I am far more interactive on here. I was almost exclusively a lurker on Reddit.

There are places like that, even with YouTube, but you usually have to pay rather than use the ad-supported free product. (Assuming ad blockers don’t work well any longer)

I think I have like 5 Lemmy apps installed, including the voyager web app, but I keep coming back to Memmy.

This is the way to do it. Getting your photos printed by somebody else will be tons cheaper AND give you better results.

Eh, I am all about wired networking wherever I can, but my awesome old Brother laser printer gets used like once per month or two, and it lives off in a far corner of the house where it isn’t taking up valuable space. Plus it could work with a tiny fraction of the LAN bandwidth available to it.

On wi-fi it stays, lol. I think I may have had to reconnect it once in the decade+ we’ve had it. Otherwise, the printout is ready before I can even walk to the printer (unless it has a ton of pages, naturally).

I don’t even know how old it is at this point. I just know it’s over a decade because I didn’t buy a third party toner cartridge until 2014.

As with lots of issues surrounding him and the US government, the system wasn’t designed to be packed with people acting in bad faith AND a huge chunk of the population ignoring it.

As crazy as this is to watch from within the US, it must be terrifying in a different way for those in other countries. You have this lunatic criminal trying to regain power like it’s a news story about a coup in some small developing country, but it’s the country with the big guns and bombs. Plus, the would-be dear leader might even want to pull out of NATO. Chilling.

Ah well, it figures they have a tradeoff like that. Maybe they’ll be limited to remote locations then.

Like so many things, it will come down to cost. It’s fortunate that renewables are getting so much cheaper because we pretty much are betting on them by being so reluctant to expand nuclear. Hopefully batteries and other energy storage technologies keep advancing rapidly.

We should be investing in this amazing science!

Oh but fuck that other amazing science over there that everybody is into.

This is awesome to see, but I wonder if an array of Small Modular Reactors would be the way to do it in the future. Nuclear is a fantastic and safe source of clean energy, so I hope it can compete better on the economic side.

No argument here. The wasteful and dangerous vehicles are just a minor symptom of our cultural issues.

There is a lot of anger, frustration, and unacknowledged insecurity going into vehicle purchases in the US.

Instances have to be created and run by somebody, so we automatically have a bunch of admins in the loop.

Then somebody has to make communities on the instances. That involves choosing the purpose of the community, and writing any relevant description or guidelines. So again you inherently start with somebody in charge of the community.

But none of them answer to a corporate overlord. Things are run the way the people decide. And if the people disagree, they can run different communities or instances. There can easily be unmoderated communities, and I’m sure there are.

I guess when you’re more worried about nearby LGBT and minorities than infrastructure and public works, you sometimes get the wool pulled over your eyes, lol.

I could totally see that working where I live. It’s a growing town of ~35K people with a lot going for it, but it’s also very white, and sits right on the border of rural areas. I think I’ve seen in the election results that votes go 75/25 towards Republican candidates, give or take.

Competing for the Republican nomination would be pretty gross, but if you’d also be running unopposed for that, ezpz.

We may be thinking of different populations of users. The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.

And to be clear, I did not mean to argue that redundant communities are a problem. I can just see potential benefits of allowing cross-instance merger of communities IF the leaders of those communities decide they want to.

There undoubtedly IS strength in redundant communities, just as there is with all the different instances to choose from. One mod, one admin, one hardware failure or seized server, etc cannot just shut things down. Plus competition is good. There can be a natural selection process to determine over time which community is the best run.

But thanks to the network effect, there is also a first mover advantage, and an inertia to whichever community gets the most users at the beginning, since many people will just sub to the one or two most active communities on a subject. It would be interesting too see how, and IF, such a “merge communities” feature would be used by like-minded communities/mods. That kind of feature would/should be low priority in these early days though.

I took a look at the “conservatives banning books” link and it says thousands of books have been banned and/or removed from libraries.

I took a look at your link, and it describes the process by which one book was removed from the required reading list, but was still allowed to be used in class.

It makes me think of the “we are not the same” meme.

It all comes down to the network effect that I mentioned. It’s not a matter of making the users’ lives easier, it’s a matter of making the content better, especially the comments.

A single merged community may kick off discussions and debates that would never happen if the users were spread across 10 different communities in different instances.

I mean, maybe the conversations would still happen if everybody subscribed all 10 of the instances’ communities. If everybody interested in, say, photography subbed to every photography community out there, you’d basically have the same effect as merging. But people won’t do that. Some will, but I bet most won’t.

That’s fine on an individual level, but unless everybody does it, you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — being spread too thin. If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect. And if the “merge” functionality just mirrors all content to all connected communities across instances, it would make popular ones more reliable.

But that should only be an option for communities, never forced. There’s strength in diversity too.

I have been using Linux a lot more than usual at work this year. Something like Fedora w/ gnome might be a little much for some users. However, I am still impressed with how seamless everything is with Linux Mint.