Yes, I recall the content of reddit being much better around the same time you describe. There was a vast amount of actual original content produced directly by the users there at the time, and the quality of discussion was very good.

Over time as more people joined it, it seemed to become more and more of a sort of parody of itself, sort of like when you make a friend and introduce them to your group of friends, and they begin to use an inside joke that existed before they were there. Sometimes it’s still funny, but it is an odd feeling that when this new friend tells the joke, you can tell they don’t exactly understand why it’s funny themselves.

Reddit to me felt like this to the nth degree when I left. I suppose it really is a result of some kind of “herd” behavior; people just acting a specific way or saying specific things because they saw other people doing or saying the same things, but to the point it no longer goes any deeper than that and becomes bereft of any real meaning or deeper thought or variety.

Whenever I see an argument made in good faith, there’s frequently contrary responses that delve into the actual issues and discuss some of the nuance around them.

I am in agreement, I have found this to be the most refreshing part of the platform. Many more people on Lemmy as compared to reddit seem much less likely to take every single thing at face value only in my experience. I have had some extremely interesting and informative conversations here in which some very good points were brought up because people were more interested in discussing the topic instead of other users opinions of the topic.

This is a long reply, but understand that I don’t intend a mean tone here, I am just speaking my honest thoughts in response to your question.

When I was on reddit I wasn’t exposed to so many people with extreme absolutist views

You have entered a place with many groups of people with many views, and you are paying attention to the loudest ones. I can understand that can be upsetting to someone if they haven’t spent a lot of time outside of reddit. Surely on Twitter you would have seen more of this kind of thing, but it really depends on what and who you pay attention to. In my case, people always talked about how volatile Twitter was, but that was never my experience, because I was on it strictly to follow various artists. I just ignored everything else, or otherwise often just didn’t bother myself with other people’s thoughts on there.

who will stop at nothing to maintain the echo chamber.

Lemmy, functionally, is a collection of echo chambers, and chambers of many other kinds depending on how you leverage it. Some - often the loudest - do devoutly believe in the things they believe in and will talk about it all the time.

Reddit was/is arguably a single large echo chamber, but you may have not noticed this because that chamber aligned with your personal thoughts and opinions.

What you are describing sounds more like someone who has left an echo chamber with a set of strong ideals and entered a place with many multiple strong ideals rather than someone who has entered one, as your chief complaint sounds like you don’t enjoy that there are multiple groups of people who believe in different things than you as strongly as you believe in what you do.

Very few people here are able to make concessions.

What concessions do you want, or think are necessary? You have the options of blocking the communities or people you disagree with, or creating an account on an instance which defederates the instance/s you primarily disagree with and/or has rules for its communities that you identify with. You can also install an extension and filter stuff based on keywords:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/471718-lemmy-post-keyword-filter

If what you want instead is simply for most other people to believe in what you believe then unfortunately I just don’t think that’s a realistic expectation to have for the international public.

I just feel like every time I get on here I go away angrier.

Well, you can try the above things to ignore the things that make you angry, otherwise I spent my first year on Lemmy working on tolerating and contending with the thoughts of people other than me instead - of course I have blocked some communities and some people as I agree some are more trouble for me than I find worth in, but generally speaking I think forcing myself to learn to control my own feelings when I see a complete stranger say something I personally disagree with has made me a more patient and better rounded person.

Personally, if someone says something I disagree with, that is just how the world is, and I know this is the experience of every person on the planet to some degree, so I have no expectation that my thoughts and feelings are special to anyone else.

It is just is not possible for every single person to be in agreement on every single thing, so it is useless for me to be mad about other people’s thoughts. Sometimes, I think it is useful however, to express your reasoning to other people, even if some of them hate you for it and even if you feel it’s at your own expense because otherwise how would anything work socially between anyone in the world. But even at that, I don’t think I ever feel the obligation to.

I have learned that for my peace of mind, there is a line to walk such that I never feel my opinions or feelings are innately righteous, and that they are not pointless either. I find believing this about other people’s thoughts and feelings as well helps me to meditate on why people think and feel the things they do; to reach an understanding of those things even if I disagree with them.

