If it’s purely a degoogling question, deepl.com translation is very good, though idk how private it is. For privacy, the built-in Firefox translation is crappy but usable if you’re just trying to get meanings of things. IDK if it’s available (or easy to separate) as an outside-of-browser CLI utility.

Oh come on.

This doesn’t seem like a Not The Onion story. This lady had a temporary job at the World Trade Center at the time of the plane crashes. The morning of the attacks, she stopped at a CD shop on her way to work which would have delayed her arrival by a few minutes. During those minutes the planes hit, so she was saved by stopping to pick up a Mariah Carey CD. I’m glad she got lucky but it’s not the type of thing that the Onion would usually write about.

I just re-read some of that thread and omg, the the stupidity level was overpowering. There were some earlier incidents but that one clinched it for me.

Ok, found a comment that I posted in that thread: https://lemmy.world/post/19136453/12040944

You can see the initial post too, about the rule change.

Well you can find the actual wording, but I think it didn’t have much effect except that one discussion. The edict was issued and otherwise forgotten about.

Lemmy.world’s admin (not community mods but the actual instance admin) decreed that lemmy.world was going to be like Wikipedia, where anything controversial that you posted had to be accompanied by a research citation, more or less. The specific statement under dispute was that brand XYZ vegan cat food was ok to feed to your cat. A bunch of idiots howled “cats are obligate carnivores, hur hur! They can’t survive on a vegan diet! Mods, delete that comment!!!” and the site admin sided with the idiots. So I had to escape from the stupidity. Are you still confused? Btw the vegan cat food is perfectly fine for cats as far as I can tell. No I’m not about to go look for diffs links so some of those details may be garbled by now.

I don’t think the citation policy was ever enforced on anything else, but anything that crazy is hard to forget.

.world also defederated hexbear because it didn’t like hexbear’s politics, but I’m a regular on hexbear’s covid community (which is pretty good and not that political) so I had to go elsewhere for it. I can still reach it from .ml but this convinced me that the federation model is a failure. There’s no giant Spez overlord who can censor you, but there are 100 petty instance admins who can censor you instead. I’m still on Lemmy to stay away from Spez though.

It’s a long story but basically after some stupid drama, lemmy.world banned discussion of cat food unless there was scientific evidence presented that the cat food was healthy for the cat. The drama had been about vegan cat food discussions in the vegan discussion group. Vegan cat food turns out to be a thing and appears to have enough approvals to be sold in pet stores, but people on .world wanting to talk about it should come over here to .ml. No I wasn’t a participant in the vegan group discussion itself. I made some posts in the surrounding drama thread that you can probably find in my .world profile from shortly after I joined.

I’m on .ml and just don’t see this. I moved here from .world after the cat food ban. The stupidity burned too much for me to stay there. I’m unsubscribed to most of the lemmy communities where the political crap is, so maybe that helps.