comfy

There might be a better title but it'll do.

Corporations insincerely adopt progressive themes because, at least in most Western countries, it's become increasingly accepted, popular and seen as ethical in the dominant culture, and therefore is a good marketing strategy for reputation management.

This phenomenon is widespread, but some core examples are pink/rainbow capitalism, greenwashing, and spin (e.g. presenting exploitation such as outsourcing labor to cheaper markets as "diversity", as opposed to actual diversity programs). A classic example of this insincerity is various companies (Bethesda, BMW, Cisco, General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Pfizer, Vogue and many more) famously adopting social media rainbow Pride logos only in some regions but not others - improving conditions for SGM is evidently not a true company value, it's marketing.

I assume that before the normalization of progressive values in these markets, the same type of phony value signaling existed to exploit the dominant values of the time. For example, in the US, patriotism and Christianity.

I believe this is an useful topic to explore, because it can give us tools to explain to some of the more casual 'anti-woke' crowd the difference between progressivism and insincere corporate pandering, perhaps by comparing it with examples of corporate pandering abusing their values, perhaps the notorious commercialization of Christmas and Easter holidays for an example.

I hope this place won't hug it too hard, it's on 61% battery as of writing. Has translations in fr, de, nl, es, it, pt

The average page size of this website is below 0.5 MB – roughly a sixth of the average page size of the original website

SERVER: This website runs on an Olimex A20 computer. It has 2 Ghz of processing power, 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage. The server draws 1 - 2.5 watts of power.

SERVER SOFTWARE: The webserver runs Armbian Stretch, a Debian based operating system built around the SUNXI kernel. We wrote technical documentation for configuring the webserver. [comfy's note: worth checking out]

DESIGN SOFTWARE: ~~The website is built with Pelican, a static site generator.~~ [comfy note: Teppichbrand replied confirming they now use Hugo]

I also like the dithering aesthetic with the site images, both practical and stylistic.

[crosspost]

I'm sick of having to look up what country an author is from to know which variant of teaspoon they're using or how big their lemons are compared to mine. It's amateur hour out there, I want those homely family recipes up to standard!

What are some good lessons from scientific documentation which should be encouraged in cooking recipes? What are some issues with recipes you've seen which have tripped you up?

"Everything has a name", if something is made, used, discovered or imagined, there is probably at least one name for it.

The cap at the top of a flagpole ('truck'). A single primary vein down the middle of typical leaves ('midrib'). The coating sheath at the end of shoelaces ('aglet'). The creases across the inside of your wrist ('rasceta'). The protective enclosure of a radar, including the nose cone of most airliner planes ('radome'). The square hole in the top of an anvil ('hardy hole'). The iconic football/soccer ball design, that is, the truncated icosahedron with pentagonal black and hexagonal white panels (Adidas's 'Telstar' design). All those different types of cave mineral deposits like stalactites, flowstone, frostwork and moonmilk ('speleothem').

(Any language is fine)

Wikipedia defines common sense as "knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument"

Try to avoid using this topic to express niche or unpopular opinions (they're a dime a dozen) but instead consider provable intuitive facts.

Different local areas have different road rules and different unwritten rules in culture. Or maybe you just have a low bridge. What mistake do non-local drivers make in your area?

Much of the Fediverse, especially the most popular communities, are continuations or clones of existing communities from twitter/reddit/etc., which makes sense given the history of these platforms as alternatives to those sites.

Are there any original communities which exist on the Fediverse with no similar community on the mainstream alternative service?

Most online communities have a low barrier of entry and effectively no user onboarding, and end up becoming chaotic messes where content is difficult to navigate. Obviously this is fine for more chatty communities, but is unfortunate in more serious and discussion-focused forums and for content archives. Even on Lemmy, there are communities where formatting rules are completely ignored[1]. This results from a combination of site design, moderation, and user respect for the community (three things notoriously bad on reddit-like sites, and well, most popular sites)

A couple of exceptions to the trend are forums which enforce a barrier of entry and quality control (unfortunately I can't recall any right now, but I would love to hear of some!) and some booru IBs. A booru site is an archive where users upload media without titles and tag it for easy searching. If a booru manages to enforce a decent quality of tagging (and there are mechanical ways to assist with this, such as tag aliases) then the site becomes a well-organized online content community.

Most boorus I've found allow NSFW content, so here are some work-safe examples:

• FindAfox (photos and videos of foxes)
• FIRST Robotics Competition Archive (unofficial)
• Safebooru (mostly anime drawings)

Note: feel welcome to list slow or 'dead' sites!

There is a well-known internet proverb, the bullshit assymetry principle:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

Anyone who has been in a few software chatrooms, a political communities, or any hobby groups has probably seen the eternal fountain of people asking really obvious questions, all the time, forever. No amount of patience and free time would allow a community to give quality answers by hand to each and every one of them, and gradually the originally-helpful people answering get sick of dealing with this constantly, then newcomers will often get treated with annoyance and hostility for their ignorant laziness. That's one way how communities get a reputation for being 'toxic' or 'elitist'. I've occasionally seen this first hand even on Lemmy, and obviously telling people to go away until they've figured out the answer themselves isn't a useful way to build a mass movement.

This is a reason why efficient communication matters.

Efficient teaching isn't a new idea, so we have plenty of techniques to draw from. One of the most famous texts in the world is a pamphlet, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a way for the Communist League to share the idea of historical materialism to many thousands using a couple of dozen pages. Pamphlets and fliers are still used today at protests and rallies and for general promotion, and in the real world are often used as a resource when someone asks for a basic introduction to an ideology.

However, online, we have increased access to existing resources and linking people to information is easier than ever. I've seen some great examples of this on Lemmy with Dessalines often integrating pages of their FAQ/resources list into short to-the-point replies, and Cowbee linking their introductory reading list. So instead of burning out rewriting detailed replies to each and every beginner question from a propagandised liberal, or just banning/kicking people who don't even understand what they said wrong (propaganda is a hell of a drug), these users can pack a lot of information into their posts using effective links. Using existing resources counters the bullshit assymetry principle. There's a far lower risk of burnout and hostility when you can simply copy a bookmarked page, paste it, and write a short sentence to contextualize it. No 5 minute mini-essay in your reply to get the message across properly, finding sources each time, getting it nitpicked by trolls, and all that. Just link to an already-polished answer one click away!

There are many FAQ sites for different topics and ideological schools of thought (e.g. here's a well-designed anarchist FAQ I've been linked to years ago). There are also plenty of wikis, like ProleWiki and Leftypedia, which I think are seriously underused (I'm surprised Lemmygrad staff and users haven't built a culture of constantly linking common silly takes to their wiki's articles. What's the point of the wiki if it's not being used much by its host community?).

Notice that an FAQ is often able to link to specific common questions, and is very different from the classic "read this entire book" reply some of you may have seen before - unfortunately when a post says "how can value com from labor and not supply nd demand?", they're probably not in the mood to read Capital Vol. I-III to answer their question no matter how you ask them, but they might skim a wiki page on LTV and maybe then read further.

(Honestly, I think there's a missed opportunity for integrating information resources into ban messages and/or the global rules pages, because I guarantee more than half the people getting banned for sinophobia/xenophobia/orientalism sincerely don't think anything they said was racist or chauvanistic - it's often reiterating normal rhetoric and ""established facts"" in mass media; not a sign of reactionary attitude. The least we can do is give them a learning opportunity instead of simply pushing them further from the labour movement)

Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it's clear when they do something right or wrong.

Maybe we can't expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?