I am not a number.

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2025

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  • I definitely understand the aversion to algorithms because just look at what platforms like Facebook, Twitter or even Reddit these days do with them. In the wrong hands, it’s deceptive and dodgy as fuck.

    But I wouldn’t be opposed to an algorithm that you can tailor yourself. And I don’t mean Bluesky style ‘tailoring’, I mean give us a list of interests and categories to toggle that then have more weight in the feed. So for example, if you like metal, you would then see more metal related stuff in your feed and not have it downed out by Taylor Swift and Kanye West because upvotes.

    And something I picked up from Facebook (even though it doesn’t work for shit on Facebook because their algorithm is mentally handicapped) is being able to ‘favourite’ something. And by doing that, not just pinning it to the top of the list of communities but actually making it appear in your feed more whether the upvotes are a high amount or not.


  • It’s probably about how all of the right wing people and their alt right movements over the last decade have been a complete load of bullshit spread by liars and hypocrites. Because they’ve been crying and crying about ‘freedom’ all this time and now that people’s freedom is actually actively being violated, suddenly they don’t have the same kind of energy. They’ve been preaching ‘free speech’ but they’re silent when a protester gets arrested and threatened with deportation for speaking. Even the fucking conspiracy theory crowd took one look at Project 2025 and went “doesn’t look like anything to me.”

    So it’s probably just an observation that all of this madness over the last decade has been instigated by liars and supported and spread by liars. And that it’s always actually just been about hate all along. A lot of us knew that already but now it’s at the point where anyone denying it just looks willingly fucking stupid.


  • No sympathy here. If you ever thought in the first place that the right wing christian nationalists were really all about freedom, then you’re a dumb piece of shit and the only way that you’ll learn about how fire works is to get burnt by it. I’m not even exaggerating. These people didn’t trick everyone with some master plan, they were calling for the rights of entire groups of people to be stripped away and wanting to force their one religion onto everyone whether they like it or not all along, openly.

    If that is your definition of ‘freedom’, then you don’t even know what basic fucking words mean. And it’s no wonder you are so easily fooled by greasy fucking slimeballs that anyone with at least half a brain could see weren’t on the level from a mile away.

    I feel really bad for the people who have to share a country with these fucking clowns that are going to suffer too. But as far as these red hat mouth breathers go, I hope they suffer like never before. Hopefully they drop dead like flies too so that they don’t just vote for the same fucking people next time.




  • won’t recommend Lemmy to many of my friends or family because I know they will give up

    Yeah, when I first started out here, my experience was like this:

    • I went to the join Lemmy page, then clicked to show all servers. Then waited. And waited. Then I went to bed.

    • By the next morning, the list of servers had managed to load. I spotted one that was advertised as “recommended for users to join to reduce load on the Fediverse”, which seemed like a good idea after seeing how even the join page was battling to load.

    • Found out that the server I joined seemed to have all sorts of issues loading content. And was apparently de-federated from a bunch of instances that align with my interests. So search results were showing me little to nothing in regards to queer communities for example, only dead communities.

    • Signed up on world instead and encountered multiple posts that said they had comments but loaded nothing. Found out that there were no languages selected in my settings. So I selected ‘undefined’, scrolled down, selected ‘English’, then saved.

    • I was still missing a bunch of posts after that, so I went back to settings and saw that ‘undefined’ was deselected again. That’s when I realised that you have to ctrl click each language you choose or else it just deselects the previous language that you clicked on.

    • Finally success! 3 or 4 days later. And now I’m here.

    I would love to recommend Lemmy to the few people I know who use Reddit. But I can’t see any of them trying without just giving up and going back to the place where all you need to do is sign up and hey presto, content to look at and interact with.

    I have a feeling that even the process of choosing an instance would probably put them off. I could give advice but there’s only so much I could do or explain without being there in person helping them. If they have to read walls of text explaining how to get started, it would probably end there.

    I’m not sure what the solution is though, or if there even is one. It might just be a little bit like trying to recommend Linux to people who just want to be able to push a button and go. Which is the majority, based on what I’ve seen.

    Also just one last thing and something that has been discussed to death. There’s just not enough content here yet for the average person to see any reason to switch over from the place with all the content.

    And on that note, recommending this place to people that I know in real life would be too risky right now that they would see my account and figure out who I am. Because there isn’t a crowd of a million people to slip into and disappear here. And this isn’t Facebook. I don’t want people to know about the very personal things I sometimes say on anonymous social media.



  • In the '80s and '90s, everything these people didn’t like was ‘satanic’. Then that nonsense seemed to disappear for about a decade. Until those people returned with updated terminology that makes them look like ‘free speech’ warriors to all the kids and not the dogmatic psychos that they are.

