Try using the Photon front end. For adding and removing mods, it is more flexible than the standard lemmy-ui front end.
Lemmy.world did defederate from exploding-heads, but never defederated from hilariouschaos as far as I know. When hilariouschaos appeared the admin team discussed it and decided to take a wait-and-see approach. First, some of the more problematic exploding-heads users seemed to be gone. Second, by that time Lemmy had more blocking options for users to curate their own feeds, so instance-level defederation seemed less urgent.
We will discuss it again. Personally, it's been a while since I have peeked over the fence to see what they're up to over there.
No problem. I added you as a mod and removed the old inactive mod. Note that, since your account is on a different instance than the community, you will not receive community reports. It’s a known bug in Lemmy. It looks like a pretty chill community so I don't expect you will get many reports, but if you want to cover your bases then I recommend making a lemmy.world alt and adding it to the community mod team so you will have a way to see them. If you use the Photon front end (https://phtn.app/) instead of the standard lemmy ui then you can assign anyone as a mod regardless of whether they have posted/commented in the community.
@[email protected], mentioning you here for transparency in case you come back to Lemmy and wonder what happened.
I added you as a mod. The existing mod has no activity for over a year. Note that, since your account is on a different insurance than the community, you will not receive community reports. It's a known bug in Lemmy. I recommend making a lemmy.world alt and adding it to the community mod team, then checking it occasionally for reports.
I left the original mod in place in case they come back. I noticed Tolstoy said they would be contacting the old mod.
@[email protected], mentioning you here for transparency in case you come back to Lemmy and wonder what happened.
That's bizarre. I have not experienced that with the stock lemmy-ui in Firefox, nor in the Summit app on Android. You have only seen it in Jerboa, correct?
Yes, that is a problem. No single solution is perfect, and VPN blocks are only one tool in the toolbox. Every instance is different, and admins pick the tools that they think will work best for their situation. VPN blocking happens to be a tool that seems to have worked well for lemmy.world.
Instances that lack moderation and have a history of being used by trolls tend to get the nuclear option: they are defederated by the big Lemmy instances. That's not ideal at all, but the tool set for Lemmy moderation is very limited right now.
Short answer: no.
I don't mean to be rude. The desire to use VPNs is completely understandable. Unfortunately, VPNs were being abused in ways that were detrimental to the community here. Last year there were several waves of really grotesque troll posts (CSAM, scat porn, etc.) on lemmy.world and other instances. Blocking VPNs was one of the responses that was effective in stopping those posts. The admin team has no interest in backtracking at this time.
You have moderation here
We have unpaid volunteers donating their spare time. Nobody wants to spend their lunch break purging CSAM posts from some troll. And no users want a post to stay up for hours because the mods were asleep, at work, or otherwise not watching the Lemmy feed. (That actually happened, and is what drove me to donate some of my time here.) If law enforcement ever does come knocking, this instance doesn't have the money or time to mount a defense.
I wish things were different. This is the unfortunate reality that this particular instance has faced. Other instances may feel differently.
The mod (@[email protected]) does look inactive.
Is there another community you think users should be directed to?
In this case the mod is an active Lemmy user. They have posts and comments within the past day. It should be up to them to decide if they want to leave their community open, or lock their community and direct users elsewhere.
@[email protected] mentioning you here since it's your community being discussed.
The headline and article are trying really hard to emphasize the mask angle of the story.
He was walking down Spindle Road, a residential street of tidy lawns and single-family homes in Hicksville, wearing dark clothes and a ski mask in August, the county police said in a statement.
... Mr. Castillo “was on the street corner, and somebody called in a suspicious person.”
When police officers arrived, they frisked Mr. Castillo and discovered a 14-inch knife in the waistband of his pants, the department said in a statement on Tuesday.
I expect he would have been stopped, searched, arrested, and charged the same regardless of any mask law.
The oldest lakes on earth, ranging in age from 130,000 years to many millions of years.
