Skip to main content





Lenin: By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Quotes

  • Lenin: Miraculous prophecy is a fairy-tale. But scientific prophecy is a fact.
  • Noam Chomsky: See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
  • George Bernard Shaw: Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
  • Henry Kissinger: Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
  • Fidel Castro: This position of the Trotskyists is the same which all newspapers and publicity agencies of Yankee imperialism adopted in relation to the cause of Comrade Ernesto Guevara. All the imperialist press of the United States, its news agencies, the Cuban counter-revolutionaries' press, the bourgeois press throughout the continent and the rest of the world - in other words, this campaign of slanders and intrigues against revolutionary Cuba in connection with the case of Comrade Guevara - coincided with precision with all imperialist bourgeois sectors, all the slanderers and all the conspirators against the Cuban revolution, for there is no doubt that only reaction and imperialism is interested in discrediting the Cuban revolution and in destroying the confidence of the revolutionary movements in the Cuban revolution, in destroying the confidence of the Latin American peoples in the Cuban revolution, in destroying their faith. Therefore, they have not hesitated to use the dirtiest and most indecent weapons.
  • Fidel Castro: Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction.
  • Fidel Castro: Yon Sosa led the movement of a group of armed officers in the crushing of whom the mercenaries who later invaded Playa Girón participated. Through a businessman who took charge of the movement's political aspects, the Fourth International fixed it up so that that leader, who was ignorant of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, would permit that agents of Trotskyism, about whom we do not have the slightest doubt that he is an agent of imperialism, to publish a newspaper which copies outright the program of the Fourth International. By doing this, the Fourth International committed a real crime against the revolutionary movement to isolate it from the rest of the people, to isolate it from the masses, when it contaminated it with the stupidities, the discredit, and the repugnant thing which Trotskyism today is in the field of politics.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.: So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: It is the beginning of the end.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: Financiers flourish only when nations decline.
  • George Friedman: The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought wars– the First, the Second and Cold Wars– has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they’re the only force that could threaten us. And to make sure that that doesn’t happen.
  • Lenin: Prompted by fear of revolution, the old state power, which is independent of the people and is a power over the people, promises the people that it will ensure their freedom. But its promises remain unfulfilled; they cannot be fulfilled.
  • James Connolly: If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain.
  • Lenin: There are moments in history when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for the next struggle.
  • Kim Il Sung: Our ideal is to build a society where everyone is well fed, well clothed, and lives a long life, a society where everybody is progressive and works devotedly, a society where all people live united in harmony as one big family.
  • Michael Parenti: To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
  • Edward Snowden: There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war.
  • Lenin: Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.
  • Stalin: Only in the highest phase of communism will people, working in accordance with their capacity, receive recompense therefor in accordance with their needs: "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs."
  • Stalin: All that Marxism declares is that until classes have been completely abolished, and until work has been transformed from being a means of maintaining existence, into a prime necessity of life, into voluntary labour performed for the benefit of society, people will continue to be paid for their labour in accordance with the amount of labour performed.
  • Stalin: The October Revolution is neither the continuation nor the culmination of the Great French Revolution. The purpose of the French Revolution was to put an end to feudalism and establish capitalism. The aim of the October Revolution is to put an end to capitalism and to establish socialism.
  • Lenin: We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets.
  • Gilbert Scott-Heron: The first revolution is when you change your mind.
  • Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya: Solidarity among the male and female workers, a general cause, general goals, a general path to that goal - that is the solution to the "woman" question in the working-class environment.
  • Lenin: No idea could be more erroneous or harmful than to separate foreign from home policy.
  • Kim Jong-il: Introducing individualism into socialism, which is based entirely on collectivism, is tantamount to taking poison.
  • Langston Hughes: Put one more S in the U.S.A. To make it Soviet.
  • Lenin: There is a good Latin proverb which says: “It is natural for all men to err; but only a fool persists in his error.
  • Lenin: A Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.
  • Kim Il Sung: It can be said that the life of a revolutionary begins by going among the masses and that it is over when he parts from them.
  • Lenin: Deafened by liberal catch-phrases, people in our country are apt to overlook the actual class stand of the liberal party’s real bosses.
  • Lenin: The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat (“the dictatorship of the proletariat”).




