I’m surprised no one has tried to give any dating advice here. OP, regardless of the virginity thing, do you want to find a romantic partner? It’s entirely reasonable to want both romance and sex.

Here’s what’s worked for me:

• Figure out what kind of person your ideal partner would be, what their interests are, and where they would hang out.
• Put yourself in places where you’re likely to meet that kind of person. For example, if you’re looking for someone that likes the outdoors and staying physically active, maybe look for a hiking group in your area.
• Be confident, and be chill. If you’re neither, fake it until you are.

That’s the basic outline. If you’re meeting people that are sort of like what you’re looking for, but not quite, that’s an indication that you’re on the right track and should keep at it. Dating is a grind and requires patience.

In terms of confidence/chill, that means:

• Assuming that someone you’re interested in could also be attracted to you, instead of just assuming they aren’t.
• Handling rejection gracefully.
• Not keeping your desires a secret, but also having the patience not to dump everything on them all at once. If you want to be sexual, be lightly flirty with them, and see if they respond in kind. If they do, then you can gradually escalate along those lines.
• Not requiring constant attention from them. Give them a chance to miss you. Don’t feel the need to respond to that text right away, for example. Wait 10 minutes or so, then respond. This lets them know that you don’t expect immediate responses, and they can get back to you later if they’re busy. It also slows the pace of conversation down, so that you don’t run out of things to talk about.

Even if you’re a die-hard capitalist, you shouldn’t use “tankie” as a broad label for anti-capitalists. Diluting it as a term just helps the actual tankies (authoritarian communists).

I miss 90’s techno-libertarian utopianism. A little naive in retrospect, but I’m holding out hope that it’ll still have some relevance going forward.

Ah, gotcha. Those are one-time passwords. Same acronym, so it’s easy to confuse them.

But yeah, I agree that everything should use (T)OTP for two-factor authentication, instead of SMS messages. The later mainly provides a false sense of security and presents only a minor hurdle for attackers to overcome.

One time pads or bust motherfuckers.

Not sure if you’re being facetious, but one time pads are for encryption, not authentication. They’re also impractical (and overkill) for most purposes.

You might find this helpful: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

Like I said, they have to maintain their own patch to make that work, which needs to be updated for each new Lemmy version. It’s not something that mainline Lemmy will do.

then I really will not get into it.

Bet.

If this is your idea of being “sex positive” then I really do not want to get into this argument. I can guess this will quickly play out to any objection as “pearl clutching” and I will stick to the point that your attitude is completely dehumanizing and that there is nothing “positive” about reducing sex to the mechanical/physical act.

DEHUMANIZING? Seriously? I guess you actually are a SWERF. You clearly have no claim to the label “sex positive”. Why would you even want to identify as such?

The view I expressed here is consistent with how sex workers view themselves. Sex work is work. They’re just doing a job. They don’t want to be “rescued” by moralizing radfems. They want more pay and better working conditions, the same as most workers.

Like I said in the first comment, if you feel so strongly about this, go ahead and create your own and see how far it goes. When you start putting some Skin In The Game you will get more credibility or at least accept that things are Just Not That Simple.

And as I’ve said, I’m definitely interested in doing that. If you know of any IT people that want to work on such a project, send them my way. I’ve got experience with programming, leadership, and community building to bring to the table.

Given your attitude regarding (more than just performative) sex positivity though, I’m not sure why you’re egging me on here.

You lamented the fact that unlogged users can not see it and that they can not be found as easily. This is the same as “make it available to the public without any type of check”.

Behold! (nsfw) - no login required, just an “are you 18+?” prompt, which is pretty standard. You can also search for NSFW communities without logging in. If you’re being more moralistic about this than Reddit is, you’re probably taking it too far.

Sexuality != Porn

Porn ∈ Sexuality. Also, I intentionally used a broader term here, because what I’m advocating for is expansive, not restricted to just porn. For example, I miss r/bdsmcommunity and r/sex, which are discussion-only. However, you don’t get those kinds of communities growing in a place as structurally and culturally prudish as the threadiverse.

“toxicity” is dose-dependent.

Yeah, porn is about on par with video games in that regard. Yet we (rightly) don’t suppress gaming communities here.

You don’t see young people destroying their lives because they were promised they could make a lot of money by knitting sweaters or working as electricians, but cases of vulnerable women who regret getting into sex work are infinite.

C’mon, don’t get all SWERFy on me now. That regret is a direct result of (drum roll)… sex negative culture! (And capitalist labor exploitation.)

“If you think sex workers ‘sell their bodies,’ but coal miners do not, your view of labor is clouded by your moralistic view of sexuality.”

Look, I want a world in which, to the extent that jobs continue to be a thing, acting in commercial porn is just as normal and unremarkable as any other job, and people don’t get all judgy about it. Same (hopefully robust) labor protections too. We don’t get to there without abandoning pearl-clutching attitudes towards the resulting product, among other things.

You seem to be implying that I’m arguing something that I’m not? This thread started with me lamenting that piefed.social accounts are prohibited from accessing NSFW communities, and inquiring whether feddit.online would have the same policies. Along with some commentary on the general state of the threadiverse’s culture.

