Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it’s still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.

When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.

Quantity isn’t everything. There is an innumerable amount things that could be better about Mastodon, Lemmy and other Fediverse software and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.

Interesting choice… Musk has a bone to pick with Microsoft so even if the FTC gets hobbled, this investigation may get to survive the changing of the administration.

I mean old, un-Musked Twitter was what people wanted. Mastodon is similar, and I like it but it’s not Twitter (which personally I couldn’t get into even in its heyday).

That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.

You’d have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname

Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.

When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?

It would take a HUUUUGE leap of logic

US Fifth Circuit of Appeals and Supreme Courts: “Hold My Beer”

For example, if Trump’s Republican Congress gets rid of elections, then this Amendment doesn’t matter.

I don’t know what it would look like but I know what it would sound like – a heat-pump compressor starting up.

People want to leave X, but they still want the same old, rather than new stuff to make things better as a whole. They don’t want to have to do this “pick a server” thing, they want to have an algorithm spoonfeed them popular content, and it would be best for them to have to put in zero extra effort. In Masto you have to put in the hashtags to get found, and search for and follow people and hashtags to find stuff you want, and essentially DIY-ing your feed seems to be too much work for people.

I don’t think it’s the worst outcome or the Fediverse needing to be written off because of this. At least for now BridgyFed is a thing, and it’s not like we have to capture every refugee, Mastodon has thriving and tight-knit communities.

You were right. The body text had transcribed as ツイッター incorrectly. It’s been edited out since.

The feel of Lemmy communities is a little different than Reddit, even if the software features are mostly analogous and there are many Redditisms used.

Your average commentor/poster will stand out more in a small community, there’s less of being able to post and then slink away.

People have gotten used to a lot more comforting features of modern Reddit, Lemmy in both the users and in the software has more of a “Reddit 10-15 years ago” feel to it.

yep, that’s right

A tablet is more like a clipboard with paper than a binder 📋

If you think of a stone tablet, it’s a flat thing with writing on it, same idea.

You probably know most of it so just some advice: Don’t format the Partition table (MBR to GPT etc.) on the disk whose data you wish to keep.

Shrinking a partition or moving it carries a small risk of data loss and will take significantly longer than creating a new partition (since data needs to be cut and pasted from one area of the disk to another). If your old laptop has an empty slot for another SSD or NVME drive you can plug that in, and still dualboot and having the new drive Linux only.

Also to deal with the occasional Windows cockups, just carry a boot-repair USB, the auto repair has fixed the Windows issue for me 90% of the time (the other times are usually boot order priority or other BIOS setting)

Honestly I thought about it, I’m terrified by the results, but even if things have to get worse over the next 4 years before they get better, the young generation has the time to turn it around. The will to improve? That’s still unknown to me.

I feel bad for Jimmy Carter seeing what his country has become…

At least following MAGA logic, starting next year we can say that Trump is causing the hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes and floods. Mother nature asking nicely hasn’t seemed to get it in people’s heads.

That Kingston DataTraveller I have as well and it’s my ol’ reliable from at least 9 years ago. For some reason PCs put up a fuss with recognizing other people’s USBs at boot, I’ve never once had an issue with the Kingston.

It is true that it is slower but for a live distro, install and troubleshoot disk it does the job perfectly fine.

Sure I think so overall, but “drugs” is a broad category, so I’ll try to hone in on it.

If you are normally healthy, if you feel sick from a cold, flu, fever, allergies, motion sickness etc. there’s little reason that you shouldn’t take OTC medication to help you get through recovery and purposely abstaining is needless suffering. When you feel you’ve recovered is when you stop using them.

If you are prescribed medication by a physician then you take it as prescribed. If taking it doesn’t feel like it is effective or it makes you feel worse, you talk to the doctor to make adjustments or switch medication.

For casual recreational drugs (ranging from caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, tobacco) occasional use is fine, but my opinion is that you would rather have the default be without it, if the default is with it in excess then you should consult a doctor.

For abuse of OTC drugs, prescriptions and illegal drugs, it’s a sign of a problem if you’re on them and can’t get off. They are a trap that is very easy to fall into and hard to get out of.

I don’t hate people that have been caught in that trap but I think they deserve a lot of helping hands, so that it would be possible for them to live a healthier life and have that be their normal rather than being on a drug trip be their normal. At the same time I don’t blame many such folks, a drug trip sounds like a way better life than just sitting on the street sober as a homeless person. They are victims of their circumstance. People need to have a normal living space if we want people to live a normal, sober life. Drugs are great but they break our brains and bodies if used improperly.

Likes: the small community, traditional forum vibe. No ads, no oppressive corporate hand to keep things advertiser-friendly. Interests and views tend to align, but I can have a healthy disagreement on many issues with most users here. Only a few famous borderline trollish users that aren’t fun to chat with, most overt trolls are quickly dealt with.

Dislikes: heavy use of downvoting simply unpopular opinions (a mild annoyance). Difficult to pick between posting in a rarely active niche community and a very active but general community (sometimes I just crosspost). The threat of centralization, with Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml having by far the largest communities (I would like to see more active communities spread across sites, though I make an effort sometimes to comment on different servers). Some big features I’d like to see that still seem far from implementation, such as multi-communities.

Yuru-kyara but for the pope?