La vie est un mystère qu'il faut vivre, et non un problème à résoudre.


Citation extraite de "Religion and Personality" d'Adrian van Kaam (1964).

Adrian van Kaam était un prêtre catholique néerlandais de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, un professeur d'université, un psychologue existentialiste et un écrivain sur la spiritualité formatrice.

Cette citation était parfois affichée dans des hôpitaux et des lieux de vie.

Extrait de "Religion and Personality" de Adrian van Kaam (1964):

Alors que la première chose à savoir dans une crise technique est l'information exacte sur l'instrument concerné, la première chose à savoir dans les problèmes de la vie est que nous ne savons pas. La vie est un mystère à vivre, pas un problème à résoudre. Devant ce mystère, nous nous tenons dans l'admiration et l'abandon. Nous n'imposons pas nos catégories mesquines au mystère de la vie; nous ne forçons pas la vie à s'adapter à nos préjugés étroits; nous ne nous plaignons pas que la vie est trop vaste pour nous ; nous savons que la vie échappe à notre emprise. Nous nous inclinons avec révérence devant le mystère de l'Être; nous acceptons avec humilité le fait que nous ne pouvons pas comprendre où la vie nous mène ; nous apprenons la vertu de la patience à l'école de l'aventure de la vie. Car nous sommes comme des marins sur un navire dont la destination est inconnue sur une mer inexplorée.


|La vie est un mystère qu'il faut vivre, et non un problème à résoudre.|



Quand tout va bien on peut compter sur les autres, quand tout va mal on ne peut compter que sur sa famille.


"Proverbe" dont le sens est introuvable avant 1980 aux États-Unis et plus tard en France, ce qui témoigne d'une évolution frappante des mentalités occidentales.
Cherchez la phrase "only count on your family" et "on ne peut compter que sur sa famille".


|Quand tout va bien on peut compter sur les autres, quand tout va mal on ne peut compter que sur sa famille.|



On a dû te dire qu'il fallait réussir dans la vie; moi je te dis qu'il faut vivre, c'est la plus grande réussite du monde.


Citation extraite du récit et essai "Les vraies richesses" de Jean Giono (1936).

Il faut vivre en personne vertueuse, car vivre dans le vice ce n'est pas recommandable.

Extrait du récit et essai "Les vraies richesses" de Jean Giono (1936):

On a dû te dire qu'il fallait réussir dans la vie; moi je te dis qu'il faut vivre, c'est la plus grande réussite du monde. On t'a dit: «Avec ce que tu sais, tu gagneras de l'argent.» Moi je te dis: «Avec ce que tu sais tu gagneras des joies.» C'est beaucoup mieux. Tout le monde se rue sur l'argent. Il n'y a plus de place au tas des batailleurs. De temps en temps un d'eux sort de la mêlée, blême, titubant, sentant déjà le cadavre, le regard pareil à la froide clarté de la lune, les mains pleines d'or mais n'ayant plus force et qualité pour vivre; et la vie le rejette. Du côté des joies, nul ne se presse; elles sont libres dans le monde, seules à mener leurs jeux féeriques sur l'asphodèle et le serpolet des clairières solitaires.


|On a dû te dire qu'il fallait réussir dans la vie; moi je te dis qu'il faut vivre, c'est la plus grande réussite du monde.|



Subway Tooter & Foggy Minds


Tried logging on to here via Subway Tooter, which I use for Mastodon. It's supposed to work with Friendica too. I tried the Friendiqa app but it doesn't even recognise this site exists. Anyway it appeared I'd logged on successfully but when I went to look at my feed I got a very long error message. The folks on Subway Tooter's help forum said it was a server issue and to contact the server owner.
in reply to Vanessa

@Vanessa That would be me for future reference (in the menu under information it has a lot of the server details and in there is a link to my profile as well as my email address)

If you look further down on that error message where it says HTTP 502 Bad Gateway it tells me the server might have been having issues at that point in time. In all honestly it's kinda unavoidable at the time due to resource constraints, sites currently on a rented dedicated server until I fix my housing situation (current ETA is late october when I can work on putting it back on my own, more stable, hardware again), so it probably was just having issues loading that page at that time.

