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Comments
(Be forewarned that the segment immediately following this one is squicky.)
If not that, I dunno. Umm... maybe the system is wired such that the microwave works as the resistor in a voltage divider that controls the voltage to the disposer, with the oven's varying resistance or something.
(I'll keep posting if I come up with more of these.)
The two biggest Reddit-like alternatives currently are called Lemmy and Kbin (stylized as /kbin).
https://join-lemmy.org/
https://kbin.pub/
Lemmy is a lot bigger right now, though I think Kbin is a lot more recent.
Also, curiously I noticed that the main page for the Kbin project (the link I gave above) is currently available in both Engilsh and Polish. (For the record, the Lemmy project's site is avaliable in a large number of languages, including Polish.)
Anyhow, I don't currently use either of these, but for what it's worth, both of them use the ActivityPub protocol for federation, so they are to some extent cross-compatible with Mastodon. Indeed, I've seen kbin.social posts on Mastodon already.
GMH some of us have soul-crushing jobs that don't let us keep up with the latest internet drama so if you could include a mini-summary of whatever it is now, that'd be helpful.
???
Well, I won't lie, I like that the internet is sort of getting bigger, and I (oh goodness) kind of miss certain aspects of old Twitter moderation. But I don't think Twitter is any less popular than it used to be.
I'd go on these sites but I feel like they would be the left-wing version of gab/truth/whatever it is this week so it'd just be full of political pitfalls.
The exact reasons aren't too important to me, personally; I simply like open-source and decentralized platforms.
I'm not sure what this means, but the (still ongoing, for that matter) controversy with Twitter has definitely popularized Mastodon, and the "fediverse" more generally (but mostly Mastodon).
I poked around some search results trying to find but couldn't find user count trends. Regardless, the userbase has definitely seen some notable changes since Musk's takeover, driven by the poorer operation/management of the site and its features, as well as his political inclinations that frequently feature into his decisions regarding the site, including but not limited to inviting back a number of previously-banned wingnuts onto the platform. I've heard various stories of people stopping using Twitter, or even outright deleting their accounts. I've also heard stories of some people picking up Twitter, particularly folks with more right-leaning political views. I don't know which one's bigger.
And that's not to mention the business and revenue issues which I posted about on the thread about Twitter. It certainly has lost some luster.
And incidentally, Twitter has also screwed with their API. (Amusingly I didn't know anything about this API stuff personally. Word of all this comes from many other people complaining about these two sites being more difficult to use. I've actually just used both sites via a web browser, and on my PC, and that's it. And FYI I've used Reddit's "old" UI.)
As of right now, Twitter still doesn't yet have a comparably large direct competitor, so what with social media consolidation over the years (consolidation not necessarily in the business sense, but the "people go to the big platform where other people are" sense), it still has some too-big-to-leave value by way of simple inertia. Putting up with it out of some degree of necessity isn't the same kind of user mindset as wanting to use it, though.
Different instances (and other subcommunities) of Mastodon (and the fediverse, more generally) do vary in how politically inclined they are, though there are definitely some communities centered around topics that are of interest to people who'd be considered liberals/progressives (at least by U.S. standards), such as environmental issues (my personal wheelhouse) and LGBTQ issues. People have reported that they enjoy being able to talk about topics of interest to them, including some of these political topics, without having the frequent presence of trolls flaming and arguing, which is an issue I've both heard about and personally seen on Twitter, and which as I understand has gotten worse with Musk's intentional efforts to stoke various...illiberal views on things.
That said, for a stricter definition of "left", tankie types aren't that popular. Also, regardless of the topic, some (but not all) instances to have a rule asking people to put political content behind a content warning togglebox (a feature that Mastodon has had for a while now, but as far as I know, Twitter still lacks), as a general courtesy.
On the other hand, much of the fediverse is quite supportive of trans people and trans rights. This is perfectly fine for me, but considering that this is a known bugaboo of yours, well...
It's a repository of free coursebooks and stuff like that (in pdf). This time it's likely I won't download like anything that draws my fancy, since I did that many times in the past and haven't read like any of these and it's doubtful I will ever have to single-handedly rebuild (post-) industrial society off e-books on my miraculously surviving hard drive, but I wanted to share it with you guys on the off-chance you will find it useful.
The other day I learned that the probability of dying to a meteorite is believed to be about 1 in 250 000. The reason for the significantly high probability for something that hasn't happened is because of the low but significant probability that a meteorite ends up killing seven billion people.
Edit: Huh, I just realized the relevancy of that segue.
But all that asphalt that they tore off the roads to slow Vagner down... well, it won't just come back now, eh?
Meanwhile, TIL that if you look closely enough, houseflies have 5 white stripes on the back of their thorax (their middle body part), with a white one in the middle (since it's a symmetrical pattern, though it might be worn off on some individuals), so if you find a fly that has a black stripe in the middle, it might be a flesh fly rather than a housefly.
Basically this position comes from severely opposing socially liberal positions and believing that the West will be "punished" for these beliefs ("The Chinese military won't ask for your pronouns! ha ha ha ha!")...
Except it turns out most of the extremely smart people (like, for example, GMH) kind of do buy this stuff but also remain extremely smart enough to keep creating insanely useful weapons, useful battle strategies and (most important of all) strong diplomatic ties that prevent this sort of "If I can't have you nobody can!!!" war effort.
It's the quiet ones you gotta watch for.
