cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47584733
Trita Parsi May 18, 2026
We should first recognize that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit — the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.
Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realize that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.
It still has the best niche subs though. Like /r/weeviltime, or any random hobbies, it has the largest community anywhere. Anything remotely about news or politics or anything is dogshit though and I try to stay away from all that (and keep it here).
If you don’t build it here they won’t cum. Fuck u/spez
Damn I just know some tech bro sex bot company is gonna use it as their slogan or something lol
They still won’t come here even if you do.
They are centrists, we have tankies here, it simply is what it is.
Some people don’t enjoy reading the incessant calls for murder e.g. Luigi-ing or guillotining. We can be anything that we set our mind to, I’m just trying to illuminate how we are - wishful thinking about what might have been does not help us in any way.
We turn them away, we routinely say that we don’t even want them here, we (collectively) don’t want them here. So they both do not want to come nor are welcomed if they did. This matter has been settled and decided and seems extremely unlikely to change.
Meh. I came here from Reddit and it’s fine.
We all did, and agreed it is better here:-).
Here is the last discussion about it afaik. Here is a quote from the comments in that discussion:
Here is another quote:
These were both highly upvoted, with tens of upvotes and almost no downvotes. I could go on… and in fact, here’s one more:
(this one had many downvotes, but it had >3-fold more upvotes than down so…) Another one is:
On the bright side, the upcoming Lemmy 1.0 software should help a bit, as moderation reports will finally federate out to mods on other instances besides exclusively the one that the community itself is on.
But there are more downsides too - such as the fact that since that discussion the anarchist flotilla has been pushing strongly to defederate from lemmy.world, and any instance that runs PieFed software too, for being “zionists” - thereby further fracturing the Threadiverse into tankie-tolerant vs. tankie-intolerant spaces, and increasing the complexity of someone having to pick an instance. This includes lemmy.dbzer0.com that is the #7 most popular instance.
Leftist in-fighting and the complexity of signing up are the top 2 reasons why people do not join. Lack of content is the third, which is further aggravated by defederations and in-fighting.
I am so very glad that you felt welcomed here. I am so glad that you persevered through all of this. But… I can understand why people choose not to. At the end of the day we cannot control how others feel.
I think you wildly overestimate “leftist infighting” as a reason people wouldn’t join.
It’s peripheral drama at worst. Just here for the memes. I just want to grill for God’s sake!
Every month or so I see a post such as https://tarte.nuage-libre.fr/c/fediverse/p/198468/do-we-need-more-users discussing this topic. I barely look at Reddit myself anymore, but this is what people say that Redditors (and people on Bluesky, and even X) say about us here. Which also matches my own experiences too - although yeah if you personally block it all, then your experiences will ofc differ. I’m talking more about what someone who has no account would see, by default, as they just check us out.
Here’s another relevant discussion post: https://piefed.social/c/fediverse/p/1897818/how-to-sucesfully-post-about-piefed-on-reddit, with links to actual discussions that took place on Reddit about us here, if anyone wants to read primary source material.
Whenever people speak so broadly about social media platforms, describing the prototypical user… it’s pretty bizarre. Most people post NOTHING, a handful post some, and then like 0.01% of users post like 50% of the total content. The “vibe”, even the discussion about the vibes, are made by a very small percentage of the users.
PugJesus, ThePicardManeuver, and SatansMaggityCumFart do a LOT of the heavy lifting in terms of setting a tone/vibe/discussion etc. Just those 3 accounts.
In short, making inferences about users based on platform is pretty sketchy at best. I GET that human tribalism inclines us to form strong opinions about “the other”, and to then apply those overly broadly… so im not blaming anyone.
I’m just suggesting stepping back and recognizing that a bunch of what you (and others) are thinking on the subject is informed by:
A faulty assumption that the median content of a social media platform is evenly contributed to by the platform population as a whole (it isn’t, not even clise)
An out-of-time instinct to “otherize” groups which isn’t super valuable anymore.
It all reeks of any other immigration discussion. Immigrants who insist they were the last good ones. Ranking which are the shithole countries. Grandstanding about how many generations one has been “here”. I’m hesitant to even call it a “parallel”, because it’s honestly the exact same thing and the exact same arguments get made.
Just instead of people trying to like… live … they just want some memes. Build a fucking wall and make Reddit pay for it. Drama for dramas sake. A complete and utter waste of energy.
