SpaceCadet

If human skin was sometimes completely patterned

If?

Gingers would like to have a word with you.

It's when you have to set static routes and such.

For example I have a couple of locations tied together with a Wireguard site-to-site VPN, each with several subnets. I had to write wg config files and set static routes with hardcoded subnets and IP addresses. Writing the wg config files and getting it working was already a bit daunting with IPv4, because I was also wrapping my head around wireguard concepts at the same time. It would have been so much worse to debug with IPv6 unreadable subnet names.

Network ACLs and firewall rules are another thing where you have to work with raw IPv6 addresses. For example: let's say you have a Samba share or proxy server that you only want to be accessible from one specific subnet, you have to use IPv6 addresses. You can't solve that with DNS names.

Anyway my point is: the idea that you can simply avoid IPv6's complexity by using DNS names is just wrong.

You do need to know it when you're working with subnets and routing tables.

Unless you have anything but a flat network structure with everything in one subnet, working with IPV6 is a giant PITA.

It's not even about which view is right or neutral. On .world posts and comments critical of the US aren't mass censored like .ml does with posts critical of China, Russia or the former USSR.

Just disconnect your network cable, press this magic key combination and type this undocumented command: "MSBLAOIGKSDF /ACZSF"

The thing is, as far as users and communities go lemmy.ml is pretty much a general purpose instance like lemmy.world, but it is controlled by political extremists who are using their admin position to put their thumb on the scale to push discussion in a certain direction.

The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

Well it's really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

1. The admins are political extremists
2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they're not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

So I think it's necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml's prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can't put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml's nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won't be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand "just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml" is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.

No but there sure is a much more unreasonable form of this.

white-adjacent

You keep using that word as if it will somehow transform the color yellow into white and make your argument for you. It won't happen. It's yellow, and not just pale yellow but an extremely saturated and bright version of yellow. It is clearly not a natural skin tone of any race unless that person is very ill.

If you look at a white person's skin tone, it's not a saturated color and the hue is certainly not yellow. If anything, it's pink. How you can arrive at "yellow = white-adjacent" just boggles my mind. There are literally billions of people on this planet who are not white and whose skin tone is closer to the yellow of a smiley face. You can call any color with sufficient luminosity white adjacent then. Bright blue: white-adjacent. Bright red: white-adjacent. Bright green: white-adjacent. Wee look at all those white-adjacent colors:

Anyway, I'm done with this discussion because I find you truly insufferable and I no longer want to spend my energy on it. If I can give you one piece of life advice: go find something worthwhile to get up in arms about.

yellow skin tone is clearly adjacent to whiteness and this was well established before aughts.

Not it was not and it still isn't. The reason we think of the Simpsons as white is because the context makes it crystal clear that they're a typical white suburban family, not because of their color. If Matt Groening had made Simpsons green, purple or blue we'd still think of them as white, and at the same time smileys and later emojis would still be yellow. At best there is some parallel evolution here in the sense that both Matt Groening and Harvey Ball both chose yellow for the same reason: because it is perceived as a bright happy color.

If you then associate yellowness exclusively with whiteness that's purely a you thing, and honestly I find it pretty fucked up to see racial connotations like this in the most innocent things. Stop projecting your own prejudices.

emojis caught widespread support in the mid/late aughts

My argument is that bright yellow smileys have their own cultural lineage dating back to 1963, and it has nothing to do with skin color or race. Using these yellow smileys to express emotion in computer programs has been a thing since at least the mid nineties, not the mid/late aughts as you claim. The reason that it only appeared in the mid nineties and not earlier is technological and cultural. It has to do with the developing graphical and networking capabilities of computers around that time, and because smileys were popular in other aspects of culture around the same time. It has nothing to do with The Simpsons or other supposedly white cartoon characters.

The Simpsons came out in 88. You are saying most of the world got the Simpsons about half a decade later. I would say this proves the exact opposite of your point and that it is a huge world cultural phenomena. I’m shocked that I’m having the defend the Simpsons as one of the most important and impactful TV shows of all time.

My point is, I didn't even hear about the Simpsons until I was in Uni, which puts it around 1995-ish, but I sure knew what a yellow smiley was.

Emoticon != emoji. Characters don’t have skin tone colors. The first emojis didn’t come out until 1999

I meant smileys really, because that's what they were initially called. Emojis is a more recent retroactive rebranding/appropriation of smileys by Apple when they launched the iphone.

Anyway ICQ had yellow smiley faces 1996-ish. AIM had them 1997-ish. Yahoo!Pager, later Yahoo!Messenger, had yellow smileys in 1998. And MSN definitely had them in 1999.

And then there's friggin minesweeper that had a yellow smiley face all the way back in 1992:

I guess they all watched too much Simpsons?

My point is that everyone, who is being honest at least, interprets the Simpsons as being white. Do you think they’re white?

Yes, from the context it's crystal clear that they're white, they could be purple or green and they'd still be "white", but I think it's not relevant in a discussion about emojis.

As I said, it’s no surprise the default emoji is closest to white skin. Even if that association comes from the Simpsons, emojis didn’t come out until decades after the Simpsons became a cultural mainstay.

My point is that yellow smiley faces have been a cultural mainstay independent of the Simpsons, and that you grossly overestimate the worldwide cultural impact of the Simpsons. Most of the non-US world didn't even get the Simpsons on TV until the mid 1990s, while smiley face t-shirts and pins were all the rage in the late 1980s and 1990s. Source: I wore them myself when I was a kid, and from your comment I'm guessing you weren't born yet.

And decades? The Simpsons started in 1989, while the first instant messengers already had smiley face emoticons in the mid 90s.