There's not a lot I can do with troubleshooting clients, but let me know if it keeps having trouble and maybe I can work with you to find some answers?

in reply to Vanessa

I've got it partially working. The feed doesn't work but the notifications do and I can boost/repost posts from my Mastodon accounts onto my Foggy Minds account





I don't think it's talked about enough tbh.
When my egg cracked, there was a sense of dread... because once I knew there was no going back. My life would never be safe again.
Do I regret it? Not one bit, I'm genuinely happier now, but I do miss safety...

reductress.com/post/trans-woma…

#trans #LGBTQIA #LGBT

LGBTQ+ Feed reshared this.





A First Post


As I move into my 40s, and contend with the dynamic tension of both more time, money, and capability; against higher demands on those very resources. I've been looking for a new place to do my social networking. I don't need the massive social networks of the past, since most of my community is well established at this point. It's nice to have federation, so my more distant friends can still see my posts without having to maintain or check a specific network just on my behalf. It's a little disappointing to find the landscape of self-hosted or federated social networks so barren, but Friendica seems like a solid option. The federated landscape makes it easier to try a platform, knowing that my work will not be forever vendor-locked into that platform.



Slightly sketchy account makes me uncomfortable and others report it... I politely give them a warning to migrate before shutting them down...

Day and a half later "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"... whelp, that's an immediate delete...

reshared this






The shadows of Baykus oak tree - A short story


Dark Lovecraftian-like story

Introduction
The following text is a story I wrote yesterday. There are some deep layers of meaning (such as the character's main name, "Baykus", from the turkish word for "owl"). There are some "Lovecraftian" aspects as well (although I'm not really a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, but let's say me and him were inspired by the same... realm).

There is also a defense of Mother Nature (Gaia, Pachamama, Goddess Isis, Demetre, the list goes on), Her relationship with ancient knowledge (hereby represented by the archetype of the owl and the oak tree), and a critique of the way people fear the unknown, especially the darker aspects of the nature (Darkness is not evil; if it weren't by Her dark aspects, there'd be no light).

The story is human-written (i.e. not an AI output), I guess it'll be evident as there are some English grammar errors of mine (I'm Brazilian and my native language is Portuguese, so I'm aware I commit a lot of mistakes when I write English texts, even though I'm capable of writing rhyming poetry).

The shadows of Baykus oak tree
The quietness of the boy made her restless. She noticed that Baykus hasn't eaten since yesterday, preferring to sit below that old oak tree. Every time she tried to approach him, he'd run away somewhere else inside the big yard.

The sky was overcast, it'll rain any time soon. But these dense clouds didn't suffice to scare Baykus, as he continued to sit and gaze at the nothing like a thousand yard stare. As the day became darker and darker, his mother could finally understand what he was looking at. Mesmerized, she went outside and sat by the stair steps.

Days passed and the neighbors started to worry about the absence of both Baykus and his mother. They tried to call, but no one answered. They tried to spy by the window, the kitchen door was open but there was no signal of them. Another day passed and the neighbors called the police. When the policemen broke into the house, they readily started to notice a dark smoke coming out. Initially thinking that it could be some pot that was forgotten by the stove, they found the kitchen abandoned, but there was no lit fire nor pot over the stove, and the smoke was coming from everywhere across the house, letting the agents curious and confused about what was going on.

One of the policemen noticed the opened door that led to the yard and decided to go there. There was no one there, except for the shoes of Baykus' mother at the stairs, and the black smoke permeated the entire yard. Next to the oak, they found another pair of shoes, these from Baykus. They also found the source of the strange smoke inside the oak's trunk, but the oak wasn't on fire.

There was a little hole and they decided to look inside. The policeman put his eye near the hole and then he fell to his knees, paralyzed. Fearing that the smoke could be some toxic chemical, the other policemen readily ran to the car and fetched some masks. Another policeman, masked, tried to look, and the same situation happened as soon as his eye approached the hole: he fell to his knees, with his eyes wide open.

