we allowed 196 to be here

These aren't mods talking, it's admins. They manage and pay for the server 196 is hosted on, that's a pretty big endeavor

Moderates: [email protected]

Key point: they get money for implementing features, not fixing bugs, so I think for now they're surviving off donations

When someone shares a personal story about his wife's struggle with cancer and the top reply is "I also choose this guy's dead wife"

Man, when I joined this was a brand new instance with only few users. That wasn't even that long ago.

Oh damn, I remember people saying that everybody interested in Lemmy already joined by now. I'm really curious how things will look one week from now

I agree that ambiguous rules are necessary, but common sense should be enough to figure out most of it. [email protected]'s opinion on China isn't really advertised (unlike [email protected]'s)

What motivated the move, was Tildes the place overtaken by Rationalists?

That and "this is worthless, they only tested 10 000 people" are the worst

are getting butthurt

Were butthurt, until they got what they wanted and the community got banned

As long as you don't make your title incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a native English speaker

"Signups: no" can also just mean that your sign-up will be checked manually, like on older instances like beehaw and sopuli

They're removing it because it puts a lot of load on the servers but I'm not sure how much of it will be removed

Why Tildes and not just another instance? Tildes is still headed by a single person

Now I wonder if it's possible to 'link' RSS feeds with ActivityPub. I guess it's always possible to have a bot make Lemmy posts from the feed.

I’m assuming that people would downvotes pictures of cats which had the #dogs hashtag

Honestly I'm not sure. One problem on reddit is that people just upvote things they like that show up on their frontpage regardless of where it's posted, which means all the big subs blur together.

astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion

What's wrong with XR?

This. There's no need to join the biggest instance, as long as you're not among an instance's first users you won't notice much difference.

Feds has nice ring to it :)

Anyone can host a server that'll talk to the others seamlessly (like Lemmy), but it doesn't talk to Lemmy