I think you missed the concept of what I was saying. I am talking about what people think of when someone mentions that someone should come over here and join Lemmy. Posts like https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/. Since so few people seem curious enough to research things on their own, and before I get accused of making stuff up again, I’ll just copy the whole thing in its entirety:
This was from 2-3 years ago now. The content has gotten better, and the UX too, but the in-fighting has gotten worse (see calls on \0 governance community to defederate from Lemmy.world). You legitimately might have missed a lot of this - many of the BS posts end up getting deleted - but it is here, and when \0 defederates from LW it is going to affect us all, especially if they defederate from all PieFed instances too, and every other instance that they have accused of Zionist moderation practices.
And even (much newer) posts that are aimed at being strongly positive towards us, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1ixf1gb/lemmy_may_seem_small_but_its_the_most_viable/, get heavy pushback in the comment sections. e.g. calling us “Reddit but decentralized”, and “Lemmy is dreadful. Sorry but it’s true.”, and wow this one hurts:
I’m not talking about whether we deserve to be liked, I’m saying that those of who want to be here already are, whereas among Redditors in particular we have a certain… “reputation”, and it is not a good one. Some of those people might be happier with Nostr or Voat or Truth Social, and we definitely hope that those people go there rather than here, but the centrists…? Yeah they don’t like us here. They say so and everything. Anyone can read these messages. I’ve seen the same on Bluesky too, when I’ve gone looking.
I’m not suggesting that we make any changes necessarily, just saying that an honest diagnosis of the situation is helpful if we ever did want to make this place more welcoming. Which we do not, it would seem, but if we ever did… then we need to realize that for primarily American centrists (who are the majority audience of people on Reddit?), they don’t want to come to a 4chan version of Reddit. They are on Reddit for a reason - it meets their needs, no matter how enshittified it also gets alongside that. Spez was (at least partially) right - he did in fact get away with calling us all landed gentry. The company remains profitable at least.
Post has real “you people” energy
Reddit has tankies too. Sure, it’s fucking annoying to have an argument with someone who you can’t tell whether they’re a troll or just thoroughly deluded, but overall they’re not that hard to avoid.
Just block a couple instances, a few comms, and the worst users. Tag the ones who aren’t quite bad enough to block outright and avoid engaging with them except to stick up for someone they’re hounding. It’s not that bad.
There’s plenty of good stuff here. Especially if you’re a techie or a trekkie, but also just plenty of general internet silliness, and some nostalgia bombs here and there.
Maybe there aren’t as many niche communities as reddit has, but that might build over time.
Really? I thought Reddit was fairly right-wing, and loved to ban leftist viewpoints? Reddit definitely has trolls though, that’s for sure. And bots, and perhaps a couple irl humans occasionally here or there mixed in as well 🤪.
You are offering solutions that every single one of us here has done to handle the trolls in this place, but remember that non-technical normal folks think different. Also, when they first browse a place with anonymous guest access they do not have an account yet nor the ability to ban anyone or anything - they simply see what they see, and that is it. (which is why they leave rather than stay)
Or for someone who joins, later after that the trolliest places never honestly announce their true intentions, so they have an enormously steep learning curve. We know the unwritten rules, but to a new joiner the process of catching up is overwhelming. Look up the Wikipedia definition of “Nazi bar” - hint it has little to do with actual irl Nazis and everything to do with the Paradox of Intolerance. We host tankies here, hence we are a tankie bar, like it or not. And just as a Jewish person might not feel comfortable around actual Nazis, American centrists do not feel welcomed in a space where tankies run the major portion of the show. Plus they get relentlessly trolled, e.g. by hexbears, and hence they leave. And after they leave, they complain about us, which causes others to not want to join us over here.
My argument is that I wish that we were not the incels that we clearly, collectively, are. DoN’t YoU rEaLiZe WhAt A nIcE mAn I aM? If we are going to be offensive to people, I would hope that we could at least do so honestly and genuinely, not living in ignorance of that fact (as the tankies themselves do).
And yes there’s genuinely great stuff here - there’s also genuinely great stuff over on Reddit btw, and even on Xhitter and Facebook, not that I want to go to any of those places to see it, but I acknowledge that it is there. I choose to be here. But most people do not choose that, and that’s okay. Or at least it’s facts, which we should own up to imho.
there are current subs, that are niche that people want to ask questions about, like trying to solve a specific issue. just not replicated on lemmy, if its even possible.