This sounds like a situation where the club needs to be explicitly neurodivergent and leftist. There is a group that I run into every week when I take my kid to dance. They operate a neurodivergent game night, and it's a very diverse crowd of people (spectrum wise). From what I can tell (and from speaking with the person who runs it), it's a very inclusive space for people all over the spectrum. As a neurodivergent person myself, I get what you're saying. This club is frankly the first space I've seen like it, but to be fair, I also wasn't seeking it out, so maybe there are more. The BPP was Black and Marxist. I would even argue it was Black first and Marxist second. I think what you're talking about could be handled in the same way: Neurodivergent first, and Leftist second. I wouldn't doubt there are people who have neurodivergence who still harbor and act on normative bounds, reinforcing normative social rules in what should be non-normative spaces. Those people shouldn't be running these groups.

One thing I think is a good place to start is building social connections. I think there could be a lot of space in reviving the left-wing social club. The average US citizen is extremely isolated, and one way we can fight against that isolation is finding ways to rebuild that social network we've lost. I'm talking about building clubs where the socialist perspective dominates but isn't always the focus.

I mean, I could just rattle off a list here, just off the top of my head:

• Parenting clubs
• Sporting clubs
• Reading groups
• Health clubs or neurodivergent & disabled support groups
• Wilderness clubs
• Gaming clubs

I think we can also draw inspiration from sources like the survival programs of the BPP for example.

Okay, let’s actually read past the headline and look at what the article itself admits versus what it wants you to believe.

First, the “schools are being shut down and kids are abandoned” narrative. The article buries the fact that Gangjong Grassland Girls' School (one of the three “closed” schools) was already a government-affiliated institution with a curriculum following the state system. So the “closure” is a restructuring of an already integrated school, not the sudden eradication of an independent Tibetan institution.

Second, the “where did the children go?” question. RFA doesn’t tell you. But public reporting does: Golog has 63 boarding schools where rural students get free accommodation, food, and tuition. The reason is geographic. Golog is at an average altitude above 4,000 meters with scattered pastoral populations; daily commuting is not realistic. Boarding is voluntary, decided by parents and students, and kids go home on weekends and holidays. This is logistics, not a plot.

Third, the “language is being erased” claim. The article cites an “expert” saying kids will be forced into Chinese-only schools. Here’s the actual data from Xizang (Tibet): there are over 30,000 bilingual teachers, and the number of full-time Tibetan language teachers grew from 5,800 in 2018 to nearly 8,300. Tibetan language is a core compulsory subject, and in Chamdo, about 94% of ethnic Tibetan students take the Tibetan language exam for college entrance. If that’s “erasure,” it’s the most incompetent erasure campaign in history.

Fourth, the “Ethnic Unity Law is a weapon against Tibetan” line. The law that RFA says is the legal cover for closing schools explicitly states the state shall “encourage all ethnic groups to appreciate each other’s exceptional traditional cultures, and learn each other’s languages and scripts.” That’s Article 29, in black and white. RFA’s “researcher” either didn’t read the law or hopes you won’t.

Fifth, the new schools are invisible in this article. The same month RFA claims schools are vanishing, a brand-new Golog-Xining Ethnic High School (built with paired assistance from Shanghai) was operating with nearly 1,000 students, mostly from herding families. Earlier, the Golog Middle School in Xining received 122 million yuan in investment, largely funded by Shanghai. These aren’t secret facts. They just don’t fit the “cultural genocide” template.

So the next time you see “China closes Tibetan schools,” ask the questions RFA didn’t answer: Were the schools already government-run? Where did the students go? Are there more Tibetan-language teachers now than before? The answers usually make the headline look less like journalism and more like a press release for a very specific political agenda.

Is this some kind of ploy to try and find some "Voting is always good" counter point, that voting in and of itself is democracy and having that is better then nothing? Which is why you seem to be implying that the system doesn't need to justify itself, that if the system didn't do that it would still function and people would still participate, because it is, after all, "Democracy"?

Quit beating around the bush and just say what you mean instead of being a coy annoyance.

Why? Are you looking for someone to read it for you?

I definitely thought the right wing was gonna help Palestines

You're right about one thing. Harris is part of the right wing.

Why do all these liberal projects have such authoritarian, dictatorial measures baked into their source code?

Why is it that the "tankies" building Lemmy have not hard coded their software with similar dictatorial, authoritarian measures?

I guess we'll never know.

You can read the bible in China.

Feel free to explain to the class how you are not in a cult.

StarTrek is cool and good!