    So since then we’ve gone from SJW to woke to now DEI. But it’s always been the same fucking people, or types of people, that told me that all the cartoons I watch and music I listen to was ‘evil’ and ‘satanic’ when I was a kid.

    I actually almost fell for the SJW thing myself back in the day. I was circling that drain. Until I opened my eyes and saw the company that I was in. Since then I’ve been borderline ‘SJW’ myself because fuck those people.


  • One thing at least is that when you search “Reddit alternatives”, most articles that I came across seemed to make out like Lemmy is the best option in terms of amount of users and not being advertised explicitly as a “free speech and censorship free platform”, which we all know really means “bigots are welcome here.” In fact when I was searching Reddit alternatives, it seemed to me that Lemmy is really the only option.


  • My respect for Chapell Roan’s persona/politics and her showmanship caused me to listen to her stuff less judgmentally

    This makes me think of another pop star that has crossed this boundary for me before - Pink. I don’t think I liked her music as much as I found myself liking this today but she definitely came across more as a rockstar doing pop than a pop star. So I had a respect for her and kinda enjoyed her songs if I ever heard them on the radio or wherever.

    The vibes are probably playing a big part for Chappell Roan to as far as I’m concerned but it also helps that she’s going for that old school sound, which kinda sets her apart musically too.




  • Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoFediverse@lemmy.worldCensorship
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    2 months ago

    can’t function in society where random individuals can freely reject their statements, so they need the internet to hide away from life.

    Show me where in real life are random individuals able to interrupt your conversations with friends and like-minded people without being told to fuck off or punched in the face? People like you keep peddling this idea that we’re all supposed to ‘meet in the middle’ at all times with bigots that think we don’t deserve human rights, or else we’re the bad ones. Fuck off, what does the ‘middle’ of respecting rights or not respecting rights even look like. And real life doesn’t fucking work like that anyway.

    I would not hang out with inbred supremacist ‘alpha’ fucking idiots even if you paid me. And I would not welcome them into my home or my social circles. You’re free to speak but that doesn’t mean that I have to fucking listen.



  • Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zonetolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldJumping Steps
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    2 months ago

    Honestly I’m gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you’re not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it’s Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you’re going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.

    Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn’t really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.

    And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it’s been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you’ll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.


  • shifted to the point where a double Sieg Heil at your president’s inauguration is within normal discourse

    Haha thank you. I’m not even American but to me it’s pretty shocking to find out that this place, world of all instances, is too ‘extreme’ for people. Maybe I really am a dirty radical but I think that if people who consider themselves democrats are still fucking clutching their pearls about the left wing being too left wing while Elon Musk does open nazi salutes and trans people get their rights and dignity stripped away, then it’s no wonder the USA is so fucked.

    You guys clearly need a new political party because your choices are overt right wingers, or spineless right wingers that like to pretend they represent the left.

    Edit: maybe the bad men will see the light if we all hold hands and sing kumbaya. I’m sure that all of the people who are already finding themselves victims to this will thank you for taking the high road and not scaring too many centrists.



  • They’re really not meaningless though. For one thing, they allow moderators and admins to more easily detect trolls and bad faith actors. And on platforms or with add-ons that allow better tracking of vote history, it allows the user to more efficiently moderate their own experience, should they so choose.

    Also, I think you’ve got to be kind of an asshole to not recognise that a little bit of validation from communities that you participate in is a nice thing to have and that downvotes can hurt to an extent, even if it’s not the same as getting physically slapped. And to be clear, I’m not pointing at you or anyone, I’m just riffing here. I haven’t even seen downvotes for a while now.

    So yeah, I’d say they’re meaningless in a video game sense. You’re not going to win any prizes with them. But there’s a reason they exist, plus no one is immune to the effects of positive or negative reinforcement.


  • We don’t need to reach 1M MAU, but having 100k would already be a nice improvement

    Definitely agreed with this. And less always (understandably) angry political posters, more escapists that want to chat about movies, games etc. It becomes like that snake eating itself because people that want a break from real life come here and see nothing but the same 24 news cycle as everywhere else. And then, speaking for myself, searching up certain niche communities and finding them either non-existent or with 3 posts from 1 and a half years ago.

    I’ve been thinking of porting a couple of my old review posts over here from my banned but not yet closed Reddit account. Just so that, for example, the next time someone visits the Ghibli community there’ll be 4 posts instead of 3.

    And the Sonic communities are pretty disappointing too, considering I’m always seeing it mentioned in the wild these days. Makes me think (or hope) that there’s a lot of people like me wishing there was more activity in these areas.

    Reddit is sadly still unbeaten in searching up a TV show that you enjoy and finding an entire community built around it. And those communities never took a lot of members. So it shouldn’t be impossible here.