Huh, just checked out the ranking on join-lemmy.org. The default setting is “random”, which might be why it’s not featured up top.

But what’s weird is that lemmy.world isn’t in the ranking at all.

If you sort by active, the top two are lemmynsfw.com, followed by lemmy.ml.

Issues that would be solved by time/gaining more users

• Not nearly enough people to cover all the niche interest communities that Reddit does. At Reddit you find an expert on almost any topic to help you with your problems and you’ll find information on pretty much anything. Lemmy isn’t there yet.
• Not nearly enough history. A lot of content is still good and informative after many years. Lemmy doesn’t have a library of old-but-still-relevant content to search.

Issues independent of user count

• Search sucks. Reddit’s search does too, but reddit is easily searchable via Google. Lemmy isn’t.
• Onboarding is difficult, because you have to choose an instance, which is hugely important, but a newcomer has no idea what makes/is a good community to join

Issues that get worse with more users (aka, the potentially deal-breaking issues)

• Lemmy scales terribly. Every larger instance needs to retain a copy of pretty much all other content out there, and each comment/like/delete/update/… needs to be propagated to every other major instance out there. Adding more instances thus increases complexity and cost instead of decreasing it. Running a major lemmy instance is already prohibitively expensive now, with just about 50k monthly active users. If Lemmy was to scale to Reddit numbers (1.1 billion monthly active users, roughly 22 000x the number of users), everything would just break down.
• Moderation work scales just as terribly. Not only does an admin need to make sure the communities on their instance are moderated, but they also need to moderate all other communities on all other instances.
• Related to the last point, there’s some legal issues as well if an admin doesn’t moderate all other instances. Since content is copied from other instances to your instance, illegal content (e.g. illegal pornography, copyrighted works, …) are also copied to your own server without your active participation. That makes it legally mandatory to moderate all other communities.
• Legal pitfalls in general. If lemmy becomes sizeable enough, all sorts of laws in regards to social media platforms will apply. That’s one thing if the social media platform is run by a huge corporation with a legal department, but it’s an entirely different story for a tiny group of non-profit idealists running the social media platform.

That’s where law is not justice.

I do agree with your sentiment, but if the law defines a driver as a human, which is usually the case, then by definition Tesla cannot be the driver.

It could even be that the passenger sitting in the driver’s seat of a robotaxi would be defined as the driver.

And sure, these laws need to be adapted before robotaxis should be allowed to hit the streets.

I haven’t read too much into the topic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was as much a marketing decision as well as a developer one.

Version numbering has no implications on development. Firefox released just as frequently before, just that they didn’t increase the major version that often.

Yeah, as soon as the question could be interpreted as leading, it will directly follow your lead.

I had a weird issue with Github the other day, and after Google and the documentation failed me, I asked ChatGPT as a last-ditch effort.

My issue was that some file that really can’t have an empty newline at the end had an empty newline at the end, no matter what I did to the files before committing. I figured, that something was adding a newline and ChatGPT confirmed that almost enthusiastically. It was so sure that Github did that and told me that it’s a frequent complaint.

Turns out, no, it doesn’t. All that happened is that I first committed the file with an empty newline by accident, and Github raw files has a caching mechanism that’s set to quite a long time. So all I had to do was to just wait for a bit.

Wasted about an hour of my time.

You aren’t wrong.

The problem with AI here is that it tends to prefer agreeing to you over being correct and it’s very likely that it teaches patterns and terminology to you that doesn’t exist.

For example, I just asked ChatGPT to explain a “backflip” in the context of agile development (I claimed I was an university student and that a teacher used that term in the context of moving tickets), and it came up with this:

If your teacher linked “backflip” to moving tickets in a predictable fashion, they might have been emphasizing:

The importance of minimizing rework or regressions.

Understanding why work items move backward (if they do) and making that visible in your process.

Managing workflow policies so that tickets don’t repeatedly “backflip” between stages, which can disrupt predictability.

How This Might Help You Move Tickets More Predictably: If “backflip” means work moving backward:

Track the Cause of Backflips: Identify why tickets are moving backward (incomplete acceptance criteria, insufficient definition of done, unclear requirements).

Improve Definition of Ready/Done: Tighten entry/exit criteria to reduce backflows.

Add Checkpoints: Build small validation steps earlier to catch issues sooner.

Visualize Flow: Use a Kanban board to visualize backward movement and analyze bottlenecks or quality gaps.

It just takes the nonsensical word, makes something up, and claims that it’s right.

I hated writing pointless essays about topics I don’t care about, and yet I still like to research and debate.

Why is Chrome 121 versions ahead of Android?

Depending on how exactly the laws are worded, they might even get away without paying fines. Many traffic codes define that only the driver (not the owner of the car) can be fined, and these robo taxis don’t have drivers.

