This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.

I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!

We need one of those mod appliable (or vote-appliable?) "Misleading title" or "headline altered" tags maybe

That is fantastic news.

I've already deleted my reddit account, but I use RedReader primarily as a "look, don't touch" way to view reddit anyways. RedReader allows you to customize so much that you can turn off all the voting buttons and the reply buttons, so you just get a nice minimalist reading experience, don't have the constant tiny mental overhead of voting, and don't risk getting tempted into impulsively wasting your time (and supporting reddit) writing comments/posts.

Edit: being able to use RedReader for Lemmy would be wonderful, but it looks like that might be a thing in the distant future, perhaps, but not the near future.

Dang, after reading that, somehow I'm even more glad I overwrote all my past comments and posts with a protest message. You do not get to monetize my speech down to keyword targetting, reddit!

The way that's written is so blatantly and shamelessly "all these people volunteer and provide an amazing service for free! :D look how much money we can make off this free labor without giving any of those volunteers a single cent, and while sabotaging the service!"

If you want to auto-overwrite your comments and posts, or just delete them, check out Power Delete Suite or Redact by June 30th, before the API change breaks these tools.

I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.

That is my favorite way I have ever heard anyone express that wish.

Some lint for you (accuracy may vary):

Bee family trees, if you follow a queen down through drones and workers and other queens, follow the fibonacci sequence. The fibonacci sequence is also reflected in the structure of spiral seashells. Source: Some book I read about the fibonacci sequence many years ago.

Flamingoes are motherfucking TANKS. Seriously. Their ability to survive in absurdly harsh environments that would kill other animals is wild.

Only female reindeer lose their antlers in wintertime (disclaimer: this may depend on species of reindeer?)

Some guy (Russian I think?), when a computer informed him that nuclear missiles had been fired at his country and he was told to return fire, correctly believed the computer to be bugged and refused to fire the missiles. So uh. Thanks, guy. He went and lived out his life normally and never got appropriate thanks for saving a shitload of people, I think. Source: memory of wikipedia article, may be wrong on some details so really I should be double checking those before repeating them but here you go I'm too tired for that.

Some other guy survived BOTH the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and lived to old age afterwards. Somehow both the literal worst luck, and the best.

There is a parasite that latches on to ants' feet that does not harm the ant - in fact, it fully replaces the function of the ant's foot, including forming a claw to help the ant grab stuff like it would with its actual foot. There is also a similar parasite that replaces a fish's tongue (yeah I hate it too).

Octpuses only live for like 3 years max, and the females die after laying their eggs. Meanwhile, they are really, really, really smart, like dolphins and parrots and crows. Imagine being that aware and smart, but only living 3 years. It disturbs me.

Uranium glass, which is exactly what it says on the tin - glass made with a teensy bit of uranium in it - glows in the dark in (typically) bright, cartoon acid green.

Whales can and do communicate across vast distances because their calls carry much more easily in water than sound carries in air.

Hammerhead sharks' heads detect electrical fields, and they use these fields to locate their prey. Run.

The whole alpha/beta/omega wolf pack thing is complete bullshit, retracted even by the person who first popularized it, and he has spent years upon years trying to scrub out that idea he unleashed into pop culture but has been unable to.

Elephants' feet are very sensitive, able to feel minute vibrations from miles away, and they can communicate with them. Also they do NOT make the thumping sound that is foley'd into nature documentaries - they walk silently. Also, the bottom of their feet looks like swiss cheese and you should not google that if you have tryptophobia.

The supposed tendency of lemmings to run blindly off cliffs is greatly exaggerated, too, and based on a 'documentary' where they were pushed off one by a human. A tiny group of documentarians abused some lemmings and ruined their reputation forever.

tldr I'm proud to be a lemming :) Let's rejuvenate the reputation of lemmings the animal.

That said, I did enjoy the old "Lemmings" video game, featuring rather human-shaped lemmings that you had to prevent from falling to their deaths.

Ditto. Brave also promotes their own crypto-coin ponzi nonsense. And at one point I believe they made a far-right website a default link on their homepage, before outcry compelled them to remove it.

Duckduckgo search engine works as well as google's, though. Except that I haven't yet figured out what the equivalent formatting for "site:reddit.com" is for it, if site specific search is even a supported function (surely?)

Edit: I won't scold anyone for using a free browser though. It's not like you give them $$$. But they do get your data, and while they claim to be about privacy I don't exactly trust them as far as I can throw them.

