I had something similar happen to me in r/republican. Pre-Trump, it actually wasn't a bad subreddit. You could have relatively civil discussions in there. I often used it to see and ask how Republicans/Conservatives thought about various things. I always tried to be respectful, understanding that that the wasn't "my sub." I flaired myself with a 'D' or something so it'd be obvious that I wasn't hiding and trolling. Had some OK discussions in there the few times I'd dare to chime in.

But it changed once Trump started running. I once was having a civil discussion with a user, trying to understand their take, and ended up linking to an article from a large, mainstream publication, to show what I was talking about.

I was banned with no comment. When I politely asked mods what I did wrong and if I could be unbanned if I promised to not do whatever I did again, I got the message: "Don't link liberal sources." And it wasn't a liberal source! Just something not from Fox or wherever. From then on, I could lurk, but I could never comment.

And the mods got crazier. I'd see that they'd remove comments and ban anyone, even Republicans, who spoke out against Trump. At that point, there was no reason to go there anymore.

This is impressive thus far. Keep up the good work!

For anyone who hasn't had any experience running a server of any kind, it can be a lot of work. I've run Minecraft servers for my friends, first on hosted services, and then out of my basement. For like 5-10 friends. There were times I was giving up my entire weekend to get the MC server updated, research, get plugins and mods working, speaking with support people, and attempting to fix it all when it broke. When we were using hosted solutions, we technically split the cost, but every month I still had to go around semi-begging for donations (we were a bunch of poor college students/new grads). When I started hosting out of my basement, I bought the computer to run it. It was inexpensive, but still money entirely out of my own pocket.

So I cannot imagine what it's like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.

This is just like that situation with the young Ralph Yarl in Kansas City, but worse. Because at least he survived, miraculously.

I'm fairly neutral when it comes to guns and the 2A. I personally don't like guns and I don't own any. I've fired a handgun all of one time and didn't like it. But I'm not out there trying to ban them all. I have many friends and family members who own guns.

It's funny; hardcore 2A supporters have always used the the the left or democrats or liberals or whoever, as a straw man or boogie man. That these groups are out there to "take yer guns." Yet it never happens.

But it's these people acting poorly with firearms (to say the least) who will be the cause of more restrictions. And these people tend to be hardcore 2A supporters. These people who think owning guns means you can shoot and kill with impunity. Because someone rang a doorbell or knocked on their door. Because someone pulled-in to their driveway momentarily to do a U-turn. Because someone accidentally tried to get into the wrong car.

Normal people, including responsible gunowners, aren't going to stand for this. This includes people like me who largely sidestep this "debate." The hardcore 2A crowd thinks that all gunowners are willing to sacrifice everything else at the alter of the 2A. And I don't think that's remotely true. Gun violence has gotten more and more ridiculous. It was bad enough (again, to say the least) that there are children are dying in schools. Just today I read an article about a shooting at a high school graduation in Richmond, Virginia. But now you can't even ring a neighbor's doorbell? You can't briefly back into a driveway? What's next? Can't use the sidewalk? Can't grill on your patio and make too much noise? People aren't going to want to live in fear like that in their own neighborhoods and homes.

On the other hand, we'll see. If Sandy Hook weren't enough to cause action, I don't know what is.

It's crazy to think that a perfectly normal website, devoted to healthcare access, needs a "Quick Exit" button, as if it's porn or some flash game website from the the 2000s. I understand why it's necessary, but it's just sad.

Of course, the more depressing fact is that this site and service exists at all, especially in the US. The supposed Land of the Free.

I'm glad this and services like the "Auntie Network" exist, but they shouldn't have to.

Nice to see Formula 1 on Lemmy! As long as I get my sessions and race day threads, I'll be happy.

I'm getting my 13yr badge in November. Idk. I don't think I'm deleting my account. I couldn't even muster up the willpower to delete my Twitter account that I've had since 2009, that I've barely used for the last several years.

So to delete my reddit account, that I use everyday -- except at least today and tomorrow; probably first time in several years, maybe even a decade -- feels wrong.

My goal, however, is to reduce my activity on reddit over time. Give up my remaining mod positions. Start unsubscribing from subreddits little by little. Maybe just use it for researching work related thing. So far, Beehaw/Lemmy and Tildes and Mastodon have been holding my attention pretty well. We'll see.

FF7 is a great game. One of my favorites. And for quite a long time, people say that it aged well.

I don't think that's true anymore. And probably hasn't been true for years.

But you know what's even better than the original? The FF7 Remake. I was somewhat ambivalent about it. Cautious, even. Because I knew it was going to be real-time active battles instead of the old traditional turn-based system. And I like the latter (because I'm bad at real time stuff). But SE did a fantastic job on the remake with the battle system. It's so much fun. I even think the updated story is great. I highly recommend it to anyone who didn't really like the original FF7.

It's interesting, too, to see how small the subreddits need to be to maintain that community feeling. I helped found a political subreddit 9yrs ago; a non-partisan US state news & discussion subreddit. Political communities tend to be pretty spicy for obvious reasons, but when we had like maybe less than 500 sub (so maybe like <100 actually active users), there was a nice sense of community, even though people of different political persuasions would argue and debate. I'd see people tend to have fairly civil discussions. They'd chit chat and joke around in less controversial threads. It wasn't always rainbow and unicorns of course, but for the most part, the active users played nicely together. We rarely had to bring out formal moderation tools. A simple "Hey, you two, chill out," was usually enough to settle things. And it was like that for a few years.

As the number of subscribers and active users increased over the years, that sense of community started getting away from us. There was a lot more dogpiling. A lot more incivility. A lot more of the typical rPolitics style low-effort comments. The older active users started dropping off. Reddit tends to lean left, so the left-leaning majority started drowning out the right-leaning users. And my state is solidly right-leaning these days. Not that our sub had to be representative of the state political demographics, of course.