We won’t attract new users if we’re like this

I have a contention with this for a couple reasons.

I think that if the objective of Lemmy as a platform were user count, it would be a business instead of software, and I am glad it is not a business. That is what attracted me to it, and I am not too concerned if other people aren’t. Lemmy probably will never attract a lot of people like normal social media, because it isn’t a business and has no marketing as a result. In some ways I think Lemmy could even be made worse by having a population like reddit or twitter.

The idea of “we” is unclear here compared to traditional social media. Do you mean “we” the users on the instance, “we” as in all users on all Lemmy instances, “we” all users on all activitypub based social media platforms?

Depending on what you mean, “we” could both care and not care about attracting more users, and want to or not want to work toward that, at the same time, because it depends on what and who you actually mean.

You’re posting to a community in Lemmy.ml so I have some guesses about what you might mean, but Lemmy.ml is not Lemmy, and many users on it do not hold ideals similar to reddit users in the slightest. Remember, “Lemmy” is just the software.

So the question “is Lemmy worse than Reddit/Twitter” is like saying “Is Firefox worse than Facebook”, though I know this is not what you meant.

My answer to your actual question as a result is Yes and No, at the same time, because it depends on which instance you are on, which instance you are looking at, if you leverage the blocking and filtering available to you, and your ability to contend with people who are different than you.

Oh kerosene! How many what with without it? All of the and drenching in outside of it is are not bones. In experience did not to remove feathering over all did it.

Can any with chicken, the brines my hand it wasn’t, but for wasn’t did for certain.

It depends. Some of it is more readily available in my mind than other stuff. For example, someone can bring up Christmas specials and I can think back and vaguely recall stuff like the Garfield Christmas special and other things I would watch seasonally as a child.

Other stuff is a lot deeper, and usually it is a lot harder to access because there is no straightforward path to remembering it like a holiday, because it’s the things I experienced in between things like holidays.

An example I can think of of this is that I recently went through a listing of 90’s television shows which were shown on the YTV network (In Canada), and I came across a couple names which vaguely rang bells; but the exciting thing was that I couldn’t remember why they rang bells. One of the listings in this case it was for a show called “Stickn’ Around”.

Went and searched for it, found this intro sequence and suddenly unlocked the memory that I watched this show almost every day for most of my childhood, but I had forgotten because there was no correlating event that let me remember this.

(Forgive the youtube link, can’t find it on invidious right now).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etJLl415RuY

Makes me wonder what other lost memories I have, and how the hell I could possibly go about accessing them, because this was just by chance.

I highly recommend everyone go look up listings from the TV stations they watched in their childhood, you might just find something you forgot ever existed until now.

I went one year and six months. It was bad. I’m wishing you the best.

Yea Costco has great stuff, the kirkland liquor prices and quality are hard to beat too.

A user on Lemmy a while back (can’t recall their name) had said that when they get fast food fries, they don’t salt the fries, they salt the ketchup.

I will confirm that this is a fantastic idea because it makes every fry taste equally salted, and gives the salt a way to actually adhere to the fries instead of just ending up in the bottom of the container or on your table.

My own recommendation where I can’t believe more people don’t do it is buying no name/store brand stuff when getting groceries and supplies. I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t do this because marketing has pushed them into thinking these are “inferior” or are not as good, but 7 times out of 10 the no name/store brand stuff is equal in quality or better while also being something like 20-40 percent cheaper. Just because something is different than the name brand stuff does not make it worse, just different. Like you DONT need a more expensive type of aluminum foil for example, the cheapest aluminum foil is identical in quality.

This

Hell yea, glad you got it. I have my third interview at a software company later today, here’s hoping.

Networking/security is some really neat stuff, I have dabbled as I used to work doing systems stuff, but moved to robotics automations after that. See if you can get your new employer interested in paying a bit for you to get certs at some point (often if you bring it up that you want some cert, they might be interested in putting some percentage of money towards helping you get it), Network+ and those other Cisco certs are pretty sought after as I understand it and could definitely help progress your career.

Also welcome to the industry!

I think it may depend on where you are. Back when Whatsapp went belly up, myself, my entire family, and every other person I know IRL switched over to signal within a week, so I think it may be more popular than you expect, though still not as popular as Telegram as you noted.