I'm a bit baffled - I love the active sort so far. Sure, it's different from reddit, but in a good way. It means the exact timing of a post, to line up perfectly with the peak active hours of U.S. users, or similar, isn't critical anymore, because a post can go relatively ignored for a day or two and then get picked up and filled with comments and discussion.

It gives people more time to get around to reading a long linked article or watching a linked long video first, before commenting, too, while still leaving them able to participate in discussion after.

It means that people who comment "late" still get replies. Commenting even slightly late on reddit and not getting any replies or votes felt awful, like you were talking to a wall. And the people who sorted by new and commented first tended to stick to the top of threads because they accumulated more upvotes by sheer force of time.

I hope we can avoid re-creating the constant, over-hurried content-churn of reddit, and keep this more patient feel.

That said, I'll concede that active search is best for discussion posts, like on Chat or Gaming (e.g. threads that ask people to share favorite xyz games and so on), or those based around longread articles, and not necessarily as good for Breaking News. But even then... I think it does us good to allow time to discuss news posts, too, and active search does that.

Tldr I use active search as default for everything and I absolutely love it like this, please don't get rid of it just to make the site more like reddit.

I would also appreciate a vegan/vegetarian specific community (I'm fine if those two are combined though), because a) I dislike seeing photo after photo and recipe after recipe about meat in my feed, and while I would like discussing vegetarian and vegan recipes I don't want it enough to put up with wading through meat discussions, and for people who are actively in the process of trying to give up meat they maybe wouldn't want to be constantly reminded of it, and b) posts about animal rights have a tendency to go poorly in general food forums full of meat eaters who take our food choices as a personal attack on them or as "I'm better than you" posturing, and that gets exhausting quickly.

Maybe the latter point could end up not being an issue here, I suppose, if the community here deals with this better than reddit, but I'm wary for now at least and personally probably wouldn't risk posting.

Anyway, I'm excited to see all the new communities that have been added so far!

I have some similar concerns, although reddit does hang on to deleted comments and posts for themselves/their monetization and tracking purposes. That's why those reddit account deletion scripts edit all comments before deletion, and people are (were?) advised to let the edited comments sit for 24 hours before finally deleting them. I don't know if that actually works anymore to delete the comment from reddit's servers, though; somebody said they started keeping the pre-edited versions of comments to get around it.

At least with Lemmy you also have the option of hosting your own instance, which I would think could get around some of these concerns? I haven't looked into it much.

If you post on multiple communities, too, I think your info is spread around multiple servers. And there's no monetary incentive for people to be trying to track us, except perhaps on instances hosted by companies.

But the only company I know of that currently has an instance (I think) is Mozilla, and since I use Firefox, they'd have a heck of a lot of other options if they wanted to invade my privacy.

Edit: I dislike that when I delete a comment, it just deletes the text and leaves my username there above the deleted comment marker. I can kind of see why it might be desired for accountability purposes, but also, ehhh.

Long press on the empty space to the right of the username.

How were you supposed to know this? Magic, clearly. 🙃

Most active users though are lurking voters only, or not logged in at all, and don't comment/post. When they leave, it won't be as obvious. And the more contributing users leave, the more the only ones left and talking will be the ones who don't care.

I think a lot of people are riding the sinking ship all the way down and planning to bail on the 30th, when the apps are actually banned, too. Probably enjoying the drama of it and not realizing they could be enjoying the drama of it from, like, over here on dry land instead.

But yeah. There'll be people who put up with it for now, or who join after and missed the whole controversy, or who straight up don't care at all.

I think there'll be these initial waves of people who can see the writing on the wall leaving, then after that there'll be a steady trickle of people abandoning ship over time, with spikes whenever the next outrageous thing happens, and the whole thing will collapse gradually, perhaps over years.

I dunno about "tomorrow". Eventually, maybe. But today's AI are just language models. If there are no humans answering questions and creating new reporting for new events/tech/etc, then the AI can't be trained on their output and won't be able to say a single thing about those new topics. It'll pretend to and make shit up, but that's it.

Being just language models - really great ones, but still, without any understanding of the content of what they say whatsoever - they're currently in a state of making shit up all the time. All they care about is the likelihood that one word or phrase or paragraph might typically follow another, for truthy sounding language, but that's often very far from actual truth.

