This seems like a weirdly unnecessary way to not quite manage to duplicate what lemmy has been designed to do.

How do I make it just work with just my original account?

You go to the community list for your instance and do a search on the URL of the community you’re interested in. Then (assuming that your instance is federated with the other one) your instance will create its own mirror of the community, and you’re done.

I don’t spend any time on Mastodon.

Why? Are there anarchists on Mastodon? Or is this some kind of sarcasm I’m not getting?

I do have a Mastodon account, but I never use it. I much prefer forums over microblogs.

The implication here is that anarchists are relatively common on the fediverse, and if so, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen this idea expressed.

But the thing is that I am an anarchist, and I’ve been keeping my eyes open, and I haven’t seen any other anarchists here. LOTS of authoritarian leftists, ranging from naive social democrats to full-blown “submit or die” tankies, but not one single other anarchist.

So are you actually trying to say that anarchists are common here? And if so, where are they?

Definitely.

I posted a fair amount on Reddit too, but mostly I’d just write something, then think about what was likely to happen if I actually posted it, then delete it.

The one time I did that, I just switched my inbox from “Unread” to “All.” Problem solved.

I happened to run across a CD of the fourth one used, a couple of years after it released. I didn’t even know it existed before that, and definitely didn’t know it’d end up becoming my favorite. And I still don’t have a copy of the fifth. I do have the last two though.

25 On is sort of reminiscent of Tornado or The Good News and the Bad News - a return to form. It’s pretty good on its own, but sort of suffers by comparison. Monster Movie is odd but interesting. It feels kind of self-indulgent, but in a good way - just a bunch of guys sitting around playing what they want to play just because that’s what they want to play. It’s a bit disjointed, but I like it.

I happened on them when they put out their first album and have been a fan ever since, and that’s even without ever getting a chance to see them live. Bob Walkenhorst is easily my favorite songwriter.

Flirting with the Universe is their fourth album - after a bit of a recording hiatus after The Good News and the Bad News, and it’s far and away my favorite. It’s obvious that they took their time and carefully crafted an album designed to showcase their talent. It’s unfortunate that it still didn’t manage to bring them the recognition they’ve always deserved, but I appreciate it.

Off the top of my head…

The Presidents of the United States of America - The Presidents of the United States of America

Stan Ridgway - The Big Heat

The Rainmakers - Flirting with the Universe

XTC - Black Sea

Morphine - Good

Bloodhound Gang - Hooray for Boobies

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Rattlesnakes

The Mattoid - Great Lovers

Frank Zappa - Joe’s Garage

Was (Not Was) - What Up Dog?

…or something like that…

Yes - I’ve had many of those asshats over the years insist that I have to “choose a side.”

That’s generally because they can’t actually argue for their position, and the best they can manage is to find fault with a self-serving characterization of a falsely dichotomous opposing position. So they need to be able to assign me to one or the other team, so they know whether they can ignore me or if they need to hurl some emotive rhetoric and fallacies somewhere in my general direction.

And yes - they’re almost never worth engaging with.

And to go all the way back, it could be said that the exact problem is that they have unfounded confidence.

And it’s sort of ironic really, because they’re generally driven by a psychological need to be right, and clinging desperately to one fixed position pretty much guarantees that right is the one thing they will not be.

There’s a line in Nicholas Roeg’s movie Insignificance that has stayed with me for decades now.

There’s an obvious Einstein expy just called “The Professor.” At one point, he’s asked why he’s so cautious about his claims - why he habitually says things like, “I think that…” or “The theory is that…” or “One might argue that…”

His response is, “If I say ‘I know,’ I stop thinking.”

That, IMO, points to the primary answer to your question - don’t try to remove self-doubt. Nourish it. Revel in it. Because it’s the thing that will keep you thinking, and the more you think, the more likely you are to get to actual truth.

I browse on All almost exclusively, and if a community or poster is notably toxic or spammy I block them, but if they just don’t interest me, then I just scroll past them.

Honestly, I don’t even understand what the supposed problem is. The world is full of things that don’t interest me. That’s just the way it goes, and really it’s just background noise that I barely even notice.

That’s not uncommon in trades - plumbing, construction, auto mechanics and the like.

There are tricks and techniques that one can learn over time to make things easier or more efficient, but they’re often complex enough or require enough skill and experience that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just going to unnecessarily screw things up trying. So new people are taught the standard, safe, dependable way of doing things, even if that’s not the way the old hands do it.

Edit to add: in a moral context rather than a practical one, I don’t think it ever is appropriate. IMO, the first requirement for any moral stance is that one abide by it oneself, and unless and until one has managed to accomplish that most basic of tasks, one has no standing by which to even meaningfully comment on other people’s behavior.

Lemmy isn’t a platform at all. It’s a piece of forum software.

The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There’s well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.

And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.

You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you’re trying to pretend you’re not defending.