Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.

As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?

As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.

I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?

The problem really is that lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it’s entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.

If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it’s a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.

I’ve been reading that there are ways to roll your own version of some of the old 3rd party apps using your own API key. I might look into it, if only so I am not relegated to using the shit web interface when I do need to check a few things on reddit. I refuse to install their official app though.

Yeah if Lemmy ever hits whatever saturation point is needed that niche communities are more relevant my participation will increase. As it is I’m honestly having to visit reddit occasionally to get answers from those niche type communities because they are simply non-existent here. There is nowhere but reddit to interact with these groups, as much as I hate that.

Every good engineer I have ever worked with googles things. To me it’s actually a red flag if someone doesn’t Google stuff. That tells me they think they know everything, or that they would rather punt than learn. I think googling is a critical job skill for IT.

I was never a direct manager, but I’ve been in on the hiring process for many candidates. Great advice, top to bottom.

When we interviewed we also liked to hear people say they’d Google it. It seems stupid but I want someone with the initiative to find the solution to a problem they’ve never seen.

Also the thing about ownership is key, and for us was always an indicator of someone who might want to move up later. Help desk folks who want to move up do everything they can feasibly do and offer their take on what they think the next level needs to do before escalating. If it truly needs to be handed off then it’s because of permissions. But the best help desk people try to hang on to the ticket as long as they can so they can provide the most consistency to the end user.

The argument works exactly the same the other way. Your rationale is based on your own preferences.

In a vacuum both tobacco and alcohol are destructive vices with no real discernible objective “benefits” to larger society. The argument against alcohol is exactly the same as the one against tobacco products. They harm the user and potentially those around them.

I’m not saying that tobacco should be further regulated while alcohol is not. But I am saying that the rationale for alcohol regulation is ultimately based on a desire to limit destructive behavior, which is the same rationale for limits on tobacco. You cannot effectively argue for deregulation of tobacco while arguing for increased regulation of alcohol. They are two sides of the same coin.

But… It’s still not bad that those smoking regulations are being put in place.

It weakens the argument for additional alcohol regulation when you keep insisting that the regulations being put on another similar vice are pointless.

That is threadbare justification for deregulation of something we know has basically entirely negative effects and absolutely is something that kids have historically done.

Kids’ habits are fickle and unpredictable. Removing barriers to destructive behavior simply because they don’t do that behavior as often anymore (the current regulations seem to work??) makes no sense.

I’m hesitant to spin valid concerns about alcohol into de-vilification of smoking. They are both vices, both unhealthy, both dangerous to the user and those around them for different reasons.

So yeah, it’s valid to say we ignore the dangers of alcohol. But also yes, we should “think of the children” when it comes to tobacco.

Why smoking remains so prevalent. I’m sure it’s not a majority that smokes, but it is massively more common anywhere I’ve been in Europe than here in the US. I live in a fairly large city and I will go many days in a row without seeing a single person smoking.

I just don’t really get it. It’s gross, it smells, it ruins your teeth and your lungs, and it’s expensive. Why do it?

We don’t know. But they did literally say this in interviews, that the story changed because someone guessed it. Like, how transparent can you be about having no vision for your show.

One thing I don’t like about the approach of blocking things is that the frontpage of reddit still allowed some level of discovery. If something in a niche community got hot enough it would break into my feed even though I didn’t subscribe to that community. It was a cool way to expand my content on an occasional basis.

If I’m going to only view my subscribed list on lemmy then I have to also manually go out and intentionally discover new communities. That’s hard, because some of my favorite small reddit communities were ones I never would have thought to search for.

Ah is the directors cut good? I think I own it someplace but have never watched it.

This might be controversial, but for me it was Watchmen.

I was really into the graphic novel when the movie was announced. They dropped this trailer with Smashing Pumpkins “The beginning is the End is the Beginning” playing over it and it was so good. Perfectly captured what I felt the tone of the graphic novel was. Gritty, forlorn, dark, contemplative.

https://youtu.be/wdiHDzT6YbQ?si=K6WoxVts0ZGzSb28

I must have watched that trailer 100 times before the movie came out. Then I saw the movie and it was weirdly campy and totally the opposite of the feel the trailer gave in a lot of places. Which in turn was very different from the feel I got from the graphic novel. I was so disappointed. I’ve never gone back to rewatch it, and I probably should because I think the consensus was that it’s a pretty good movie and being more than a decade removed from reading the book might help me appreciate the movie on its own merit a bit more.

Meanwhile I’ve bought a few and they are all trash.

I can’t charge my phone while using them. They cut in and out. I hate them.

Fascinating. I’ll add a slight addition of info that prickly pears are actually present in the Midwestern and eastern parts of the US. Saw them growing in the wild at the Indiana Dunes national park last year. Very weird to see cacti that far north, but there they were.

Never knew the Spanish name for them!