Heh. It so happens that I read a few articles on what's the average opinion in your parts of the world, but that's a new take. Are these people, like, English language internet people, or something more IRL?
I have not been responsible for any "insanely useful weapons", "useful battle strategies", nor "strong diplomatic ties", heh. (And if I were, I probably wouldn't be authorized to tell y'all anyway. =P)
Russia is morally wrong to invade Ukraine, but morals only go so far in military conflicts.
Meanwhile, political power is a rather strange thing; we may speak of it like it's some sort of quantifiable concept, with the implication that it follows certain logical processes, but if anything, experience has taught me that there is, at least, a high degree of chaos involved in real-life outcomes of political who has or who gains/loses power. Those who appear "weak" may very well continue to hold power for much longer than others expect, while those who appear "strong" may very well crumble with little warning. Add in the fog of war and the uncertainty is even more pronounced.
Those who bet on particular political outcomes in such situations are gambling on things that make casino games look like predictable certainties in comparison. Anyone can come up with plausible explanations with 20/20 hindsight, and anyone can make plausible speculation, but no one actually knows how things are gonna play out.
Also, neither "the west" nor any rivals to it have a monopoly on good -- or bad -- ideas.
A. people don't care about gender at all and everyone is treated in a gender-neutral way
or
B. people do care about what gender others perceive them as, and devise a way to communicate it.
We've ended up with scenario B. This is really not that much of a surprise given that English has no good gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun -- you pick he/she, or use the very awkward and dehumanizing "it", or use the widely used but also imperfect 'singular "they" '.
Outside of the internet, even before trans rights became a part of broad social consciousness, we've had various people scattered throughout history to whom the gender binary didn't apply cleanly, and we've even had (on a pretty typical and normal basis) totally cisgender people who just happen to look androgynous.
On one hand, I feel that putting something like that down for myself draws too much attention to my own idea of what gender I am or present as, because I personally feel that that doesn't/shouldn't matter that much for myself. But, on the other hand, I can see how it'd be a generally useful thing for other people.
And put another way, I can see how some people could feel that a pronoun field on a profile is an odd and unnecessary novelty, but I also feel that it's a pretty harmless thing for anyone who doesn't particularly care for it. So the outrage over it is...at least as silly in the same way that this idea is "odd and unnecessary". It's a social change, sure, but I can't really find a good argument against it.
Lemmy has this weird thing where the flagship instance (lemmy.ml) is reportedly run by one or more of the same people who run a tankie instance called Lemmygrad, resulting in some combination of some people preferring to make their accounts and also start communities (i.e. "subreddits") on other instances and some other people opting to use an alternative called /kbin instead. Yes, I've mentioned /kbin before, though I called it "Kbin" at the time (it seems the main devs prefer "/kbin" or "kbin"), and yes, it does federate, so it's functionally like just another instance, albeit with a slightly different feature set.
FWIW I also found an instance with right-wing instance admin who seems to be one of the few people who posts there.
Anyhow I'm not on any of these instances I just mentioned; I poked around and found an instance with lots of neat science and nature stuff. Though I'm also subscribed to some communities on lemmy.ml, because it's the biggest instance and has the most stuff, and doesn't seem to have much presence of tankies being tankies, though that hasn't stopped people from debating whether the main admins (who I think may be the project devs as well) are trying to insidiously use a broad-based open-source social media project to boost tankie ideas. To be fair to its critics though, I haven't exactly spent much time poking around lemmy.ml either.
Anyway, so what the heck is all this like?
This whole realm, called the "threadiverse" ("thread" as in Reddit-style threaded conversations x "fediverse"), can be thought of in terms of Reddit features. Reddit is basically a crapton of subforums with individual labels, called "subreddits", all prefixed by a familiar /r/, like /r/anime for example, and anyone with an account there can access all the subforums.
Make an account on Lemmy or /kbin and you'll get access to a similar style of site, except that the "subreddits" are "communities" on Lemmy (prefixed with /c/) and "magazines" on /kbin (prefixed with /m/). But there will probably be fewer communities/magazines on that particular site. Instead, thanks to the magic of federation, you can also access communities/magazines on all the other Lemmy and /kbin sites. (Assuming they federate. Which they generally do, though there are some hiccups.)
So, you can make your account on lemmy.world but then post in threads on /c/visualnovels over at lemmy.comfysnug.space. You can also subscribe to it and so any posts from there will be added to your subscribed-stuff homepage.
So basically there are "subreddits" spread across many different instances, and you can interact with all (or most) of them with one account. (And if you can't, then you can just make an account elsewhere.)
There's currently a mix of general-interest Lemmy instances, which are usually larger, and Lemmy instances with more niche themes, which are usually smaller. Over on the /kbin side, it's a newer platform, so there's fewer instances and it's basically just kbin.social so far which is by far the biggest instance, though there are a handful of others at this point.
Right now I just have one Lemmy account but at some point I may make a /kbin account, depending on how things work.
Yeah I'm not taking your word for it either.
If I were to just comment on this, I'm mostly concerned with the pre-war efforts in terms of proper diplomacy or at the very least, giving people incentives in the right direction (not that I agree with that direction) rather than hoping your puppet oligarch just continues having power in X region.
Yeah I think I covered that in terms of "scientific advancement" and "pronouns" being able to coexist.
Noooooooooooooooo.
I don't know what a Lemmy is and I'm fine with stuff being that way (for now at least).