• 10 Posts
  • 125 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2025

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  • Lemmy is ephemeral in part because the redditlike format is designed to be ephemeral. You have a topic, you discuss it for a few days, then it drops off the front page never to be seen again.

    Then you layer on all the issues listed in the OP and they combine to make something very impermanent indeed. Server flakiness in particular is something I don’t see ever going away. It’s part and parcel of the fediverse. The folks hosting the server aren’t a big company, they’re a small group of volunteers running off donations. They don’t have the means to guarantee five nines of uptime in the same way a big corporation can.




  • I know I’ve said this multiple times but a fanatic is someone who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject, and there are a lot of fanatics here. To me, there is inherent value in attempting to create a neutral space where people who otherwise may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum can talk about shared interests.

    To drag out my tired example, say Alice is a gun nut and Bob wants to seize the means of production. But both of them like vintage computers. They talk on the vintage computers community about their mutual love of vintage computers, and they realize that the “other side” is also a human being with hobbies and interests and thoughts and feelings. Alice may not put on the hammer and sickle and bob might not go out and buy an AR-15, but they both realize that the other isn’t a monster. Surely there’s value in that.


  • The concept of twitter was never appealing to me, so I naturally won’t like platforms that ape it. I joined Reddit at the time because the Minecraft sub seemed like it was getting more attention from Mojang vs the forums. I stayed because the entire IT industry is on Reddit. I left because of the API nonsense in 2023.

    Honestly the two big problems I see with the fediverse are the political stridency of the userbase and the friction of picking an instance when you don’t know what that even means. The first problem, as I’ve said elsewhere, is somewhat a result of fedi users self selecting (again I include myself in here) and might resolve on its own if mainstream platforms enshittify to the point that even the normies can’t take it anymore and we figure out a way to onboard people better. These problems are probably why I don’t try other fedi platforms.

    But I’m rambling again. I haven’t slept well in days.






  • Perhaps related, but when communicating over the radio (including via digital printing modes like RTTY) you have to declare that you’re done transmitting and yield the frequency to the other party. This is because your signal may fade, appearing to the other person like you stopped transmitting. This is the purpose of the ubiquitous “over” seen in movies and TV, though in ham circles you use the more casual “go ahead” or “back to you”.

    I imagine a period sends the same message, but because you don’t have to manage turn-taking with texts the way you do on the radio the period can be seen as redundant because they already know you’re done speaking. So sending a period may seem like you’re emphasizing the finality of your message.

    In radio, you signal the end of a contact (QSO) with “out”, but again, in ham circles you just say “73”.

    Is any of this relevant? I have no idea I’ve been up since 1 AM this morning.