Rentlar

I was talking with awareness of the context of the primaries. Stevens was the DNC favourite but she was still evidently an Israel bootlicker and didn’t perform well at the debate. El-Sayed got pre-primary endorsements from UAW and has had strong individual and collective support from labour union members. Not to say Piker didn’t help signal boost the campaign a lot, just to say Senator-elect El-Sayed would have never gotten through the primary without him is not necessarily true, there were many axes of support that converged and primary voters also compared the quality of candidates directly. And El Sayed used the fact that gobs of cash were being lobbed into the race to defeat him to his benefit.

I’m just tempering the argument that Piker is the primary or sole reason why we got the result we did, it’s a whole bunch of factors, a bunch of rural faces got eaten between the ICE raids, more new wars and gas prices, Republicans primaried particularly shitty candidates because they were measured by their fealty to Trump. It’s a bit of No Kings rallies driving people to vote as tangible action against this admin, and finally it’s the Mamdani effect where sewer socialism, left-wing populism that purports to go beyond ideology to focus on making a tangible difference for everyone while enshrining rights for the underprivileged.

I don’t think Piker was that instrumental in how good the Democrat campaigns were this time…

But I do credit him for getting into Republican media talking heads’ heads and living rent-free, to the point that they put out a thirst-trap photo from his IG on the jumbotron at the RNC Trumpapalooza.

Hey, I’m aware I have my own biases. I’ve tried to describe the situation in a fair and reasoned way as best I can, based off the experiences I’ve had over the last 3.5 years, including before lemmy.world even started, your experience may differ from mine and that’s okay. I donate quarterly to the Lemmy devs and occasionally to my homeserver’s foundation, so please feel free to accuse me of bias in either way.

There’s no specific instance wide feud between the two or anything. At a high level, .world is just the biggest Lemmy server currently by MAU and .ml is just the oldest and flagship ones run by the main developers of the Lemmy software.

Now, the moderation philosophy between the two differs a fair bit, which is where the rivalries and the bad blood develops between users. On most general topics you’d see very little difference, but as soon as discussion touches the Russia-Ukraine conflict, anything negative about China, and the Israel-Palestine war, the mods on ml are aggressively one-sided in their moderation, and consider anything that goes against that perception as hate-speech against Russia/China/Palestine even if that’s not what you are saying. If you want an illustrative example, look in the modlog at the ‘nazi apologia’ comment I was tempbanned from !memes@lemmy.ml for.

Still, as community and instance managers, that’s their right. There’s significant overlap between lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml where moderation is more overtly this way, and hexbear.net where users like to communicate with image macros more in ways that I think most other server members find annoying. Some on world don’t like that so certain users crosspost discussions from ml communities onto world communities. Some users call the ml folks tankies for their disdain of violence committed everywhere except where committed by Russia, China and its allies. Some ml users (and many lemmygrad+hexbear users) call users on other servers libs for the converse reason, excusing or not pushing back hard enough on atrocities and oppression caused by Western governments. Some users like to generalize these characterizations to every user of an instance, it seems.

Aside from high profile defederations with ml or world and some servers for various reasons, refederations, redefederations between hexbear and other servers, there have not been any specific incidents that have caused .world and .ml to grow apart. I think it’s fine to let each server have its space.