#1

Van Hollen wants to run for President in 2028. Good for them. If theyʻll give me Wʻs along the way, Iʻll takeʻm. Iʻll never stop reiterating that our numbers #1 and #2 enemies in the fight against fascism since 2024 has been the Democratic Minority leader in the senate and the Democratic minority leader in the house. We did not need to suffer this Trump administration like we have, if not for the existing leadership. They need to be replaced.

Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, North Korea, etc This point is especially important. I’m in the middle of reading (and recording) Philip Agee - Inside the company, a CIA diary. He was a former CIA case officer who defected and escaped to Cuba. In Ecuador, he ran several of the 15+ operations the CIA was running in that country. These programs included everything from running US-friendly assets in the government, infiltrations of labor unions, control of religious institutions, control of youth orgs (especially catholic and conservative ones), journalists (especially getting them to put out anti-communist agitprop), leftist-org penetration agents, witting and unwitting police captains. They ran both ultra-conservative and social democratic / center-left media and political orgs. These campaigns destabilized and divided the country, and the CIA was laughing while people on the streets were killing each other. Their #1 goal: to get the Ecuadorian government to cut ties with Cuba and denounce communism, expel Cuban diplomats, and alienate them from Cuba and the USSR. If any org was even vaguely pro-Cuba, regardless of how left it was, the goal was to either take it over from the inside, or if that proved impossible, then make a new org friendly to US interests. The US knows that the greatest threat to capitalist-imperialism and its overall power, is the threat of a good example, in the form of nations who reject its dominance. Anti-communism becomes the new witch-hunting campaign to unite all these disparate groups, to act on behalf of US interests.

I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired. Looks like they like the idea and it’ll be in v5.1. Looks like they already completed it. … also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial … Fair point. … essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created … Silver linings :) … “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase … Yeah, I remember that ‘argument’. That was annoying to deal with. I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in. There was another feature/set of features that were opt-out and poorly communicated before the vote-limiter, maybe a year ago. I don’t remember what it was though. I recall it went over just as poorly as the rate limiter and made me view Rimu in a different light. Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out. That’s my understanding as well. I had to ask my admins to remove it. Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜. Haha. Yeah. I do think their call for a vanguard kind of gives away the game (wiki: “According to Lenin, the purpose of the vanguard party is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat"). I think using the word “dictatorship” at all is unlikely to go well or attract the people you want that would be okay with giving up power, once they have it. Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw. And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances. Absolutely. According to Fedindex, it looks like Lemmynsfw may have only had 3.6k MAU when it crashed. FediNSFW is now at ~3.6k MAU. So, weirdly it came out to be an even exchange. PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right? Looks like Fedindex is putting Fedinsfw creation on 02-18-2026. Fediverse-Observer data, puts Piefed at 4816 MAU on 02-17-2026. Piefed is at 6742 MAU and Fedinsfw only at 3583 MAU, leaves non-Fedinsfw Piefed at 3159 MAU today. Last time Piefed was below 2k MAU (1990 MAU) was 2026-01-20. So, up ~59% in 10-ish months, not bad, percentage wise. Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway. Looks like Lemmy has had 63 new instances since 2026-06-08, 20 still active (Piefed: 18 new, 8 still active). So better percentage fro Piefed, better volume for Lemmy. From 2026-07-28 to 2026-10-27, Lemmy alive servers went from 321 -> 294 (Piefed: 66 -> 59). So, with the increased total threadiverse MAUs, it looks like some consolidation is happening. And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation. I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well. With you there. ‘Whole ass 1 thing, rather than half-assing 2 things’. PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily). This has legitimately been a huge annoyance for me on web (and a reason I prefer Voyager). I made FR about this too. I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it. Very exciting indeed!! :-) Looks like it’s already live. Looks like it’s only contained to users. I was hoping this could also be an admin feature to help stop scraping (with automation only 1 instance has to be hit by a scraper before the subscribed instances are ‘inoculated’). Added another FR. Edit: added an additional sentence to the ml discussion.

… They are the #1 exporter and this #1 supporter of Israel, they are just smart enough to shut their mouth. Everything Israel has done could be stopped by China in a day, but that doesnt make them profits. If China sanctions Israel, no more missiles fly, yet China doesn’t? … Why? Because it benefits them to allow the U.S. to show their true colors. So in truth, every life lost in Palestine is because China prefers the U.S. to look bad then kids to live.

