Welcome! Don’t let the ironic detachment fool you, this is one of the kindest and most well moderated places on the internet.
Be open to having your opinions challenged because if you’re from the anglosphere I promise you the propaganda and indoctrination run much deeper than you expect. No one challenging your views is doing so out of some desire to personally attack you. Feel free to report if that’s what it feels like because our mods are A1 best in the fediverse and they will attend to that shit. Most of us are just trying not to feel hopeless and powerless, especially those of us in the west. Sometimes that can manifest as vitriolic rhetoric but our mods are pretty good and catching and stamping that shit out.
We all believe that growth happens through struggle and we’ve all had to struggle a lot with each other and ourselves to arrive at the positions we carry. And do not mistake this for a hive mind because there’s actually a pretty wide range of beliefs here and we’re all the better for it.
And we all recognize that we are all fallible and so it’s ok to be wrong about things. We get stuff wrong all the time here. But often times the difference between correct and incorrect is not so much whether “X thing happened like this” vs “actually X thing happened like this” but “X thing happened like this” vs “I do not have the firsthand knowledge or resources to say how X thing happened or whether it’s happening at all”. This is especially true when it comes to current events. (Uyghur “genocide” being a great example of this)
Just keep an open mind and remember that the atomic unit of propaganda is NOT falsehood, it’s EMPHASIS.
And if that comment about Xinjiang is too spicy for you then DM me so I can set you up w/ my homie Mehmet. He’s no Authoritarian tankie totalitarian apologist and he can get you an incredible deal on some Iraqi WMD’s!
Oh and don’t clean the owl, we like them that way!
For the uninitiated coming into this thread, no that is not literally true, we banned people who downvoted a whole bunch of specific posts from trans people that were clearly just "hey I love being trans👍" or something clearly good and cool and valid about their trans experience or whatever. We did not ban people who just happened to downvote a trans user who said they like pineapple on pizza or some shit. That doofus is telling on himself, he was probably in here just downvoting people for being trans.
But imagine we actually did ban ALL people for downbearing trans comrades...
Givem the ol' contraption
They always tell on themselves with this. Given how many of our most powerful posters here are trans comrades, literally everyone who ever used the downvote will have done so in response to a user who was trans. I certainly did but since I never did it out of spite or habit and, voila, whadya know, I'm still here.
I'm glad the downvote is gone since it's a bad system and bad for the vibe in general. But I'm even happier the mods purged the transphobes. Fuck those crybabies.