• 3 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 17th, 2021

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  • I think the future will be good for countries like Canada / Sweden / Russia because global warming will more or less only help them. A lot of land will become better for agriculture / more habitable. Of course they will probably have to deal with some sort of refugee crisis from the global south.

    I don’t know much about this but I don’t think that this is how global warming works ?

    I think this misunderstanding is why the phrase “climate change” is preferred because “global warming” makes it sound like everywhere will be a few degrees warmer which is not really the case.

    My limited understanding is that the average global temperature may be warmer, but that really just means the ocean surface will be warmer, which creates more severe weather patterns.

    The big problems with climate change seem to be quite nuanced, in a nutshell more severe and less predictable weather patterns. For example here in Western Australia maybe 20% of the state is arable land with predictable rainfall. Suppose next year there’s 50% less rainfall in that 20% of the state (it just rains somewhere else) - that’s a catastrophic problem. 50% of the productivity, 50% of the water flowing into dams for industrial and household use. Suppose the following year there’s 50% more rainfall than usual, falling on arable land where it hasn’t rained for a few years - it washes the dry topsoil away again destroying productivity.

    There was an episode about water scarcity on doomsday watch podcast - fascinating & terrifying. There’s a phrase that stuck with me - if climate change is a shark then water scarcity is the teeth.


  • You’re right in a way, but I think you’re applying a narrow definition of “opinion” when I think most people ITT are thinking about “behaviours”.

    Sure, it’s not great to exclude dissenting political opinions, the intolerance paradox being a notable exception. That said, I’m not here to discuss politics.

    Say for example that some users will do anything for fake internet points - post anything, say anything, there behaviour is guided by the pursuit of karma and building some kind of following. Other users will do anything for engagement, whatever it takes to get others to engage with them including trolling. I’m happy enough for these types of users to find more rewarding platforms elsewhere. Note that’s different to excluding them, it’s just being a part of a place that isn’t fertile ground for their fixations.







  • Redditors in general just aren’t that into lemmy. Most redditors come here expecting to find a 1 for 1 replacement pre-warmed with millions of users and brimming with reddit culture.

    Not having an algorithm to tell people what they want to see is a bigger impediment to attracting users than most people realise.

    Additionally, I think mods are reluctant to direct users to any other community as they will give up lordship of their own fiefdom. Sorry, I acknowledge that I have probably an unfairly dim view of mods. I’m sure some are amazing, but certainly many are self-obsessed power trippers. They act in their own interests to preserve control rather than acting in the interest of the community.



  • The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.

    I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.

    You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.

    That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.

    The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:

    • linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in !selfhosted@lemmy.world then you also post in !selfhosted@lemmy.ml. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
    • grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.


  • 2 things.

    Firstly, most will go back. With the enshittification of twitter in November mastodon experienced an influx of new users. It feels like for several weeks activity doubled, then it died down to about 30% of the increase and stayed there. So while most go back it was still great for Mastodon. Fosstodon users increased from 10k to 60k in a month.

    Secondly, it’s not a mutually exclusive binary thing. Reddit will always have some great niche communities. There’s nothing wrong with following those, but you can also continue to follow some lemmy communities too.

    Lemmy doesn’t need to become a reddit killer over night. I think for the fediverse in general there will be a few events like this each year, and if the fediverse get’s some exposure and increases in size, it just makes it more viable for the next round.


  • It’s not a binary decision, they’re not mutually exclusive.

    It’s like arguing about browsers. I use Firefox and I use Chrome every day.

    I’ve been using mastodon & reddit everyday, but while I’ve had a lemmy account for a long while but until now the community hasn’t been well aligned with my interest.

    If just a third of the current active users stick around I can see it becoming part of my daily scrolling.