Lately I'm seeing a lot of "pundits" suddenly saying "in retrospect" and acknowledging all the stuff I predicted right at the time. But I seriously fucked up today's #1 fucked up story.

@snacks@netzsphaere.xyz @twinspin6@outerheaven.club worlds #1 bike rider

The White House Panther I sit in my corner, so handsome and grand, The finest White House Panther in the land. But my brother keeps copying everything I do, My pillow, my pose, and my serious stare too. He wants to be perfect, and I understand, Who wouldn’t want to be the #1 panther in the land?

Then my response is that it’s very odd that the KMT wasn’t able to emulate that “coincidental” rise in life expectancy when they were in power and it had already started increasing in other countries. And as for communism playing a role, let me use an analogy. Recently there was a story where an Eritrean immigrant, Ebro Ahmed, saved a runaway bus full of children by jumping into it and hitting the brakes. He told the news that it was his Muslim faith that inspired him to jump into the bus. That guy is obviously a hero for what he did. But that doesn’t mean that only an Eritean, only an immigrant, or only a Muslim, could have done what he did in that situation. Any sort of person who believed any sort of thing could have, if they so desired and were in a position to do so, instituted land reform which overall greatly increased food security, and anyone could have trained up a bunch of doctors and sent them out to the countryside to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people and provide access to modern medicine for the first time in history. And anyone who had done those things in China would have seen the same increase in life expectancy. And, had someone else done so, they might well have avoided blunders like the Great Leap Forward. Unfortunately, nobody else did. The Qing dynasty did nothing to help the peasants. The Western colonizers did nothing to help the peasants. The warlords did nothing to help the peasants. The KMT did nothing to help the peasants. The Japanese did nothing to help the peasants. Every political faction that had actually existed in China was perfectly willing to just stand there and let the bus full of children roll on by, except for the communists. In other countries, that wasn’t the case. As their graph shows, in, say, Sweden, there were people who were not communists who took actions that helped the people and raised life expectancy. Communists do not, in fact, have a monopoly on implementing policies that help people or raise life expectancy. Being led by communists does not somehow magically create better living conditions. It does so when communists implement good policies that raise living conditions. And if they’re led by someone who’s not a communist but implements the same policies, then it will produce the same effects. Honestly, when I saw that out loud, it’s so obvious that it’s crazy I have to say it in the first place. Somehow, my actual position of, “Mao helped raise the life expectancy of the Chinese people,” has been bizarrely twisted and misinterpreted into “COMMUNISM #1! EVERYONE ELSE SUCKS! MAO IS THE ONLY PERSON WHO DID ANYTHING GOOD EVAH!1!!” No doubt, this sort of twisting of beliefs is where the whole accusation of “tankie” comes from, because anyone who has a single good thing to say about Mao is automatically assumed to be “stanning” or “simping” him, or whatever silly phrase they’re using this week, and assigned all sorts of positions regardless of what they actually said.

According to tip #1, I am a trans neither

I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired. #2 already exists though - for PieFed/ PyLova though not for Lemmy afaik - but also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial - I’ve seen many people either outright leave PieFed or stating that they had plans to imminently switch to it that they cancelled as a direct result; that was an extremely poor communication rolling out those anti-features, which along with other similar matters previously essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created). My recollection is that they are now opt-in Ah… interesting. I don’t know the full history and it likely depends in part on what features under discussion. There was one set of features that someone on a Lemmy.ml community lied about, stating that a bunch of “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase, and Rimu responded that they were the opposite of hard-coded since they were wrapped inside of an if-statement that was turned OFF by default, so that one was opt-in (fwiw, the original OP there never did acknowledge afaik that they had been in error - the post remained up for at least several months when last I checked and people continued to point to it as evidence of PieFed betraying the principles of the Threadiverse, despite how the entire thing had been debunked). I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in. Rimu in the past has usually been quite friendly and responsive to such, except when he digs his heels in and insists that his way is better even in the face of all opposition (maybe it is even, but it is too much at once and people don’t like having their choices taken away from them, so not the right way to go about making such changes, imho). Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out. Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology. Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜. By the same token, MAGA is “against” the government telling people what to do. Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that. Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw. Other than porn, which Rimu almost but not quite does the opposite of support, PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right? (I’d have to take another look myself to update myself but that was my thought at some point?) Hence this singular change is essentially an outlier that may - or may not - be representative of the situation as a whole. Or you could take the opposite position that the number of these events is simply too hard to be able to say much of anything about, but in that case what is there to learn at all? Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway. And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation. And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances. becoming ‘the only game in town’ That sounds logical. I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well. Barely any third-party apps support it, and its web browser UI assumes that post titles will be very long, so for short ones it wastes a very large amount of space, plus other layout concerns as well. PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily). I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it. Very exciting indeed!! :-)

