The ones with the rabbits are pretty messed up as well!

While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):

I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.

I trawled unintentionally.

Your body, as a warm-blooded animal, tries to keep a constant temperature (around 98°F or 37°C). Thing is, the body is constantly producing more heat (your metabolism at work…) and needs to get rid of the excess. If the air around you is at the same temperature as you are, it is very hard for heat exchange to take place (for you to get cooler as the air gets hotter) and, thus, you overheat a bit and feel warm.

This is why wind makes you feel cooler: it moves the heated air away from your body and brings in new, cooler air, making the exchange more efficient. Evaporation takes heat away as well, hence we sweat to col ourselves down.

IMO, this seems exactly what the fediverse needs to thrive. The whole “choose a server” thing is a big disincentive to adoption by most people.

This is actually a thing. When learning calligraphy, it was one of the exercises we did. If you have good enough control of your hand and pen, then all strokes should be the same length, slanted the same way, and separated by the same spacing. When you manage this apparent “unreadable” thing, it means you nailed it!

The example below comes from this site (not mine)

Sadly, this was a thing even before the web, let alone social media. There’s always been people for whom the vacations didn’t even “happen” unless they get to go on incessantly about them when they come back, ideally subjecting you to two hours of photos that mean very little to you. They derive little enjoyment from actually being there, they take it from showing it others…

For some people life is not worth living without external validation. Sad.

A rifle scope that can see through walls.

The last paragraph is interesting and I think sums up what’s wrong with the whole zeitgeist of these tech and media companies: it can be good (and, I argue, is actually better) without being “worth billions”. This feeling that sustainability isn’t enough, decent profit isn’t enough, it has to be worth the GDP of a small country is awful, and it is always done at the expense of the users, who for the most part complacently don’t give a fuck. Unbound greed really is an ugly thing to see…

Edit: fixing autocorrect…

Joining would be neat but… how?

That you can is beside the point. You shouldn’t need to. If the first thing I need to think about after installing it is “well, let’s see what garbage is in here that I need to turn off”, then any trust I would have for it has already gone out the window. Especially important for a browser where that is kind of the main differentiating aspect.

Edit: correcting autocorrect…

This is like saying “you can write ransomeware in C++” and implying it is the language’s fault, somehow. ChatGPT is a tool, it does what the user asks it too (or it should, anyway). It has no agency nor morals. The argument that it makes it easier to write ransomware is silly as well. From high level languages to libraries and IDEs, we’ve always been developing tools to make programming easier! This is just the latest iteration.

You, you can add that list. Motherfuckers will let you type a password as long as you wish, only to internally truncate it. Was driving me crazy until I tried to log in on the mobile app, where it does prevent you to type more characters…

So much this! I am old, I guess, but I was on Usenet for years before the web was even invented. When I became aware of the fediverse, I got serious Usenet vibes. A decentralized model, several servers, you access one and get what it sends you, but it syncs with all other servers. You‘re getting everything in the entire Usenet and what you post gets everywhere too… we’ve come full circle, I think, even if we now use ActivePub instead of NNTP… a shame people nowadays know of it as “that piracy thing” instead of what it once was (and was designed to be).

For better or for worse (obligatory remark on how in a federated model there should be no “main” or “flagship” instance) that would probably be lemmy.world on the sheer number of users alone?

Indeed. Apple does give you control over notifications, in their different forms, so just turn them off.

Having said this I have the app installed since forever and notifications turned on (useful for order status, shipping notifications etc) and never got a self-promoting notification like that. I wonder if it is a regional thing (I’m in Europe).

Huge democratic deficit and do they really follow European customs and values?

The last thing I need in my life is to have my privacy debased by another data collection app disguising itself as social media, and even less to participate in another echo chamber shitshow like Facebook or Twitter. Hard pass…

I think you touched on the main aspects where things are different. Although, yes, there are many cultural differences across Europe as well (and I see that as a strength) they don’t run as deep. I would add my worry about their treatment of the Kurd minority. To be fair, however, things do change over the years, and there are a couple more countries that have turned for the worse, IMO.

I guess someone should come up with an idea for config.sys next!