Half-Life is also my favorite. But incompetent? He graduated from MIT!

Yeah, that’s bullshit. Early Reddit is probably best described as “libertarian” - not to be confused with the embarrassing Republican malapropism of the same name. Much of the community was not explicitly political, but they definitely held what would be called “liberal” beliefs by conservatives. /r/atheism used to be a default sub. Political issues of the time such as gay marriage, OWS, and universal health care all enjoyed popular support among the site’s community. The demographics of the site skewed young, educated, and technically inclined - /r/programming also used to be a default sub - so the whole site had a sort of “California liberal” vibe.

You can always tell a conservative who found Reddit during the /r/KotakuInAction/ and /r/the_donald era, because their memory of the site doesn’t go back any further than those shit-shows.

As far as I know, Syncthing’s local web interface is locked down by default. You should only be able to access it from localhost unless you change the settings. That said, there is some security concerns about JS in browsers making web requests to localhost, which is why I keep a password on Syncthing even though the webui isn’t remotely connectable.

A new version of the Lemmy server software was released recently, version 0.18. It appears that the Jerboa app is now expecting servers to be on that new version. It looks like you’re connecting to the lemmy.world server, which has not upgraded yet. They are waiting for a feature that won’t be ready until 0.18.1

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do to fix this yourself - it’s up to the people administrating lemmy.world to upgrade their server when they’re ready.

IMO, Jerboa should not have locked out old versions so quickly.

I remember it mostly the way you do. It certainly wasn’t conservative in any sense of the word. Socially, /r/atheism was a default sub, most of the user base was LGBT friendly, and pornography was allowed. Economically, universal healthcare and the OWS protests were supported.

There was a libertarian-minded free-speech-absolutist streak, which is why things like /r/jailbait and /r/watchpeopledie were allowed. Some people like to blame the elimination of that type of stuff on “intolerant leftists” but in my estimation the real culprit there was the media catching wind and advertisers not wanting to advertise on sites with that sort of content.

In my opinion, Reddit became far more hostile to conservatives when /r/the_donald took off. That may be more a sign of the times than anything particular about Reddit; political engagement in general was rising during that time. But also most users didn’t really appreciate the way that sub manipulated Reddit’s algorithms, or being called “cuck” in their hobby subs.