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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it seems likely to me that humans as a species will survive through the various climate crises, but I think the question is - at what cost? A lot of the scientific research and tech developments that might help us cope with or reduce the impact of climate change seem pretty reliant on our global system of trade / supply chain, and COVID showed how fragile that system is. I worry that by the time it gets bad enough that everyone is on board with doing what we can to reduce our impact, it’ll be too late because the systems that could create those new options will not be capable of operating at the level we assume is normal today.


  • Again, I think there’s a certain crowd of internet users who are familiar with fun domain names and enjoy playing in that space. My example is particularly innocuous (a club of people who love stone megaliths in the UK). I also think the fun and playful names aren’t difficult to tell from phishing sites, but maybe I have a gut instinct developed from exposure to the folks who do use playful domains.

    My point is that thinking these quirky links look dangerous is specific to a certain social or generational group, and it wouldn’t hurt for them to keep an open mind about URLs/TLDs.

    (Adding an icon to remote fediverse instance links is a nice idea too.)










  • The note at the end about the new system working as a URL system for user profiles is interesting, because around the time the change was announced I saw some people theorizing that the change is rolling out because Discord wants to implement some kind of profile page. pure speculation, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do when the rollout is complete.

    on that note, someone I know got the pop-up to change their username about a day before I did, and they weren’t able to choose my username – and when I got the pop-up, it auto-suggested my previous username. so it seems there is a pre-reservation system that does a reasonable job of letting people with already-unique usernames keep those.



  • Respectfully, I think it’s somewhat naive to think that we the users can make Reddit listen to us. They are a company operating in a capitalist system and as the CEO said, they are going to prioritize profits until they are profitable, and once they are profitable, they are going to keep prioritizing profits. I’d be pretty surprised if users were able to make enough of a dent in profits in 17 days that they forced Reddit’s hand.


  • At least on Beehaw, the application process for an account seems a reasonable gate. Admittedly, I don’t know what sort of comment posting API Lemmy has, so maybe it is technically possible someone could ChatGPT an application and comments? But, what incentives are there? On Reddit, vote manipulation, getting people to click on scam links, getting karma to sell the bot account, etc. Lemmy is small enough that I’m not sure there’s any incentive right now.

    (I don’t think Reddit will get better which is why I’m here and not there.)


  • In my eyes - and I’m a 9+ year user - Reddit has shown that they do not care about their users or their users’ experiences on their platform and only want to exploit us for data and ads, and breaking my 3rd party app is the last straw. Assuming Alien Blue stops working for the last time on July 1st - and I’m pretty sure it will - I’ll be leaving permanently. I’ll be editing all my comments with a final message and deleting my account.

    It is sad to lose communities, though it was already happening slowly with bots showing up more and more. I think our experiences online are more meaningful than we might think, and I’ve been feeling a bit of grief at what’s been a good part of my life for so long ending.

    But, endings can lead to new beginnings and that’s what federation offers us, on Lemmy or Kbin. I think enough people will stick around here, and software will get updated, and kinks will get worked out, and if there’s ever another mass exodus once Reddit does something to drive off more casual users, we’ll have made a great place for them to land.






  • Re: an archive - if you have the hard drive space, there’s a ~2 TB torrent of PushShift’s Reddit backup from 2005 to 12/22, with Jan, Feb, and March 2023 up on Internet Archive.

    I haven’t looked too deeply for tooling to interface with the data yet (compressed json) but I expect it’s mostly focused on machine learning or large data analysis, rather than browsing and searching. Still, with so many 10+ year users doing the “overwrite and delete your comments” combo (which will be me come June 29/30), it comforts my data-hoarding soul to even have the potential to dig into the archive for anything I might want to reference in the future.