Note that I haven’t asked either admin to host said communities, and I specifically acknowledged the caching issue. Nor am I advocating for them to be treated on absolutely equal footing; they’re specially marked so that people who don’t want to see them can filter them out, which I think is a good thing.

what do you think will happen if you create an online space and put a big billboard saying “here you will always be free to share your NSFW content”?

If you’re specifically advertising it as focused on that, then that’s likely what you’ll get. If you allow NSFW but don’t center it, you’ll end up with something like Reddit, Twitter, or pre-ban Tumblr. While there are things to criticize about those sites, very little of it has to do with porn.

Content discovery of porn should not be as easy and it should not be trivialized under the pretense of “sex positivity”.

Why? That absolutely sounds like a sex-negative attitude to me. It’s treating sexuality as something toxic that needs to be suppressed and hidden even from those that are interested in seeing it. Sex positivity means treating sexuality as a normal thing that is not unusual for people to be interested in.

Every one wants to talk about supportive they are on sex positivity until some men in uniform knocks on their doors because they are running a website that is available for minors all around the world.

Are you speaking from first-hand experience, or is this conjecture? At least in the US, complying with the law isn’t that difficult.

Also, I don’t even want to get in the discussion of “sex positivity” being associated with “easily available porn”.

That’s an odd way to avoid discussing it. Do you think the availability of porn (or prohibition thereof) within an online space has no effect on what kind of culture develops there?

I’ve considered it, but my skillset isn’t really suited to it as a solo project. I can write code, and I have a reasonable understanding of the human factors side of things, but my IT skills are lacking. I’d be happy to join a team of like-minded people undertaking such a project, though.

It’s not that I want the threadiverse to deliver porn to me. I’m capable of finding that myself. It’s that I like sex-positive culture and think it’s a good thing for humanity overall.

As I noted, my complaint isn’t about any specific instance admin. Individually, no one should be required to host or cache anything that they don’t want to. However, the overall trend of blocking NSFW communities is still concerning, and we should advocate for admins to not do that where feasible.

The design decision to hide NSFW communities from logged-out users also plays a part here. Community discovery is bad enough as it is, and this makes it even worse. Last I checked, lemmynsfw was having to maintain their own patch to fix it, and keep updating it as new lemmy versions are released. Kbin and PieFed also copied this behavior, and I assume Mbin inherited it.

Good to see another public PieFed instance. Any idea if this one allows subscribing to NSFW communities? They’re entirely blocked by piefed.social, unfortunately.

Nothing against @rimu (or any other individual admin) for not wanting to deal with having NSFW content cached on his server, but I find the collective prudishness of the threadiverse disheartening. I think it hinders our growth, and fosters a worse culture overall. It’s kind of ironic that Reddit, for all it’s other flaws, is more sex-positive than the threadiverse is.

No defense, then? Lemmy is just intended as a delivery vector for shitty politics, shackled to the rotting corpse of the USSR?

Fair enough, I hadn’t been keeping track of their pace of development. Doesn’t look super active.

I’m operating under the assumption that for a while the bulk of new user growth will happen on the existing larger instances, which are all running Lemmy, rather than Piefed or Mbin instances growing faster than them. I think that’ll remain true even once Piefed and Mbin are more featureful than Lemmy, unless the gap is really significant.

If that turns out to be true, then for Lemmy to no longer be the dominant software, the existing big instances would need to switch, which wouldn’t be a trivial task. Piefed or Mbin could add the ability to migrate an existing Lemmy database, but I assume that it would be overall easier and less risky for them to move to a Lemmy clone than to a different system.

You walking away would be a net benefit at this point.

It’s not that obvious.

At the very least, we’re at the point where the counterargument to mine is merely damning with faint praise.

I haven’t tried Mbin, and as a Piefed user I agree that it’s not there yet. I’m not suggesting that they should replace Lemmy as the backbone software of the threadiverse. However, Lemmy will continue to run in the absence of active development.

I expect Sublinks to eventually overtake Lemmy since it’s being designed as a drop-in replacement, in a language better suited to web development than Rust. The dev team also aren’t pathological authoritarians, as far as I know. If development on Lemmy were to stop, the threadiverse community’s attention and resources would significantly shift towards Sublinks, which would benefit us all in the long run.

I’m not saying that the work you’ve previously done should be undone. Ideally you would abandon your shitty politics instead of your development work, but I assume that’s out of the question.

From the perspective of those trying to advocate for people to actually use lemmy, the instances that you run, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad, are a serious problem. Together with hexbear, they’re the “missing stairs” of the threadiverse. We’re constantly having to tell people “Yeah, it’s understandable that you don’t want to associate with tankies, but it’s really not so bad if you just block those three instances, and don’t mind that two of them are run by the lead developers of lemmy”. You walking away would be a net benefit at this point.

Ah yes, I sure am making any effort whatsoever to conceal my identity? Weird dodge there, guy.

At this point even someone as ideologically blinded as you should be able to see that the presence of you and your tankie friends is a liability to the project. Why do you think OP is looking to avoid a “lemmy.ml type of situation”?

Wait, when have I ever denied any genocide?

I don’t have receipts handy for that right now, though the company you keep does say something about you.

I do have you on your weird transphobic conspiracy theory, though.