Today, the sub is like under 7,000 users, which is still a smaller subreddit, relatively speaking, but any sense of community is long gone.

I'll admit, we -- and especially me as head mod for most of our existence -- could've done better to tamp down on that stuff. But I also think that that kinda thing is a natural part of growth of a community. That the sense of community tends to disappear. People can't individually recognize and emotionally connect with that many people. It's so easy, especially on the Internet, to simply say something mean-spirited to someone and metaphorically walk away. They may never see or interact with that person again. And if they do, do they really remember who they are?

Obviously my experience is just anecdotal. But it still makes me wonder how Lemmy (and similar sites) will deal with that. How can we maintain a sense of community, while also wanting to allow people in and grow communities?

I happened to look at my Discord profile today. I've been on Discord for almost exactly 7yrs. I'm in several tens of servers, mainly gaming-related. Some of these are just Discords for specific games, other are for guilds/clans that I'm in, and I'm "required" to be in them (like for Eve Online).

In addition, my main friends group uses Discord. My brother (also a gamer) and I use Discord to chit chat with each other. Since us two were on there already, I convinced our parents to join us in a family Discord. Was way better than the Android vs iOS SMS/MMS texts we were doing before, which were terrible for videos and photos. And I tried to get my family on Signal; only my mom got on.

It basically doesn't matter whether I like Matrix or Discord more (fwiw, I just created a Matrix account today today to see what it is). I and the communities I'm a part of, both IRL and/or online, are already on and invested in Discord. Like someone else said, Network Effect. I guess I could leave Discord and move to Matrix...but then I'm just sitting there by myself. Super useful for a communications platform.

I literally gasped out loud and yelled out "OMG!" when that happened, not realizing Lando was one of the first over the line. But then the motorsports gods (aka Max himself) made sure RB got that P1.

I loved Lando's cheeky, "Max ruins for everything for everyone," in response to the interviewer mentioning Lando almost getting P1. I don't understand how people don't like Lando; I think he's hilarious. Obviously him and Max are good friends, too.

Excellent day for McLaren!

As an American, I greatly dislike the later times when races are on this side of the world. I don't mind waking up like 6,7,8am or whatever to watch a session. Or even staying up very late til like 4am. Even on Fridays for FP1 and FP2.

Idk, I like getting F1 "out of the way" so to speak, then I can do whatever else I need to do for rest of the day.

Like right now, it's 12:30p for me. That's not terrible since it's lunch time. But FP2 is at like 4pm; I tend to take a nap around then. If I was still working from the office, I'd be leaving the office around then.

I'm ready to be bored!

Excited to see you guys on the Lemmyverse! The subreddit was always one of those places I could get lost in for hours. Now I can do it here!

Huh I hadn't heard about Stack Overflow's protest. Found these articles:

"Stack Overflow strives to protect community content from AI firms, striking mods say “re-enable the data dumps”"

"Stack Overflow Moderators Stop Work in Protest of Lax AI-Generated Content Guidelines"

In case there's a paywall.

Some of our leaders in the state love talking about small government and "governmental overreach." Wouldn't allowing counties and St. Louis the ability to regulate guns (not ban them) at that level be an exercise in small government and government-closest-to-the-people?

I know, I know. I'm thinking too logically.

Who would replace him? Yuki?

I know a lot of people are wishing for DR, but...is that really realistic?

Breath of the Wild probably tops my list, largely for the same reason as others. But in the particular, it's the emptiness. I get that it's part of the story, but I still hate the emptiness of it. What good is an open world if it's largely devoid of content and interaction? That criticism probably encompasses many open world games. Subsquently. I don't play a whole lot of them.

Path of Exile is another. While I enjoyed Diablo 1, 2, and 3, any maybe will eventually get Diablo 4, I've never been a hardcore player of any entries in the series. I think what annoys me the most with PoE is that it seems like you can't have an organic experience in that game. Whenever I asked how I should be speccing out my character or even just some general advice, I just got the answer -- from multiple people -- "Oh just find a build guide online." OK...but I don't know any of the builds. Or anything about the game. So what am I supposed to do, just sit there and research build guides, reading about things I don't even understand, before I even really get into the game? When I said I'd just wing it for a bit like I do in every other game, I kept hearing, "Oh you'll have a bad time then..." OK well then forget it. I just won't play. I'm really not a fan of min-maxing. Also, the trade system and lack of actual currency sounded horrendous to me. There's a reason we have currency in real life.

Idk. Checo is still 2nd in the WDC. If Checo was somewhere around like 10th in the WDC, I could possibly see it. Alonso in 3rd isn't far behind Perez, but AM seems to be in a slump of sorts at the moment. And Perez still managed a great result last week.

Even in the Constructors, RB is in no danger. RB has over double the points than 2nd place Mercedes.

Not sure if it's worth RB rocking the boat at the moment.

Hi all. Another refugee from reddit that just joined today. Thanks for letting me in!

I haven't given up entirely on reddit, but I'm getting pretty darn close. Been a redditor for nearly 13yrs now. I've also been on Tildes for 4yrs now. I've tried various reddit-likes over the years including Imzy and Voat (before it turned into a raging cesspool).

Anyway, let's see how this fediverse stuff goes. Not sure I entirely understand how federated services work, but excited to find out.

I stopped paying on nearly all my federally-backed loans like 6yrs ago? In that time, I've financed a car at a great interest rate, and I've been able to open credit cards with no issues. My private loans and one federal loan are paid on time all the time, along with car loan, and credit cards.

Of course, the big one would be a mortgage loan. Idk how my defaults would affect trying to apply for a mortgage.