Queer folks and leftists tend to be aware of this guy on the one hand
Guess who the CurrentAffairs demographic is. :D
Literally a magazine for internet socialists, who absolutely know who this guy is, especially if they’ve been reading it for awhile. Your average Joe Schmoe doesn’t know what CurrentAffairs magazine is. More people know who lobster man is, honestly.
Marx is being juxtaposed here because the article the author is addressing did that; he’s not equating the two, nor is he trying to legitimize lobster man (the dude’s already gotten on mainstream platforms and has a fuckton of fans—that ship has sailed). The CurrentAffairs audience is expected to already be familiar with this guy on account of the fact that it’s a niche libertarian socialist magazine that writes critical pieces about him every so often. The author agrees that he’s a charlatan and intellectual fraud that peddles reactionary bullshit to depressed young men.
If you want to do a deeper dive into why lobster man sucks (or share other pieces that do), then that would be a good contribution to the comments section here. Or post it to the beehive, provided that it’s socialist critique. Either would be welcome.
Is it though? The entire piece is taking a swing at his “put your life in order before criticizing” shit him and his fans do in the political arena. I don’t see the article speaking positively of him.
Lemmy’s interop with the microblogging portion of the Fediverse (which is by far the largest part) sucks. You can’t follow users, so there’s no way to pull in content from there and there’s no hashtag support built in for posts, so Lemmy posts don’t get to take advantage of the discoverability features on the microblogging side. Beehaw in particular is picky with whom they federate, but it shouldn’t matter since there’s plenty of microblogging instances that share their ethos. I was already a Mastodon user for a few years prior to any of the exoduses and it bummed me out that you guys didn’t get to experience Fedi in its full glory because of these limitations. Hopefully the next platform that Beehaw migrates to will be better about this.
I would say that the decentralized nature of the platform means that the demographics that don’t get along don’t have to share the same space. Reddit is full of communities that fucking hate each other and the centralized nature of the site means that those userbases have to occupy a lot of the same subreddits; those users have a low barrier to entry to go troll each other and pick fights. In the Fediverse, these communities are separate instances and will just defederate from each other, putting an end to it. Instead, like-minded communities and instances can congregate together. The federation model also provides incentive for users to behave, since instances can be cut off from everyone else if they’re deemed too toxic/annoying.
I too have noticed a number of minor behavioral differences that I’ve found annoying, but it is what it is. This was the closest I could find to an active fork of Cantata, but nothing has been released at this time, though the dev has expressed interest in a Qt6 port.
Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.