The only way to get around that is to create AI that isn't just a pile of language algorithms, and that's an entirely different beast than what we're dealing with now, who knows how far off, if it's even possible. You can't just iteratively improve a language algorithm into not being just a language algorithm anymore.

I agree. On reddit, there are a bazillion different "gaming" subreddits that are only named different because that's the only way to have different communities around the same topic: r/gaming, r/games, r/truegaming, r/patientgamers, r/girlgamers, r/transgamers, r/gaymers, and so on.

Each of those communities has a different feel and different moderation and different priorities, and no way no how would I want r/gaming posts mixed in if I'm trying to browse r/transgamers, for example.

Similarly, I'm mostly sticking to Lemmy instances that disable the downvote button, because it makes for friendly places I think, and lowers the barrier to posting for socially anxious users.

I like the idea of there being a way for users, or for similar groups of instances that agree to it (like if beehaw and an instance with similar rules/community feel wanted to collaborate a bit), to set up a multi-lemmy 'all' community thing that shows posts across similar communities, but it should still be optional.

Oh, r/askhistorians is precious.

Maybe a History community on here would be nice, at least, until there are enough folks for more specific spots.

I've been seeing so many stories about student work getting falsely flagged as AI generated. It really feels bad to be accused of that, I think. So I can see why it would be better to avoid trying to determine one way or the other if something is AI generated, for now.

All that matters for a question answer is whether it's right, partly right, completely dead wrong, and so on, right? And that can still be judged regardless of whether it's AI.

AI absolutely shouldn't be outright invited either, though.

I... Just straight up don't buy that this would work out in reality at all. I think people just ignore what the buttons are called when they do the same thing. And we have a situation where people do dispute the veracity of basic facts, anyways.

It makes me wonder how the study was designed and whether there's an element of confusion in the reporting between "statistical significance, aka the effect observed by the study is less than 5% likely to be caused by pure chance" and "actual, common parlance significance, aka the effect observed is large and important". But I'm not curious enough to actually spend the time to look into it.

This is the first time I heard of odysee, so I just went and looked, and oh my god who picked the "lady fungus" monstrosity as a help avatar. 0.o They could've at least made her a cute mushroom or something instead of fleshy finger-thing, what the hell.

I have no real opinion of it yet otherwise, except that I'm automatically wary of anything touting blockchain at this point.

Youtube does need a viable competitor or three so badly, regardless.

Aye. If it's a U.S. official this time... So?

If we've learned anything lately, it's that plenty of U.S. officials are corrupt or idiots or both.

Shenanigans and/or misapprehensions VASTLY more likely than alien visitors, in this scenario as in all others.

I believe aliens are very likely existant, maybe even common, given the huge numbers of potentially habitable exoplanets that have been identified. But who knows how often intelligent life, and with also the needed access to the necessary tools and resources for spaceflight, arises. And the distances involved are huge.

So. Super advanced aliens develope space flight tech, send a ship or unmanned probe on a really really really unfathomably long journey, only for it to crash in a conveniently mostly unnoticed and unobserved fashion on a teeny tiny little planet full of cell phone cameras and radio receivers and surrounded by a cloud of satellites (none of which it hit)? Which would mean either it was aimed at us, and hit the target despite how exceedingly difficult it is to aim even across 'short' space distances like from the Earth to the moon, but something else went wrong at the end of that unfathomably huge and expensive engineering feat, or it hit us by coincidence, which given the sheer size of outer space vs Earth is again ludicrous. All without generating radio or other signals we can detect?

And now the astounding new evidence presented so far is... hearsay, once again (but official hearsay! Pfft).

I don't buy it.

If ever I am proven wrong, and the astoundingly unlikely turns out to be true, I will be beyond delighted and will gladly eat my hat.

But yeah, no, much as I wish I could get confirmation of alien life in my lifetime, I expect the best I can hope for is microbes under the ice in Europa, or maaaaaaaybe a little fish thing there, if wildly lucky. Or maybe some microbes in the clouds of Venus. Even just someghing like that alone would mean a lot, though, honestly, because it would confirm life is likely rather than rare, and it'd be fascinating to see what did or didn't differ from Earth life.

Edit: and if there is a genuine vehicle, HOW could anyone even feasibly diagnose technology as "not of Earth/human origin"? Vs just... Another nation has secretly built a really damn cool and complicated spy plane? Unfamiliar tech never automatically means aliens.