So if I dive forward from a very low height I can briefly fly?

I think the different Threadiverse options popping up show the demand for the Threadiverse, and that people are willing to put in that work.

I guess I'm patient. I see progress happening, even if slow. If the Lemmy/Threadiverse experience doesn't change much over the next 10 years then I'm not worried. I have a nice curated experience and find plenty of cool people to chat with (such as the present company), and am not in a rush to turn it into something different.

Finally the mystery of how y’all got beached as, has in fact been solved!

Ooh, oh no, I'm beached as! I'm beached as bro!

Damn, 2008! This youtube video is old enough to drink! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdVHZwI8pcA

Ah yes, that's familiar. I see it was published in 2014, which is probably around when I read it, so I feel justified in not remembering 😆

Ooh I remember liking The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, though I can't remember what it was about now 😅

I thought I'd try doing these posts on Wednesday for a while, Fridays are a bit quiet recently.

If you haven't already, please fill in the census survey! I'm a bit disappointed in the responses from LemmyNZ users and c/NZ subscribers, which have about 30% fewer responses than previous years 🙁

My favourite story of this is that ransomware virus that was taking out places like the NHS, and some security researcher noticed it kept pinging some domain that was a random bunch of characters.

He registered the domain, and suddenly the ransomware shut down, freeing all the places the ransomware had infected.

It turns out when researching a virus the environments commonly treat all domains as valid so they can capture the traffic and see what the virus is doing. To prevent this, the ransomware was designed to shut down if this clearly fake domain came back as valid (and I guess this was the release switch if the ransom was paid). That was it would shut down if in this kind of a sandboxed environment.

The story is here, written by the researcher so it's a bit technical. There were lots of news stories about it at the time too.

Yeah for sure there is some way to go on the experience. I'd like to think this will happen over time. Lemmy has come a long way since all the redditors (like me) flocked here in 2023. I hope it continues to get slowly better, hopefully it will tip the scales at some point so that it becomes a good experience for those that we want here.

I guess I am fine with slow steady growth rather than everyone wanting to jump over.

One thing I think is that you need to use Lemmy in a certain way. I remember reddit not clicking for me until Digg forced my hand, and that event likely irreparably changed the reddit crowd.

We probably have some way to go before we can solve the problem but somehow we need to teach people to aggressively block (people, communities, instances) that they don't want to see.

Or something I think is important, the ability and willingness to just stop replying when the conversation is no longer constructive.

Andre the Giant has been dead for over 30 years so I'm not sure he can throw as far as you're expecting.

Someone shared the coffee compass to help with brewing: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0057/6235/1219/files/Coffee-Compass.pdf-1024x1024.jpg

All I learnt is that I can't tell what my coffee tastes like 😅.

Hmm is that powdery or dull? I either need to extract more, or extract less.

I was only referring to the last 12 months. Lemmy lost some significant chunk in previous years, but that was expected after huge surges of people trying it out.

Lemm.ee shut down halfway through 2025 which is now more than 12 months ago.

I don't think you can say the fediverse is shrinking. The peak was after a surge of interest from Reddit and most people at the time were expecting to retain 10-20% if we were lucky. That surge has come and gone and now the Threadiverse is organically growing, IMO.

I just want to point out that Piefed has skyrocketed in users this year. When you look at users active (comment, vote, or post) in a given month, you're talking about 7k Piefed users vs 35k Lemmy users. Along with Mbin's 1k MAU, that makes 7k/43k or about 16% of active Threadiverse users are on Piefed.

I'm only saying this to point out how awesome Piefed has done at attracting and retaining users this past year, going up from 1700 to over 7000 in 12 months. Lemmy lost 2k MAU in that time, so overall the Threadiverse is growing 🙂

Hopefully an expert in NZ native and exotic trees comes along!

Nice shot!

When I search up Golden Chain trees, they have hanging "chains" that this one doesn't. Are there different varieties?

::: spoiler E.g. :::

Is it ok to have two bodies? Breaking one law but twice?

I normally do that, but I got Baldur's Gate I think within it's first year, and the thing that sold me is they put it DRM free on GOG super early. Normally you have to wait 15 years to get a AAA game on GOG, so I wanted to support that decision to put it there early.

Yes, to the complaint of many but that's how it currently works.

How do you hide from those 0.5%? Blocking someone stops you seeing them, it doesn't stop them seeing you?

I have this one recipe that calls for half a clove of garlic...