Done.
Yes, that is a problem. No single solution is perfect, and VPN blocks are only one tool in the toolbox. Every instance is different, and admins pick the tools that they think will work best for their situation. VPN blocking happens to be a tool that seems to have worked well for lemmy.world.
Instances that lack moderation and have a history of being used by trolls tend to get the nuclear option: they are defederated by the big Lemmy instances. That's not ideal at all, but the tool set for Lemmy moderation is very limited right now.
Short answer: no.
I don't mean to be rude. The desire to use VPNs is completely understandable. Unfortunately, VPNs were being abused in ways that were detrimental to the community here. Last year there were several waves of really grotesque troll posts (CSAM, scat porn, etc.) on lemmy.world and other instances. Blocking VPNs was one of the responses that was effective in stopping those posts. The admin team has no interest in backtracking at this time.
You have moderation here
We have unpaid volunteers donating their spare time. Nobody wants to spend their lunch break purging CSAM posts from some troll. And no users want a post to stay up for hours because the mods were asleep, at work, or otherwise not watching the Lemmy feed. (That actually happened, and is what drove me to donate some of my time here.) If law enforcement ever does come knocking, this instance doesn't have the money or time to mount a defense.
I wish things were different. This is the unfortunate reality that this particular instance has faced. Other instances may feel differently.
The mod (@comcreator@lemmy.world) does look inactive.
Is there another community you think users should be directed to?
In this case the mod is an active Lemmy user. They have posts and comments within the past day. It should be up to them to decide if they want to leave their community open, or lock their community and direct users elsewhere.
@ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world mentioning you here since it's your community being discussed.
This has been happening to me and others as well, across multiple Lemmy instances. The common thread seems to be Firefox. I assume something changed in a recent Firefox update?
If anyone figures out the root cause, I would love to hear about it.
Is this why some users downvote everything? To mark posts as read?
Yes, Blaze has been unbanned from the community.
Regions like Persia, China, and the eastern Mediterranean got a head start because their climate, plants, and animals allowed agriculture to begin. Agriculture allowed major cultural developments: written text, math, astronomy, etc. These things then slowly spread to Europe via trade and wars of conquest.
Europe took all this imported knowledge and added another detail: developing better weapons and militaries. Wars happen everywhere, but Europe took it to a new level with centuries of near-constant fighting. This created big incentives to develop better weapons, better tactics, to travel and trade to find new resources, etc. All that military development led to improvements in metallurgy, shipbuilding, ocean navigation, etc. They leapfrogged all the cultures that came before them.
Why does it start in Europe?
You should read Guns, Germs, and Steel. The author argues that humans in certain regions of the world benefitted from particular environmental factors: better climate, better geography for trade, the availability of plants and animals that will tolerate being domesticated, etc. Many small advantages combine over centuries to create huge differences in technological advancement.
That's bizarre. I have not experienced that with the stock lemmy-ui in Firefox, nor in the Summit app on Android. You have only seen it in Jerboa, correct?