Precisely. I may not be safe with a gun, but why should I let the bad people in the world be the only one who is armed?

I think this is one of those things that are just inevitable. Just like with reddit, mods can act like dicks. The saving grace is you can just ignore those users, that whole instance even and move somewhere else. You can also block users and communities on your account. I don't think Lemmy itself is a solution to this issue.

I think the deal is, you either pay cash or you pay with your data. While it definitely does increase friction for new users (and even existing users as finances fluctuate), a donation based system might be worth it. Something like wikipedia, archive.org, and other NPOs do. Incentives might be possible too, creating goals for getting X amount of donations to fund a specific improvement. It increases interest by defining a product or improvement, and increases buy-in by giving the donor the sense that they're directly improving the site through their donation.

I think Beehaw and many other instances have golden hearts for their goal to start a stable, friendly community. However, like the article says, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, when an instance gets big enough, someone needs to be on watch to ensure things are running smoothly, someone needs to be working on updating, expanding, and improving the service. On top of the cost to run the service, it's unrealistic to expect it to be free. You can't expect the admins who have busted their ass to get this much done for free. Call it human nature or the ills of capitalism, but the fediverse can't run on community and goodwill alone. I saw another post a bit ago saying to expect to pay for internet services from now on. I think, at least in the realm of user-focused and FOSS-based stuff, that may be the paradigm. Donations or subscriptions should be expected, at least for some portion of users, to keep the lights on and compensate the folks keeping things moving.

That explains why the search page quotes a comment that doesn't exist on the post. That always confused me. It's insane how dependent on searching with "reddit" appended on the end of the search term I am. I have qualms as to how this'll bode for search engines if reddit loses interest or goes under.

yup, sunk cost fallacy I suppose.

The amount of horrible medical advice on tiktok is awful. It's bad in a few places, but working in healthcare, i've never had to deal with as much "please do not take x or do y to try and treat your disease" as I did when tiktok became popular. I've seen lots of things that promoting lying to your physician, or ignoring medical advice in favor of advice of someone who recommends some other improper or unsafe thing instead. It's insane.

What about it did you not like? Was there things you thought were bad decisions or was it just not your thing?

I guess I'm biased as someone who started on Skyrim, but that's my point of comparison for games anymore. Fallout 3 was awesome, but honestly when FO4 came out, going back to play FO3 was hard due to how clunky it was in comparison. I know FO4 fell flat with it's character decisions and voiced protagonist but it really didn't ruin the game like it did for lots of people.

Disclosure: I never finished the earlier TES games, because Skyrim coddled me I guess. lol

The funniest thing is seeing the rage from Star Citizen fanboys about all this. They keep saying "it'll be buggy and awful on release" like SC isn't already. I know with Bethesda, they'll fix it up and the modders will go wild with patches and add ins, delivering all the stuff Chris Roberts said they would. Meanwhile, I try and play Star Citizen and i've died or failed a mission due to glitches any time i've tried to play this past week.

People visit reddit for user generated content. If you remove all the memes, links, comments, and answers to all the things you google " X site:reddit.com" to find, it loses value.

"At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, "

lmao. Sounds familiar. I think you're right that Reddit is going to survive, but I think this is a hard enough blow that it's going to change the personality of the site. For one, the IPO dreams seem DOA currently, with the handling of this, the fairly toxic nature of some areas on the site, and drying up of VC in tech all seem to be bad news for any optimism for Reddit as a company. I imagine that this treatment is going to lead to migration of some communities, maybe smaller ones, leaving only the karma-farming, bot-ridden, main subs to be "the front page of the internet" anymore.

I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.

I'm trying to grow mine out, which is hard because it looks a bit messy. I have trouble finding a barber who can help shape it (it's curly, so you really gotta find a good one for a good result) without cutting it really short. Now the hard part is finding products and techniques to style it. I'm so used to typical men's hair routine of like 3 in 1 shampoo, so I've had to do a lot of research because I actually need to put effort into how I wash, dry, and style it.

Yeah, I got a bad taste of crazy tankie stuff on my first venture into Lemmy when I decided to check it out. Luckily I've not seen much extremist rhetoric once I joined. I do see where it's scaring off a lot of people from reddit, that said, I've seen lots of people promoting non-communist instances specifically, as well as the idea of federating/defederating as an antidote.

Honestly, same. I decided to start sorting by old, and i find a lot of fun in following the tone of the discussion.

I hope so. I miss the old days of forums and stuff. the Pre/peri web 2.0 era was when I first started exploring the web and while i probably have rose-tinted glasses, I feel there was far more community in those days, when you knew who was in the audience when you posted something.

Videos/mealtimevideos was a big thing for me. They kept me entertained while I ate lunch, lol.

I'm dangerously furry, though I keep on the down-low.

I've been practicing watercolor painting as a new hobby. I'm honestly surprised at how things are turning out as someone who really doesn't do many creative things. It's been fun. I'm mainly painting landscapes and simpler scenes at the moment.

I think a lot of it is depression and loss of hope and think "why would you bring a kid into this mess?". I feel there's a lot of personal aversion to children that might feed into this too where someone generalizes their dislike of children into the idea that having babies is bad.