answer, but I think you pointed to the right one.

It’s porn. People’s constant consumption of porn has completely changed what people perceive to be normal, and preferences has changed with it.

It’s a huge change of culture driven by some pretty extreme shit, but we don’t talk about it because it’s still too much of a taboo to have a public discourse about. Very few men are willing to go into that level of critical self-evaluation of their sexual behaviour, and even less so to do it in public. Women are rarely given a platform to speak out. So what you end up with is women discussing in private about how their one night stand slapped them on the ass so they couldn’t walk straight for three days and seemingly thought that was a completely normal thing to do, or going in forcefully cold without foreplay expecting it to be magically enjoyable for both parties.

Our expectations for shaving is just another point where the influence of porn shines through, albeit less violently so.

Sure, that’s a different problem entirely. I’m a big proponent of universal income, universal education, and taxing billionaires out of existence.

I don’t think it’s possible to make up for historical (and soon to be historical, for that matter) injustice by paying for it. I am convinced we need to create a society where these injustices are not decisive for your possibilities in life. So I think we agree on this point.

(Within the academic debate on this, I find the idea of justice in acquisition to be pretty appealing. In particular the article Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation by Michael Otsuka from 2006. It’s behind a paywall with its original publisher, but if you search for https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00061.x on sci-hub you’ll find it. It’s less than 30 pages and a pretty light read, as far as I remember)

a) OP is talking about racial divides, not only racism. b) Makes sense, sure. Whether it’s acceptable is another question. You don’t need full-on communism to erase historical inequality. Even capitalism holds a promise of meritocracy, even though it routinely fails to deliver. In the real world, wealth tax and free universal education can go a long way. But accepting that the descendants of slaves are still poorer than the descendants of their masters and considering it to be anything else than a huge problem is seriously fucked up.

Also, Scandinavian social democracies are pretty egalitarian.

Racial divides are very much present in South America, but racial tension seems to be a little lighter than in the US. Culturally, Brazil might have gone particularly far down the path of considering everyone part of a shared Brazilian identity, independent of ethnicity. Then again, Brazil has incredible class differences, and how is race distributed between the gated communities and the favela?

One source observes that “[w]hite workers have 74% higher income on average compared to Black and Brown people”, so just because the culture might be less racist than the US, the systematic issues are still very much there.

As for race tensions, America has a few original sins. One is slavery, another is genocide. The two meet and interact in an interesting way when one considers cultural genocide: Africans brought to the US as slaves were not only forced to work for free, but they were taken from their families, deprived of their language and culture, and forced to create something new out of their situation. That’s the depressing backstory of how blues became so great.

You see this in today’s America: What is there of African culture left in African Americans? African music survived and transformed into call and respond in cotton fields, which transformed into rhythm and blues, which eventually became R&B and hiphop. Other than that? I can’t think of anything, but maybe I’m ignorant.

In South America, it’s a different story. I went to Colombia last year and briefly got to meet some people from the Afrodescendant community working on remembrance. They too were processing not only centuries of slavery and bad treatment, but also more recent horrors of the armed conflict. They did so in ways that embraced their African roots: Their use of colour, their artwork, their whole cultural production still shows clear roots back to Africa. They also have their own food, fuelled as always by “ancestral knowledge”. I also felt like their vibe was a mix between South American and African, but that’s harder to measure. Importantly however, unlike their American counterparts, there was not a successful effort to cut off these roots made on the basis of pure cruelty. They are highly aware - and proud - of their ancestry.

It’s a complex argument, but I think it is an important one to understand why racial divides in the US are so fucked. White Americans are so fucking obsessed about their great grandfather being Irish, yet they don’t want to consider the fact that black Americans had their entire history forcefully erased as a potential issue. I think it is an issue, and I think it’s part of the reason why tensions run so high in the US.

A word for users of a website to self-identify as a group will rarely not be cringe. Like, come on, is this how you self-identify?

Doesn’t work so well here as the content is platform neutral. We’re all just “users”, really.

They can survive incredibly rough conditions.

If they feel you are threatening them, they won’t run away; they’ll stand up for themselves and try to scare you away by hissing at you. If this happens, you better fucking run.

Not because they make up any actual threat to you, but because the poor little fellas can get so worked up over this they have a heart attack and die right in front of you. They’ll defend their nest until death.

So yeah, don’t mess with lemmings. Please. They’re too precious.

I use Mbin, but as a mountain person I feel strongly for defending lemmings. They’re adorable little hamsters who get really worked up about pretty much anything.

Honestly, lemmings are a good metaphor for the community here. We’re tiny, but we stand up and fight against something must larger than ourselves and we refuse to back down. I just hope we don’t work ourselves up to a heart attack over it.

While it’s excellent that Lemmy is getting some attention out on the capitalist web, I’m not sure I’m personally interested in hearing about what is trending on Reddit in the Fediverse community - for me, Fedibridge seems like a great community specifically for that. But I might be a minority, not trying to be negativistic! :)

I thought for a second if they had finally made Bluesky opt-out. Sadly it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that. :)

I lately stumbled over a discussion of Lemmy on Reddit (linked from !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com, I guess), and some of the people in the discussion seemed to genuinely believe that Lemmy had completely died off following the first few days of interest from the Reddit community, similar to Tildes and whatever other services popped out through the years.

It’s pretty fascinating, as I wouldn’t think it takes that much to double check and realize the community on here is pretty vibrant.

I think part of the reason this happens is that the front page on Lemmy is less sensationalist and appears more slow moving, and there are of course fewer votes as we are not millions of users.

Which is where I spiral into checking what this comparison looks like in reality, and this comment becomes truly off-topic:

This is top five on the front page of Lemmy.world at the moment, not signed in:

• 1 day ago, 1.67 k upvotes: “Used to consume not produce”. A meme about the kids not knowing what a C drive is.
• 13 hours ago, 570 upvotes: “Democracy is when the White House boasts about its king”. Screenshot of white house tweet stating that Trump is now king.
• 2 days ago, 758 upvotes: “Europe preps huge defense package in boost to Ukraine: ‘Never been seen’”. An article about European aid to Ukraine
• 1 day ago, 469 upvotes: “So, is the USA screwed?”. No stupid questions.
• 2 days ago, 868 upvotes: “Joe Rogan dethroned by anti-Trump podcast in the charts”. Newsweek article.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, also not signed in and incognito for good measure:

• 2 hours ago, 15k upvotes: “The shower in the apartment I moved into self-destructs”. A video of a shower that has been assembled wrong.
• 4 hours ago, 20k upvotes: “Thursday’s front page of the British Daily Star. Putin’s Poodle”. The front page of a British tabloid.
• 20 hours ago, 18k upvotes: “What will Americans do if Social Security is reduced or done away with?”. Ask reddit.
• 19 hours ago, 9k upvotes: “Trump finally calls out the Ukraine scam”. Fascist propaganda from the conservative subreddit.
• 8 hours ago, 40k upvotes: “Trump can’t end birthright citizenship, appeals court says, setting up Supreme Court showdown”. CNN article.

So of course, if you’re used to the pace of Reddit, the Lemmy frontpage will appear slow, as if the site is half dead. Meanwhile, seen from Lemmy, the Reddit frontpage looks like it’s a dangerous fucking tool made and controlled by capitalists to pacify and brainwash the masses, spewing out bullshit at an alarming pace.

But yeah, point is, no wonder they think we’re dead, there’s an article from two days ago on the front page.

Anyway, glad to have you back!