Lol you’re right about this giving native English speakers a headache. I’m not sure the subjunctive is the correct explanation here, though.

The subjunctive mood in English primarily uses the past tense form of verbs (“were,” “were to,” etc.) to convey wishes or counterfactuality. E.g. ‘I wish you wouldn’t drink so much coffee’, or 'If I were you, I wouldn’t…"

However, ‘would you like a coffee?’ is a direct question of preference, which means it technically is using the indicative mood rather than the subjunctive. Here, ‘would’ functions as a model verb to soften the request and make it more polite.

Interesting. Do you know if it works with an existing LUKS-encrypted installation?

Dolce et Decorum est - Wilfred Owen. A grim, anti-war masterpiece written by a soldier fighting in the trenches in WW1

Ozymandias - Percy Shelley. A reminder of human transience and hubris

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas. Helps me to endure when things seem bleak or hopeless.

First impressions to new users is an important factor, I agree, but is Lemmy really “full of extremist political content”?

Scrolling through the first 4 pages of Lemmy World today, I see no extremist content at all. All of the political posts are standard liberal/left-of-centre talking points and the only things related to .ml content are three posts complaining about tankies, off the back of the original post that made a splash yesterday.

I can’t see anything that would be putting potential newcomers off in droves.

Absolutely agree, which is why I would advocate against defederation. It’s better to let users organically migrate away from problematic moderation than for the LW admins to preemptively make the decision on everyone’s behalf.

Lemmy is still a relatively small community, and too much defederation is only going to be detrimental to its overall health.

I appreciate the effort you’ve put in here, but still I do not see grounds for defederation. You’ve just given me three examples from a single community that is obviously political.

Look, the question isn’t “are there communities on lemmy.ml that are ideologically censored”, because of course there are; the question I am putting to you is “is the average user going about their business and not actively engaging in politically-oriented communities affected enough to warrant the largest Lemmy instance completely defederating?” I would still say no, personally.

I’ve seen it in the obvious communities like worldnews@lemmy.ml, sure. But in non-political ones? Not once.

See, now that’s a much more positive approach. Users making informed decisions and organically migrating is much more in keeping with the Fediverse spirit than admins wielding the defederation hammer, IMO.

Yes I have, which is why I’m asking. While I agree that the admin response was totally out of all proportion, this is not evidence of either of the things you previously claimed.

If you’re going to justify defederation based on non-political communities being policed and injected with propaganda, you need to provide some concrete examples of that happening.

To what extent is this actually an issue? What examples do you have so far?

but, these communities come along with an assortment of lies and Propaganda.

So block those individual communities that post what you consider propaganda. Hell, even block the whole instance - that option is readily available to you.

At which point the negative outweigh the positive?

With a server like, say, Hexbear, this would be an easy calculation. Defederate and what does the average user miss out on? Not a whole lot. On the other hand, .ml has a wide variety of technology, open source, gaming, hobby, etc. communities that don’t even touch on politics.

I regularly visit many of them, so for me at least, it would take a lot more on the negative scale to even break even.

There are some good points here, but I think defederation should always be a last resort and especially so in this case, given that we are talking about lemmy.ml here.

Since it was the former flagship server (in activity, at least) before LW came along, there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there. To cut them all off would be a net-negative to the average Lemmy user, I would argue.

That’s not to say that I agree with the actions of the .ml admins, or think that opening a dialogue with them about moderation policies isn’t a great idea, of course; I just think it’s overall a better approach to let the individual user figure out for themselves which communities/instances they want to engage with and which ones they want to avoid.

Nice list.

Depending on your package manager, there are very handy snapper plugins that do automated pre/post snapshots for package installation/removal.

For Arch-based systems it’s snap-pac, and Fedora has one too (although I can’t remember the name).

OnlyOffice is the main alternative to Libre these days.

I personally prefer it because offers better compatibility with the Microsoft 365 documents I need for work.

Tela icons.

(if you look at the night theme shot, there are other details of the setup in the terminal output)

If anyone is wondering, you can download the .jxl files from here:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-backgrounds/-/tree/main/backgrounds?ref_type=heads

Yeah, the customization might not be as extensive as Plasma, but you can certainly add a ton of extra functionality with extensions.

Yeah, so Gnome has an extension called Night Theme Switcher which automatically changes your background, icons, theme, cursor etc. based on a user-defined day/night schedule. It works great.

Arc Menu is another extension which gives Gnome a standard start menu (since it doesn’t come with one by default) in the top lefthand corner. It also comes with a KRunner-like app launcher that pops up in the middle of the screen instead of using the default Gnome Overview UI.

Both these extensions make Gnome feel a little more natural for desktop use, IMO.

Gnome + Dash to Dock + Arc Menu. Nothing too crazy.

My bad, thanks for the correction.