Best thing you can do is just fill it all out. A lot of those muscles in your butt run between your back and hips, down into your legs. I’ll never not recommend planks and squats so that’s big #1, especially for anyone who sits a lot as people on this site are known to do. Proper sit-ups (not a crunch) engage more of the legs as well and will help fill some of those areas out. Walking on an incline (like a hike) is good for you in general and definitely works those buns n thighs. I should note I’m not a professional trainer or anything and if anyone else had recommendations they should chime in.

(I think everybody knows this is complete bullshit but for the record, ICE was doing EVEN WORSE shit in Texas, certainly including Dallas and Houston. I watched a lot of it on Texas resister social media. ICE/CBP brutality is maybe the #1 reason Texas turned blue.)

Easy, left is for a #1 and right is for a #2

Why aren't Trump and the election deniers screaming? Because ... So far, neither Trump nor the vast network of election deniers, some in positions of power regarding elections, have been screaming foul regarding these historic results resulting in the biggest Democratic gains in at least half a century. Trump says he'll be "Mr. Veto" but also that he accepts the results and wants to work with Democrats. I believe the reason is obvious. It was just TOO big, and involved so many red states that had voted massively for Trump. To call into question those states would be almost impossible. Kansas elected a Dem senator for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now the trick will be for Democrats to not screw up. Wasting time on doomed impeachment efforts would be disastrous. People voted in Dems with the issue #1 being the economy. And Trump is still president, meaning he can still block legislation. If the new Congress is all about doomed far left efforts or endless investigations (though clearly some investigations are absolutely necessary now) people will sour on the Dems before two years have passed and we reach the next presidential election. So it's going to be quite the balancing act. We shall see.

RE: https://normal.style/@healyn/117556888470370918 🗣THIS IS WHY STATE ELECTIONS MATTER from your mouth to dog. the NPVC should be #1 priority for democrats.

Similar for my Google nest, it’s the #1 host in number of daily requests in my network, around one every 500ms Now it’s on it’s own vlan so there’s nothing that they can report on my network, but it’s really concerning that a thermostat calls home this often. It should be enough to do it once an hour to check the outside temperature and only if it’s enabled.v

Right, the F250 is basically a small semi in disguise, you can even put a fifth wheel in the bed to tow campers and whatnot. Problem is that a lot of people get these for “work”, but then literally never tow anything with it bigger than what a Ford Ranger can tow. #1 doesn’t explain the whole story, but yes, part of it is because American auto manufacturers, and NHTSA crash testing, focuses way too much on occupant safety. So does the IIHS to a lesser extent. Peak individualism. #2 is kinda true, but it’s like getting a jeep and literally never taking it off road except to jump a curb at your local Tim Hortons because the queue was too long. When I need a pickup truck… I rent a pickup truck. Wow! And save money the rest of the year and enjoy my sporty compact hatchback that is comfortable and is way cheaper on gas and safer for everyone around me.

I’ve been enjoying the writing of Zoe Baker recently. Specifically Means and Ends about the historical origins of anarchism. While looking for that, I also saw an essay on Anarchism and Democracy that references more recent thinkers. Might check that out too. Anyway, one of the takeaways for me was this: the fundamental opposition to parlamentary democracy entered the (european) anarchist canon in a time, when firstly parliaments were typically created as concessions by monarchs to stave off revolution, and by design ineffectual. And secondly violent revolution was still very much on the table. In this context participation in state democraticy was opposed categorily as a strategic error. If you live in a country where these two facts are no longer accurate (okay #1 is debatable, but #2 generally no), the strategic conclusions should also be different. Even if you have a post-state vision of democracy, some level of involvement in state democracy (or at least not torpedoing those efforts on principle) is non-optional in my opinion. Not least because fascists are trying to capture those systems to suppress all of our movements even harder.

WATCH: "INSANE. I don't know how this isn't the #1 news story in the world... it's almost beyond belief..." @channel5bluesky.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy deep-dives on the Ivanka Trump/KUSHNER luxury resort corruption scandal that triggered 150+ days of protests in ALBANIA. Full: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM7Q...