The map was sourced from this research paper:
Hampton, Stephanie & Mcgowan, Suzanne & Ozersky, Ted & Virdis, Salvatore & Vu, Tuong-Thuy & Spanbauer, Trisha & Kraemer, Benjamin & Swann, George & Mackay, Anson & Powers, Stephen & Meyer, Michael & Labou, Stephanie & Oreilly, Catherine & DiCarlo, Morgan & Galloway, Aaron & Fritz, Sherilyn. (2018). Recent ecological change in ancient lakes. Limnology and Oceanography. 63. 10.1002/lno.10938.
Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/8/5691954/colonialism-collapse-gif-imperialism
One of the things that bothers people so much about Russia's slow play to gobble up chunks of Ukraine is that countries, by and large, have stopped annexing each others' territory since World War II. This modern success is all the more remarkable by the fact that, for most of history, countries loved to conquer land and subjugate the people living there.
European colonialism has been far and away the worst offender in this regard in the last 500 years. Take a look at this GIF charting the rise and fall of (mostly) European empires from 1492, when the European discovery of the Americas kicked off their movement west and south, to 2008.
A lot of interesting things pop out in that GIF. Thailand never gets colonized by any power, European or Asian. Denmark had the earliest westward European colonies, in Greenland. The Japanese empire was pretty huge in 1938.
But the biggest, most remarkable thing in the map is the ebb and flow in the territory controlled by the big European powers. That reflects a few things. Wars between great powers themselves (say, World War I), colonial conquest (Britain in Australia), conflict between colonial powers (Britain and France in North America), and colonized people throwing out colonizers (the dramatic decline in African colonialism after World War II).
The rise and fall of colonial empires warrants particular attention. Each of these sometimes-century long occupations that transformed daily life for colonized people. These regimes varied in all sorts of ways: the degree to which they literally enslaved colonized subjects, to take a particularly grim example, or the amount to which they allowed local political autonomy.
Scholars are still arguing over the implications of these massive colonial shifts for modern politics, which are undoubtedly dramatic. Take the big-picture global economy: why some countries are rich, and others are poor. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson have proposed that colonialism created a "reversal of fortunes" in economic terms. Previously rich peoples became poor when colonized, while previously poor peoples ended up comparatively wealthier. And both, by and large, remain so today.
Why? Well, the central purpose of European colonialism was to benefit and enrich Europeans. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson propose that created different incentives for European powers in richer and poorer colonized lands. In richer places, they built governments whose task was to steal wealth and resources and send them to Europe, shattering the foundations of local prosperity. In poorer places, they actually built European settler communities, protecting economically useful institutions like private property rights in order to make these communities do well. In both previously poor and previously rich places, these colonial institutions altered the trajectory of their development down to the present day.
The Acemoglu/Johnson/Robinson theory is quite controversial. Other scholars contest the very idea that a reversal of fortunes even happened. That makes sense: given colonialism's immense influence on both colonized and colonizing societies, isolating variables for controlled studies is really hard. There's also a time-span problem: tracking the consistent influence of one variable across hundreds of years can be tricky.
That's, in a way, the point. Colonialism's influence was so immense that we're only just beginning to figure out how to properly measure it.
But there are some things we know, foremost among them that colonialism was brutally nasty business. One estimate suggests that, from 1885 to 1908, Belgian King Leopold II's occupation of the Congo killed 8 million people. R.J. Rummel, a University of Hawaii scholar who spent his life estimate state-perpetrated atrocities, put the 20th century death toll attributable to colonialism at 50 million (behind only the Soviet Union and communist China in total killed). And European colonialism was around for hundreds of years.
So when you see huge chunks of the globe colonized in 1914, and colonial powers shrunk to basically their homelands in 2008, you're seeing one of the greatest humanitarian accomplishments of the past 100 years in action.
Meet Sir Nils Olav III, the mascot for the Norwegian King’s Guard. Nils is regarded very highly among the Norwegian King’s Guardsman and has received his honours and medals due to his outstanding service and good conduct!
https://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/animals-and-experiences/sir-nils-olav/
Since the 1980s, hundreds of ducks have patrolled Vergenoegd Löw Wine Estate outside Cape Town, South Africa. The winery currently "employs" some 1,600 Indian Runner ducks -- a flightless species with a peculiarly upright stance and highly developed sense of smell. As ducks cruise around the vineyard grounds, they eat pests such as snails, fertilizing the ground as they go.
H