I notice the sidebar says "Active Plugins", which is dope, I think plugin's will open up a lot of possibilities for Lemmy. I'll have to look around, but it got me thinking: I wonder if it's a worth it now, or if it would be a pain in the ass, to spin up my own test instance (not hard) to start building and playing around with the plugin system.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml are the instructions under the plugins section of join-lemmy.org still valid if I wanted to do some plugin development tinkering?

That's the name of the test instance, they have several, they're all named after StarTrek ships.

I will correct the record a little here and say it is not blocked by default, but it IS used to decide if a given instance has "Good" defederation policies or not. When new users, look for an instance to join using the main piefed instance. Which, on its face, is ideologically motivated, especially when you consider it also uses two other publically socialist instances and only one right wing instance to calculate how "Good" an instance's defederation policies are. So a 3 to 1 ratio according to the team at Piefed, they would take one fascist instance over 3 socialist instances according to their own metric. What's interesting to me is that Lemmy, as a platform and a piece of infrastructure built and maintained by open communists, has none of these issues. You might take issue with the way Lemmy.ml, or Hexbear, or Lemmygrad manage their instances, but none of that is a result of the codebase.

Ok, you have this completely off base about it "not doing anything". While I might be wrong about it defederating, what this code ACTUALLY does is rate other instances defederation lists based on this hard coded list. Let me explain:

The site_instance_chooser_view() function in /app/api/alpha/views.py provides a JSON representation of the current site's metadata for the instance chooser feature. This feature allows users to browse and compare different Fediverse instances before choosing one to join.

Within site_instance_chooser_view(), the defed_list variable is defined as follows (lines 1148‑1151):

defed_list = BannedInstances.query.filter(or_(BannedInstances.domain == 'hexbear.net',
                                              BannedInstances.domain == 'lemmygrad.ml',
                                              BannedInstances.domain == 'hilariouschaos.com',
                                              BannedInstances.domain == 'lemmy.ml')).order_by(BannedInstances.domain).all()

This query retrieves only four specific domains from the BannedInstances table:

1. hexbear.net
2. lemmygrad.ml
3. hilariouschaos.com
4. lemmy.ml

The resulting list is used to populate the defederation field in the returned JSON (line 1187):

'defederation': list(set([instance.domain for instance in defed_list])),

The defederation field is part of the site metadata returned by the API endpoint /api/alpha/site/instance_chooser. This endpoint is called by the instance‑chooser UI (/auth/instance_chooser) when a user clicks “More” on an instance card.

The template app/templates/auth/instance_chooser.html uses the defederation list to compute a defederation quality rating. The rating is based on how many of the four watched domains are blocked:

• ≥3 blocked → “Good”
• 2 blocked → “Ok”
• 1 blocked → “Minimal”
• <1 blocked → “Negligent”

This rating is displayed in the instance details modal under the “Defederation” label (line 114 of the template).

The UI also contains commented‑out code (lines 124‑130) that would show individual status indicators for each of the four domains, but this is currently disabled.

This is problematic for a number of reasons, most of all is that this rating that it generates is NOT transparent to the user. This page is used on PieFeds main page when you go to register, it's part of the instance picker. The defederation rating under More is where this shows up. For instance, this means that instances like anarchist.nexus have a "OK" rating but instances like multiverse.soulism.net have a "GOOD" rating.

Anarchist.nexus has an "OK" raiding because they block Lemmygrad.ml (socialist) and hilariouschaos.com (MAGA instance)

multiverse.soulism.net has a "GOOD" rating because they block Lemmygrad.ml (socialist), Hexbear.net (socialist), lemmy.ml (operated by open communists).

So the Defederation rating has an OBVIOUS BIAS that isn't explained to the users at all. Not only is the bias not explained it doesn't even contain all of the FASCIST INSTANCES IN ITS CALCULATION.

Ah yeah I see that. It still doesn't change my position on if the system should have defaults.

I'm telling you that Hexbear.net is on by default, and so is lemmygrad.ml. They both need to be removed from your settings before you can federate with them. There shouldn't be any default instances period.

They did roll this back after people got annoyed with the change. The fact that it was added at all though is very silly! Why should it matter to the project maintainer what some user is doing? Why build a community on a platform that is going to inject such a wildly silly opinion on you? If you don't think EM Dashes are an issue, you have no choice but to be endlessly pinged every time an EM Dash is detected by the system if you're a community admin.

Yeah I don't understand why the project can't conform to the AP standards. I get the desire to have a blocking feature that's more robust than just a cosmetic feature. One that actually prevents a user from replying. But they way they've gone about it obviously isn't it. Creating ghost comment chains on other AP services is not good.