One is one thing and the other is another thing.

So you said the government would buy it, so I pointed out that the government already has a facial picture of you. Your counterpoint is that it doesn’t have to be the government, in which case, why did you mention it.

I said “government” would be a likely purchaser, not “the” government because I am not talking about any one government. I mentioned it to reinforce the point that any government is a potential buyer for the data, not just the government that has your ID on file, which is counter point to the point you tried to make that “the government already has a facial picture of you” referring to ID when this is not the case for all governments.

As a hypothetical example, I have never been to, or interacted with the government of South Africa. I doubt they have a picture of me. They could likely buy the data if they wanted to, which would give them a picture of me in the hypothetical scenario. They would not otherwise have access to a photo of me. I don’t know what is hard to follow about that.

And then you said it’s because it would have meta data on your location, which is weird considering you would have bought tickets with your name on them through payment methods tied to your name.

Yea, and my credit card which I buy the ticket with over the internet does not have a picture of my face with a timestamp verifiably showing that I was at the location, what I was wearing, who I may be with, etc.

You also understand that you can buy things with this neat thing called “Cash” right? Cash is really neat because it’s a payment method that doesn’t have your name on it.

This is my direct counter point to your statement “you would have bought tickets with your name on them through payment methods tied to your name”. Unless you want to deny the existence of physical money, you are plainly wrong here for reasons that are ibid.

You also know that tickets don’t typically have your name printed on them right?

https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/24230/22003478_1.jpg?v=8D2410658E1E630

You can go buy a ticket and examine it as close as you like. It is uncommon for them to have your name one them unless they are for some event you have been explicitly invited to, or you ordered them in advance for pick up or through some third party service.

Probably because the public is free to buy tickets for shows AT the location the event is held? And probably because you don’t have to show ID to buy such tickets unless you’re purchasing liquor with it or seeing an event rated for adults etc? Do they ask for your ID when you go to the ticket office at the movie theater? Cool, they don’t at ticket offices at stadiums either, so if someone has been asking you for that when you buy tickets, you should probably check if your identity was stolen because that’s not a requirement to get a ticket!

It’s almost like you could buy a ticket without your name printed on it using a method of payment which also doesn’t have your name printed on it. What a wild idea! It’s almost as if this is how this universally worked before people had debit/credit cards.

Oh and if it’s a cashless location, there’s another really cool thing you can do called “buying a gift card with cash” which gives you a cashless payment method without giving your name and face away which you can also use to purchase tickets as well as food and drink.

Didn’t realize a picture of my face was on my football ticket as well.

Doesn’t need to be your government who’s buying. The picture on your license also doesn’t come with meta data about your whereabouts when you decide to go to something as simple as a sporting event.

Biometric data of individuals faces. Biggest buyer for that market would be law enforcement/government I’d expect.

To database and sell your biometric data at the expense of privacy under the guise of convenience. This is contemporary business 101. First either steal data or lie through a grinning face to acquire data, then sell the data.

I’m not so sure about that. Windows despite its ads is still generally usable or at least readable, but adblockers affect almost every website, and in a much more extreme way, without which renders some websites virtually unusable. As someone else said, installing another browser is also far easier than taking backups, installing an entirely new OS, implementing your backups, and learning an entire new OS which may not readily support the software you have licensed from windows for most users.

Users care a lot about convenience. I expect that they weigh installing and learning linux etc as less convenient than the ads in windows which is why they would not switch, but I expect when it comes to this case, they would weigh installing a different browser with adblock as much more convenient than using the internet with ads on every single website.

Wow good job Spain.

I guess this works because email doesn’t exist.

I guess this works because file sharing applications and websites don’t exist.

I guess this works because VPN’s free and paid don’t exist.

I guess this works because Tor, i2p, Freenet, and Yggdrasil don’t exist.

I guess this works because torrenting doesn’t exist.

I guess this works because black markets don’t exist.

I guess this works because chat applications don’t exist.

To be a fly on the wall of these government meetings where they talk about this shit would surely be the funniest fucking thing in the world.

(Just hopefully not Nord VPN)