So I’m a troll, am I?

The OP was copy-pasted from my post here with some clarifying edits. And you can gather from my other post on this community that “just going back to Reddit” isn’t something I want.

Also, information hygiene here is terrible. No mods seem to care.

I think a combo of better moderation and a larger and more diverse user base is what Lemmy needs to succeed. The former is hard to achieve because you have to straddle the line between too lax and too strict, and everyone’s going to have a different idea where that line is. I get the feeling people just copy-pasted all the popular subreddits without enforcing the rules that gave each sub its identity. Askreddit was about open-ended questions meant to elicit discussion or shared experiences. Nostupidquestions was about seeking information. Showerthoughts was about quick realizations or observations. Mildlyinteresting was about odd little coincidences or anomalies you run into going about your day. But here on Lemmy there’s no quality control so they’re all filled with varying degrees of ragebait.

Growing the user base is even harder because the “politics is everything” folks repel any normal human being who just wants to talk about Pokemon.

TIL severe retinal scarring is “user error”

I mean Linux folks on Lemmy generally can be pretty toxic too. I get downvoted for saying I’d love to use Linux but my blindness prevents me from doing so. If someone said they’d love Linux if not for its users I’d probably agree.

It’s a sort of pendulum effect. Lemmy as a whole is very Linux-focused, almost militantly so (see my other Linux-related posts and comments). So people who feel otherwise form their own knot of extremists, alienating people who don’t feel strongly either way.

Honestly I don’t think so. I want the fediverse to grow, but the vibe here can be exhausting sometimes. Whenever I say I can’t use Linux because I’m blind I get a bunch of downvotes. Whenever I say I’d love to talk about cats or vintage computers without someone bringing up Trumpa-Lumpa in the comments I get shouted down as well. I can’t imagine Joe Social Media User wanting to be around people like that. I could say a ton more but I’ve rehashed it elsewhere.

And that’s not getting into the (comparatively) high friction nature of first choosing an instance to sign up to. Heck, I didn’t understand how the fediverse worked for a while, and I’m in IT. The world is full of people who don’t have that background that will find the very concept impenetrable.

yeah well !worldbuilding@lemmy.world needs more content.

I feel like this would be a good prompt over in !worldbuilding@lemmy.world.

Data is the plural past participle of the Latin verb do, dare, dedi, datum meaning to give. The singular is datum meaning that which is given. So data means things that are given. Not sure that will help but I gotta use those 3 years of high school Latin somewhere.

I think in order to use desktop Linux you have to be comfortable making your computer a hobby. I’ve tried many distros across 16+ years and I couldn’t go for more than a few days without some part of the OS breaking, some app not working properly, or some functionality simply not being available. Depending on your career and lifestyle, some or all of these are solvable if you’re willing to put in the effort.

Sometimes I’m willing to put in that effort, but increasingly I just want my computer to be a tool that gets out of the way. I think militant Linux users regard that extra effort as a positive in and of itself, or are willing to put up with it for ideological reasons, and thumbs up to them for that, but they can’t grok the fact Linux simply doesn’t work for some people. If you need THE MS Office or Adobe, and many many people do, Linux isn’t going to work. If you need accessibility, as I do, Linux isn’t going to work.

I think the original meaning of “The customer is always right” fits here. If someone says they need something that Linux can’t provide, and especially if they’ve tried what Linux offers and found it unfit for their needs, they need to be taken at face value instead of being gainsaid at every turn.

If you’ve found that Linux meets your needs, hats off to you. I’m even a bit jealous, but until my needs align with what Linux can provide I can’t switch. I’ll keep trying Linux here and there just as I have the last 16 years, but I’m not holding out hope that accessibility will improve, and won’t be able to switch until it does.

Behold the cringe that is The Lonely Galaxy. It’s my worldbuilding and conlanging project. Conlanging is by its nature a hobby that you can only do for its own sake, as there’s no way to get nonlangers interested in your work without being talented at some other art like drawing or writing.

knowing absolutely nothing about this topic and assuming the statement is legit, I assume the reason why is because you want incoming light to hit the surface at a lower angle to create more shadows and make the topography stand out more.

I’m a 'Murican. When they had that royal wedding back in 2012 or whenever and everyone was going crazy I was like didn’t we fight a war so we wouldn’t have to care about this?

I’ve been around general monarchists, as in people who support monarchy as a form of government, and always wanted to ask this question. The best answer I can think of myself is that democracy is not a guarantee against bad leadership.

Heresy! *BLAM!*

Constructed languages. I rarely see this sentiment expressed even though it was voiced by the very guy who popularized it as a pastime. It’s such a lonely and melancholy hobby. The whole point of a language is to communicate, but we spend our time making languages that will never be used to communicate.

And it’s not like art or music or cooking, where it produces a product that people who aren’t artists or musicians or chefs can enjoy. You pretty much have to know linguistics to appreciate anything other than how the language sounds (phonology and phonetactics) or how it’s written, assuming the creator bothered to make a writing system, which many don’t. So my siblings who were into Irish dancing or marching band got all the attention because people “got” what they were doing and could enjoy it without devoting considerable time to understanding the underlying mechanics of it all, while I toiled away in obscurity digging up scholarly articles on proto indo-european verb conjugations and Austronesian morphosyntactic alignment.

“But early_riser,” I hear you cry, “Lots of people want to learn Klingon or Na’vi or Sindarin. You just have to write stories about your languages and their world that people can enjoy.” But I suck at writing, and it’s not as fun as making languages.

I was tired enough that I checked to see if that was an actual quote from the article you linked.

You’re on to something. I think it started out like a lot of Reddit clones (anyone remember voat?) where a huge chunk of the user base are people who got banned from Reddit or were otherwise on the fringe. This core of crazies repels anyone else who just wants to chill and talk about shared interests, making the user base even crazier overtime.

He has a spinning HDD apparently.

So they’re ad-supported but also say they want to avoid enshittification. I’m not saying that couldn’t work, but it’s a hard line to walk. Also, banning politics platform-wide isn’t really what I meant. I suppose there’s no harm in lurking.

What the fediverse needs is a more diverse user base. What Reddit had (and perhaps still has) is gun nuts who like pokemon, socialists who like pokemon, libertarians who like pokemon, conservatives who like pokemon, etc who can all get together and talk about their interest in pokemon because pokemon is the only thing they have in common. So the discussion stays about pokemon. What Lemmy has is tankies and other Marxists who like pokemon, and that’s pretty much it.

I think having a common watering hole where people who wouldn’t normally rub elbows can come together about common interests has value, even political value, as it helps opposing groups to humanize each other.

I also like LocalSend. Not quite as automagical as airdrop but it’s cross platform