The third and last policeman decided to cut through the tree trunk, so he fetched an ax. When he was going to wave the ax against the tree, the voice of Baykus was heard coming from inside: "Don't!". The policeman tried to talk to him, but this was the only word they heard from him. The policeman, desperate, continued with his idea of cutting through the trunk (if Baykus is stuck inside, cutting the trunk of the tree would help, he thought). As he approached the ax against the tree, the blade got extremely hot, glowing red, starting to burn his hand as he dropped it.

Confused, he tried to put his hand inside that hole, only to be grabbed by a couple hands inside. These hands were cold, like icy cold. As he tried to pull back, the hands started to pull him inside. He tried to fetch his gun, but it was as hot as that axe he was using. He started to panic when the hands let him free.

He ran away thinking of calling reinforcement, but as he tried to enter the kitchen, he noticed something even more weird: there was no street but a black veil all the way from the sky. He looked back, trying to find another exit, but as he turned, he came across the boy and his mother, standing together both staring at him. He looked to his side and saw the two policemen, also standing and staring at him. Scared by the way they were staring at him, he slowly paced backwards, only to find the wall behind him.

Baykus approached him and gently grabbed his hand, taking him to the oak tree, the others followed. As they approached the tree, the man was paralyzed by what he saw: the eyes of Baykus got bigger and darkened.

The smoke surrounded the policeman and he started to hear voices, billions of voices: they were the thoughts of every human alive and dead. They were memories, both good and bad, but mostly dark and shadowy. The grieving from those who lost their loved ones, the woe from those who were alone, the suffering from those who were in pain.

He started to know everything, from the known knowledge to the unknown, and this made he feel the burden. The burden She has had since the beginning of times, the burden faced by Darkness, an unknown entity that he was starting to know. "She is our mother. The mother of all living beings, and She is your mother, too. She was looking for you and now She is looking after you.", Baykus said. Although paralyzed, the policeman smiled.

The smile couldn't be seen by the neighbors: all they could see was three paralyzed policemen, one of which was paralyzed as soon he walked inside the kitchen. The neighbors couldn't understand what was going on and, scared by the unknown, they ran from it... As everybody does... 🦉🌲🌒



First post on Friendica


So I'm relatively new to fediverse, although I have already interacted with federated protocols (such as Matrix, but Matrix is way different from Mastodon/Friendica/Bluesky/Pleroma/etc).

I have been sailing through two Mastodon instances, but Mastodon's character limit is low for my needs. I'm a developer (JS, PHP, Python, etc) that also like to write poetry and chronicles, as well as interacting with AI to create artistic representations of the gothic and the dark supernatural. While it seems that Friendica supports more characters, I'll know it the moment I send this first post. It has 1342 characters in total.

I have a syncretic view over the reality, trying to converge scientific inquiry with the philosophical questioning and the metaphysical spirituality from all religions and belief systems (even when they seem to "contradict" one another; actually, they have more in common than people think, starting from the beginning of the existence from primordial waters from the amniotic liquid to the electromagnetic fields permeating the cosmos, but it's a subject for another future post).

One important thing for me to ask: does the instance allow AI Art (e.g. from artistic representations of daemons such as Astaroth and Lilith to mathematical concepts such as fractals; obviously these AI imagery would be marked as so)?

in reply to Daemon Silverstein

@Daemon Silverstein This instance? I allow properly marked AI content, I would also suggest content warnings (in Friendica it's done with [abstract]content warning message[/abstract]), but I count that more as a courtesy effort than something I'm going to really demand.

Friendica has no character limit set.

As Friendica isn't the friendliest user interface, if you do find you'd prefer Mastodon or Mastodon-like, there are many that have higher character limits.

in reply to Daemon Silverstein

@Daemon Silverstein Welcome. If you find it confusing my tutorial might help
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzg…
Pt 3 is still in the works as this is a rework from 2020


Sorry for the downtime


Housing situation has been a pain, still on the temporary server environment and been hitting major resources bottlenecks.

