Interesting. I’ve never had an interest in anime. What happened with that community?

It's a long story.

lemmy.ml defederated ani.social (an instance focused on anime and manga) under the false accusation that ani.social would host child sexual abuse material. And, at the same time, dessalines removed ani.social from the join-lemmy page. Eventually nutomic reviewed the join-lemmy change and reverted it, but both instances stayed defederated.

Some time later, an anime series called Mahou Shoujo Whatever was airing. For Western standards the series is nasty; I think that it showed 14yos in sexualised positions or crap like that, I didn't watch it. But within Japanese standards it's still not considered porn / hentai. Someone commented about that series in [email protected], and the comment got deleted, under the claim that the comment violated rule 3 (no porn).

But then people started talking about a potential migration of [email protected] to ani.social to avoid situations like the above. Then shit went downhill, with the admins wrecking the discussion threads about the potential migration under bullshit claims like "linking to instance featuring pedo content" and "doxxing". (I remember that a mod was forcibly removed, too.)

In the meantime, the very same ani.social instance was linked in the sidebar of [email protected], one of lemmy.ml admins explicitly acknowledged it, and they never did anything about it.

And the same applies to "doxxing". Back then I moderated [email protected]; and users there (incl. me) were often referring to Reddit's CEO by his full name, and nickname, and the epithet "greedy pigboy". "Curiously", that is not doxxing for the standard of lemmy.ml admins, since they never took any action against it.

So note the pattern:

• linking ani.social in a sidebar - OK
• linking ani.social while discussing the migration of a lemmy.ml community - not OK
• referring to someone by full name, nickname, and "greedy pigboy" - OK
• saying who did what in a neutral/positive way, while discussing the migration of a lemmy.ml community - not OK

That's a bit too much of double standards for my taste, and it shows that lemmy.ml has a hidden rule - "don't discuss the emigration of lemmy.ml communities". In the meantime I was already noticing issues with the admins in the [email protected] modlog, such as deleting any comment that might remotely cast two certain governments in a bad light. (Guess which ones.)

Ah yes, I completely forgot about the Japanese/Brazilian relation. I did have familiarity with it previously, though.

There's also a really big community of Japanese descendants around Lima, Peru. To the point that they even formed a distinctive cuisine, called "nikkei" (lit. "second generation").

I know that’s one reasonably well-supported hypothesis, but I thought there were others with some reasonable support that place it further southeast, around Armenia and Georgia?

Based on recent genetic studies, both hypotheses are correct. But they refer to different stages of the language:

• Early Proto-Indo-European - spoken in the Caucasus, 4500~3500 BCE, by a population nicknamed "Caucasus - Lower Volga" (CLV)
• Late Proto-Indo-European - spoken in the steppes, 3300~2600 BCE, by the population responsible for the Yamnaya culture. 80% of the genetic pool of the Yamnaya comes from the CLV; the other 20% are likely locals, from a Pre-IE population.

To be frank such large time period makes me think that we shouldn't even be referring to both languages by the same name, or trying to reconstruct them as it was one thing; that's a lot like trying to reconstruct Classical Latin and 2025 Spanish as if they were the same thing, or perhaps Proto-Germanic and English. Perhaps that's why the current reconstructions are such a mess.