Lol well teaching this professionally surely makes me some form of authority (albeit of course not the authority!) on this subject.

To clarify, your original point sounded like you were making a distinction between metaphorical mirrors and actual mirrors:

“in the mirror” tends to more often refer to a metaphorical “mirror”, typically when discussing self-reflection

• “I took a look in the mirror and decided to change my ways.”

“in a mirror” tends to refer most often to actual mirrors that exist in reality, not metaphorically

• “I looked into a mirror to fix my eyeliner.”

This incorrect distinction is what I was objecting to, because of course we can use both the indefinite and definite articles to refer to either literal or figurative mirrors.

Nope, as I explained in my other comment, it’s standard usage.

In English, we often use the definite article when speaking in general about a specific activity or action that involves a non-specific object. E.g. “go to the bathroom” or “catch the bus”, or “read the newspaper”. It’s not poor form at all.

A fair guess, but this isn’t one of those times when a grammatical error becomes normalized through common usage.

There is no grammar rule that separates speaking literally versus metaphorically in this case.

“You have something on your face; go take a look in the mirror” is just as grammatically correct in English as “You need to take a good look in the mirror and change your ways.”

I’ve explained why this is standard usage in English in my comment here.

English teacher here. Articles in English can be really confusing but essentially we use the definite article in this situation because:

• Uniqueness: In most situations, there’s only one mirror in a room or a home that’s readily available for someone to look into.
• Generality: Similar to “going to the bathroom,” “look in the mirror” refers to the general act of using a mirror to see oneself, not interacting with any specific mirror.

First impressions to new users is an important factor, I agree, but is Lemmy really “full of extremist political content”?

Scrolling through the first 4 pages of Lemmy World today, I see no extremist content at all. All of the political posts are standard liberal/left-of-centre talking points and the only things related to .ml content are three posts complaining about tankies, off the back of the original post that made a splash yesterday.

I can’t see anything that would be putting potential newcomers off in droves.

Absolutely agree, which is why I would advocate against defederation. It’s better to let users organically migrate away from problematic moderation than for the LW admins to preemptively make the decision on everyone’s behalf.

Lemmy is still a relatively small community, and too much defederation is only going to be detrimental to its overall health.

I appreciate the effort you’ve put in here, but still I do not see grounds for defederation. You’ve just given me three examples from a single community that is obviously political.

Look, the question isn’t “are there communities on lemmy.ml that are ideologically censored”, because of course there are; the question I am putting to you is “is the average user going about their business and not actively engaging in politically-oriented communities affected enough to warrant the largest Lemmy instance completely defederating?” I would still say no, personally.

I’ve seen it in the obvious communities like worldnews@lemmy.ml, sure. But in non-political ones? Not once.

See, now that’s a much more positive approach. Users making informed decisions and organically migrating is much more in keeping with the Fediverse spirit than admins wielding the defederation hammer, IMO.

Yes I have, which is why I’m asking. While I agree that the admin response was totally out of all proportion, this is not evidence of either of the things you previously claimed.

If you’re going to justify defederation based on non-political communities being policed and injected with propaganda, you need to provide some concrete examples of that happening.

To what extent is this actually an issue? What examples do you have so far?

but, these communities come along with an assortment of lies and Propaganda.

So block those individual communities that post what you consider propaganda. Hell, even block the whole instance - that option is readily available to you.

At which point the negative outweigh the positive?

With a server like, say, Hexbear, this would be an easy calculation. Defederate and what does the average user miss out on? Not a whole lot. On the other hand, .ml has a wide variety of technology, open source, gaming, hobby, etc. communities that don’t even touch on politics.

I regularly visit many of them, so for me at least, it would take a lot more on the negative scale to even break even.

There are some good points here, but I think defederation should always be a last resort and especially so in this case, given that we are talking about lemmy.ml here.

Since it was the former flagship server (in activity, at least) before LW came along, there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there. To cut them all off would be a net-negative to the average Lemmy user, I would argue.

That’s not to say that I agree with the actions of the .ml admins, or think that opening a dialogue with them about moderation policies isn’t a great idea, of course; I just think it’s overall a better approach to let the individual user figure out for themselves which communities/instances they want to engage with and which ones they want to avoid.

Studio executives.

The format actually has a lot of benefits - it supports transparency, animation, and compresses very efficiently. So it could theoretically replace GIF, JPG, and PNG in one fell swoop.

The downsides are that many apps don’t currently support it and that it’s owned by Google.

Personally I use webp for images that are not intended to share (e.g. banners and images on my blog), but stick to JPG/PNG for sending to other people.