Mastodon and Lemmy are both built on top of the same protocol: ActivityPub. That said, they provide a substantially different user interface. Mastodon is focused on microblogging (basically, a Twitter clone), where you follow individual users and boost (retweet) or like posts. Lemmy is focused on communities (basically, a Reddit clone), where instead of subscribing to users, you subscribe to communities. There is some interoperability, but it kind of like a Spanish person trying to speak to a Portuguese person at this point.

Long story short, even though the goal is for all content to be accessible regardless of which platform you are using, there is a lot of content that can only be understood if you are using the correct one.

It is definitely inducing cognitive dissonance. The developers are simply are communists trying to collectivize social media, and that will live in their heads rent free as long as they stick around.

Capitalism was not inevitable. Feudalism could have just stagnated or died out. Capitalism is what ultimately resolved the contradictions of Feudalism and this happened over the course of centuries. Likewise, Socialism will resolve the contradictions of Capitalism (hopefully before life on Earth is doomed).

In Marx’s time, it was presumed that the most advanced centers of Capitalism would be the first to progress to Socialism, but historically this didn’t bear out. The Socialist revolution didn’t take place in England or Germany, but in Russia, which was a backwater by contemporary standards, barely letting go of serfdom. As a functionally feudal monarchy on Europe’s periphery, the bourgeois class of Russia was stunted, and this certainly played a role in their defeat. The vast majority of places we see revolutionary class struggle endure, from China to Korea to Cuba to Vietnam tend not to be the centers of industrial production (at least, at the times of their revolutions).

So you could say that countries like the USSR and China skipped past Capitalism, but only in a regional sense. It still remains as a world-hegemonic system which they have always been forced to contend with.

Communism is when no uptime