The Dread Pirate Roberts reference is from the movie Princess Bride.

Wesley spends years building up an immunity to a fictional substance called “iocaine powder”, the most deadly substance known to man. He tricks a foe into drinking wine laced with it, killing his foe while he survives.

https://princessbride.fandom.com/wiki/Iocaine_powder

I am on other instances. The problem is that they are, like it or not, the first impression that new users get of Lemmy and the rest of the federation.

beholden to their guidelines

I am all for that! They need to properly define those guidelines. While it is “their” instance, the intent is for it to be publicly accessible. Continuity with their own guidelines is kind of important to help this space grow as a public instance. I don’t care what those guidelines are, just make them consistent.

The instance is in Germany from what I understand. Regardless, their justification was that shrooms are illegal in most places. That being their main point sets up the contradiction that I am referring to. It casts a bit of doubt on the intent and how to interpret rule 1.

The admins don’t have to abide by their rules, but we do.

They can do that! As a matter of fact, I support compliance with local regulations.

The problem is, they aren’t. They are picking and choosing laws to follow. Their instance is located in Germany, but yet, their marijuana legalization laws are only in draft: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dariosabaghi/2023/07/10/germany-unveils-draft-bill-to-legalize-cannabis/?sh=5ed53b322726

They are using the justification that “some things are illegal in some countries” as grounds for community suspension, yet, they are picking and choosing.

It’s illegal to talk about piracy and shrooms? I can see posts getting deleted for directly trafficking in pirated stuff or if someone was trying to openly sell sketchy drugs.

Anything that is allowed on this site could be a target for legal action. Even their unverified access to porn is grounds for legal action in most places.

You need to look at the complete picture of the bias that is involved.

Byproducts of burning PET (soda bottle plastic): hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals

No, you can’t go all Dread Pirate Roberts and slowly build up an immunity to those over several years. Try as you might to impress that lady friend, it won’t work.

I think there should be an option (unless there is) for mods to turn off (or hide) voting as needed. That might be an effective way to cancel any downvote brigades. Lemmy really doesn’t have the population for mass vote manipulation now, but it will soon enough.

Hiding all votes can also help mitigate some superficial bias, but not all. I believe that if a person sees a comment with a few dozen downvotes first, they tend not to read the post objectively. After being on Reddit for such a long time (12 years or so), I found that it was super easy to manipulate voting trends if I caught a post or comment at just the right time.

Hiding only downvotes is just silly though. Some register of public opinion, positive or negative, still has its uses, IMHO.

I am sad about RIF. It blocked all the ads, didn’t show all the shitty awards, was super clean, the video player worked well and the mod tools were awesome.

On a side note, its sad demise led me to Lemmy, so all is well.