I'm hoping to get a place sooner, but I've hit some roadblocks that very likely will push it drastically further out... in which case I'll need to spend more money on this environment to return things to stable.

Reminder that I'm covering this entirely out of my own pocket and these constraints are because I'm between homes and can't use my own much cheaper hardware. If you appreciate this instance I would very much appreciate a donation.

Shiri Bailem reshared this.




Friendica vs Mastodon


I tried Friendica previously, but never figured out what I wanted to do with it, and deleted it after a while. But after I'd read the excellent post @Elena Rossini wrote on her blog I realised I really should give it another chance, and decided to put a little more effort into it this time. So I created this account yesterday, and now I'm trying to decide how I want to use it. Some part of that uncertainty is because I haven't figured out all the bells and whistles of the platform, and I don't always quite understand what the help pages are trying to tell me. This is definitely mostly on me, having some preconceived notions and expectations, and getting a little confused here and there. This is not Facebook or Goggle+, it is its own thing.
For the most part though, just trying things out with one eye on those help pages have solved any questions I've had.

After I had signed up, I initially imported all the accounts I am following on Mastodon, but am starting to regret this. The two networks are obviously very different beasts, and I will act accordingly from now on. My current idea is to use Friendica, at least partly, as a sort of news aggregator, following accounts both on the fediverse and via RSS feeds, so a lot of those Mastodon accounts will be unfollowed here for a quieter experience and left on Mastodon. Just because you can follow everything everywhere on ActivityPub, it doesn't always make the best sense. But that, of course, is also the beauty of this, what doesn't make the best sense for me, might do for someone else. Different folks...


Occasionally I may even post something here, things that require more than 500 words, things like this.

That's what I'm planning to do right now, anyway. Who knows what I'll think tomorrow?

Jarulf reshared this.

in reply to Jarulf

@Jarulf @Elena Rossini welcome aboard! I'm definitely saving that article, might link it or one of the guides it mentions in the getting started welcome panel (... I should review that as well, I haven't looked at it in ages)

Also remember there's a helper group as you're figuring things out, just tag helpers@forum.friendi.ca (not tagged here because otherwise it'll share this comment to the group). I'm also happy to help out my users!

in reply to Shiri Bailem

@Shiri Bailem Thank you, happy to be here. And also thank you for providing the instance.
I'm figuring things out as I go along, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it here. I'll be sure to ask for help when I'm getting too confused :-)


new work


আজকে এটিই আমার প্রথম পোস্ট। দেখি কেমন হয়?


Long time no writing here


I started to digging into my latest hobby of #bookbinding (but it's not the only one i assure you)
And made several pamphlet, with also some custom design.
I recently made couple of handmade hardcover journals. One using a custom hero-quest character sheet, the other one is just a lined notebook.
More info for who is interested are available here: ko-fi.com/post/Two-more-bookbi… (don't worry all my posts on #ko-fi are free)
It also gave my a nice surprise of receiveing the first donation ever (even if it will be the last it still made me happy! :) ) Any opinion comment is appreciated.
These are couple of pictures of my latest works:

Image/Photo

storage.ko-fi.com/cdn/useruplo…
any comment/critics is appreciated.



Hey there, I'm Kees (they/them/their, ne/nem/nir), a 30-something bug living in California. I'm hoping to make this my public facing account to share my art and generally interact with the rest of the fediverse.

I'm an amateur naturalist (I like BIRDS and BUGS, especially parasitic wasps) and I do art in various media (digital, watercolor, acrylic), usually of birds or original characters from an ARPG I help run. #tokipona li pona. Aaand I don't know what else to put in here so I'll stop ha.



Hello world. Just doing some testing with how this interfaces with Mastodon, and the various privacy options
This is meant to be a public post with an abstract/CW




Hello there. Glasgow calling.
I'm an analogue digital hybrid who cares about mental health issues, music, photography and art.
I'm deeply suspicious of ducks (in a less than serious way) and although I exist on Mastodon I'm keen to migrate to Friendica.
Best wishes all.