this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Why is this the exact opposite of what I've been reading Lemmy users say about their experience? Especially the LGBTQ experience?
Because a large percentage of Lemmy are tankies?
But why would they lie to each other? I don't block many communities so I stumble into their conversations too and they're just talking to each other about it
They are lying in a performative way: the real recipient is "you"
The thing I learned about China when I was on Twitter years ago is that it's how visible you are about it. There's a code of conduct that lets you say and do the thing even if you should get in real trouble for it. I followed a Chinese lesbian who was big in the 3d printing world, and she talked about how there's lesbian bars and her girlfriend, but she's married to a man in the same way that they used to do here in western countries. They call them a Face, and they're guys who are either gay or have some other arrangement with a lesbian so they can both satisfy the cultural/legal marriage expectations while living their own lives.
Not to say that it's all sunshine and rainbows over there. It's still pretty dystopian. She also talked about how she had been grabbed by the police, black bagged and thrown in an unmarked van to be held and interrogated multiple times. They couldnt do more than that, though, because she was really untouchable despite being open about a lesbian because of her popularity on Twitter. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Western nations before the 80s or so when things like Don't Ask, Don't Tell were more codified in law.
Edit: I think I got my terms wrong and the guy is called a Beard, not a Face. Like you'd wear a fake beard to hide your face or something, I think.
I think they're going to relax a lot of the rules just like TikTok did.
It's just happened so fast they couldn't adjust in time.
Give it a week or two and they'll completely separate the US and Chinese userbases, with different standards for each.
This app was never meant for the non-chinese audience. If they want to make a foreign alternative they'd have to segregate it like TikTok vs Douyin and ban the foreign version in the mainland. If that's the case the nice cultrual exchange moments wouldn't happen anymore.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying...
They're going to pick money over morals and split.
IDK I read somewhere that some Chinese communications authority said that there was no plan to do that and they welcomed the interaction between people. To just be respectful and whatever.
But then again this is the Internet and we all know the famous quote:
"Don't trust everything you read on the internet" -Abe Lincoln
I mean, there's gonna be a heavy algorithm...
Even if not "intentional" it's going to segregate by language used.
They're not going to turn down inheriting the US user base due to morals, they'll take the money.
Yeah I've given it a try and honestly I probably won't use it long term because well... It's all in Chinese and as cool as it would be to learn a new language (any language really) I don't have the time or energy to do that.
In my short experience there's a lot of lesbians on there, and "skin" gets shown quite a bit. I saw someone pole dancing in a jinx cosplay.
There's some cool things the app does I wish we had an English alternative, it's like tiktok combined with Pinterest? So there's better category sorting and you can save stuff in collections.
I also really have enjoyed the comments from Chinese people. It's really fun hearing their stories. I honestly sometimes forget, with how much we talk about China bad in America, that they're just people too? They're curious about our pets, they want to see what food we eat. Someone had hundreds of Chinese people try grilled cheese Sandwhiches.
Its a cultural exchange in the digital age that I've never seen before and honestly... I hope it sticks for that alone.
If you're looking to learn a new language that's actually useful to learn and also pretty easy, I would recommend Indonesian. It's a bastardized version of Malaysian but with more thought put into it.
Edit: As others have pointed out, it's not actually a useful language to learn unless you're in Indonesia, so I retract that.
Unless you're in Indonesia how is learning that language useful at all?
The world is rapidly (compared to history) moving towards ONE language. We don't know which one it'll be but all the signs are there. One thing we know for certain though is that only today's top 5 are contenders and Indonesian isn't one of them.
Another thing we know is that languages that use ideographic writing systems are on the way out. The spoken language may survive but the written language just can't compete with languages that use phonographic alphabets and spelling. It's just too inefficient to remember all the symbols and write them out and it's nearly impossible to write a program or script with them (and maintain such code).
It looks like latin characters are going to win out for sure. Probably with emoji being accepted as acceptable grammar/cues/hints at some point.
You have an interesting attitude toward learning.
One thing is learning because it's fun and another is calling it a useful language...