First error to correct:

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information errors and deleting errors information.

Except that most of that is still in effect.

Especially poor people still spend 12+ hours a day working, and even for middle class people it’s quite common that both parents work 10+h a day.

Average work hours per year have gone up by ~10% since 1980.

And when it comes to the jobs: While we like to pat ourselves on our back about how creative our work has become, we are essentially still doing factory work, just on a desk with a computer instead of in the factory with a welding torch.

Most of the work that most of the people do is still the same mundane, formulaic toiling away.

Modern education is focussed on teaching kids to learn stuff they don’t care for at exactly the time it’s asked for. Same as at work. If I have to learn a new framework for a project, I have to learn it right now, no matter if I feel like it or not. My boss is not going to wait around until I naturally feel like learning what’s needed for the job.

That’s why it’s ok that we forget all but the basics the instant we graduate from school.

This is a nice idea, in theory, but once it touches reality, it falls apart, mainly for two reasons.

• Not everyone is high-IQ neurotypical with high intrinsic motivation.

As an extreme example, put someone with ADHD into a Montessori/Walddorf/Unschooling setup (three well-known systems that do pretty much exactly what you are demanding) and that kid will fail hard. That’s the reports you read of 10yo unschooled kids who never cared for learning to read and who are now having an incredibly hard time learning anything at all, because material for that age group expects the kids to be able to read.

• The most important thing to learn at school is not the subjects/material

Apart from the very basics (reading/writing/basic math), 95% of the content taught at school can be (and is) safely forgotten once you leave school. There are more than enough reports on the fact that adults fail most school tests if they have to repeat them a few years after leaving school.

And that’s ok, because what school really teaches you is how to efficiently learn material you don’t care about no matter if you have motivation for it right now or not.

That’s necessary to prepare the kids for higher education and work.

When I have to work on a new project with e.g. a new framework or some new stuff I don’t yet know, then my boss won’t wait around until I naturally accidentally find the interest to spend time learning the material. No, the project has a deadline in two weeks and until then I need to learn what’s necessary and do what needs to be done, no matter if I feel like it or not.

And that lession, which is much more important than the subjects you learn in school, is not taught at all by free-form student-driven learning systems like Montessori, Walddorf or Unschooling.

This is sadly it. If it gets niche enough, there’s no way around Reddit.

I completely replaced Reddit with Lemmy for political topics, for wasting time, for doom scrolling and so on. But when I need information about a niche topic (e.g. how to overclock the 15yo netbook I recently got), there’s just no way around Reddit.

That’s the difference between 50k monthly active users and 360mio weekly active users. There are dozens of subreddits that have more active users than all of Lemmy combined…

Sadly, the big exodus is still pending.

Or luckily, considering how badly Lemmy instances scale. If a few million users were to migrate over to Lemmy, probably the whole system would just collapse.

Mostly Lemmy here. I use it for my doomscrolling and distraction, and for that it’s imho much better than Reddit, since the content is much less fake (I hate all that AITA creative writing and similar crap) and the politics are better.

I do sometimes use Reddit for when I actually have questions about some deeper topic. Lemmy sadly doesn’t have the manpower and the decades of content to help me when I need to know how to overclock a specific 15 yo netbook or when I need help with some issue in a game or something. For that, there’s sadly hardly a way around Reddit. Some things can be (badly) covered by Stack Exchange, some things I can maybe find on DuckDuckGo between heaps of AI slop, or I could let ChatGPT lie to me by hallucinating a wrong answer. But in many cases there is sadly no way around Reddit.

I thought that Covid would have been enough of a trial run for that.

At least in my country it was that. You know, it was Covid, with the highest unemployment rate since quite a long time, and farmers ran nation-wide ads looking for workers. They increased the pay sometimes up to 2-3x. They promised housing in nice hotels. And still, nobody wanted to do the job and that year there was just no strawberries on the shelves.

The only way working as a farm hand makes sense is if:

• The workers have no decent other option
• Working on a farm is safer than working at home
• Money is worth a lot more where they are from, so that the meagre salary they make in the target country is worth multiple times of that back home, so that the €1000-1200 they make over here turn into the equivalent purchasing power of €4000-6000 back home.

Thanks for stealing copying the whole content so I don’t have to click the link!

I got banned for saying that poisoning an invasive species like cats isn’t any different than poisoning an invasive species like rats, except that cats are cute and fluffy and rats are not.

It was under a post about the Australian government putting up poison traps to combat the local cat population which is threatening local endangered wildlife.

Lemmy also doesn’t make that easy, since it’s not like e.g. Reddit or the phpBB forums of old, where everyone moderates on their own turf only, but each instance has to essentially moderate all other communities on all other instances too.

Nice claim you have there. Do you have anything to back that up?

If it’s so easy, it shouldn’t be hard for you to link a model like that.