It’s definitely the case the fediverse requires a lot of specific, technical knowledge to really grasp, and that the onboarding story for new users is pretty confusing, especially since the most significant decision you make (what instance to host your account on) is the first decision you make, before you even see any content. It’s a problem I’ve been thinking about for many years, and still haven’t found a good solution for. Other some bland reassurances that “you’ll get the hang of it eventually,” all I can say is that every time I talk about instances, it feels like the scene from Mean Girls where Lindsay Lohan’s new friends explain the various high school cliques.

I quite like quokk.au, especially their sports community; I don’t really recall why rimu is beefing with them, though I have a vague recollection that I thought it was somewhat overwrought. I don’t think you’re really missing out being defederated from lemmy.ml though. Most of all, though, I think you should avoid default instances whenever possible.

Some piefed instances turn it off – iirc piefed.blahaj.zone does as well. Piefed the software supports it, but maybe rimu turned it off for the default instance? I still can downvote from my instance.

There’s a subset of fedi users who delete their comments after a while to save resources for their instance. It’s probably not the majority of what you encounter, but there’s enough that a lot of fedi software supports it as a feature.

I wish people would get back to lying when I ask them how they’re doing. The new "how’re you?/“oh bad”/“oh what’s wrong?”/“oh you know, just kinda everything” interchange annoys me because it’s considered rude to then actually vent your spleen about the everything that is wrong. Either lie to me and say you’re fine, or say you’re bad and bring up a topic you want to discuss, but don’t say you’re bad and then expect me to ask no follow-up questions.

I am upset by how entirely correct you are about this.

6 months for being off by less than 1% seems harsh. Thanks for being a donor.

I’m not really sure about the whole thing, honestly. The comment you moderated is still out there, reachable by other fedi software like mastodon, so you’ve only really cleaned things up for a small subset of fedi users.

One could imagine a Reddit-like client for fedi built over the hashtag system instead, where you follow hashtags and then browse them as a feed like you do with communities currently. This would mean moderation duties are all at the instance level, like they are for other fedi software, and they are limited to the ones supported by ActivityPub, instead of allowing a moderator to control a community actor, and I’m not sure it would be worse? Individual users would have to use the block and mute functions more liberally, and you’d need something like the tags.pub relay for discoverability, but it would resolve the problem of duplicate communities on different instances, and community creation is as easy as writing a hashtag.

So many communities end up unmoderated, and the admins are already on the hook for everything that originates from their instance anyway, that I wonder if the tradeoffs for community moderation is worth it.

But most of all I appreciate that all of this is hypothetical for me because the trolls by and large leave my communities alone and I don’t really have to take mod actions, which is awesome.

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Good for you. I’m a more frequent drinker but I think it’s a good thing that it’s going out of fashion – it’s definitely one of the most harmful intoxicants.

Maybe I’m naive, but I really believe that had he said “I told them ‘I feel my life is in danger’ because I was afraid he would shoot me,” he’d have a stronger case. Ohio specifically requires “reasonable belief,” not simply pronouncing the words, and by acknowledging that he made the claim because “that’s what they say” rather than as a report of actual fact, I believe it will be harder for his defense attorney to rebut the prosecution’s inevitable assertion he did not act in self-defense. While knowing cops can help you avoid getting into the system following a crime, saying in an NYT article you think you should have the same protections as law enforcement because you play in their poker game is not a popular claim to make, even amongst the most dogmatic MAGAts, and I don’t think this is going to go as well for Mr. Matthews as he expects.

If you like cider but not beer, have you tried a mead yet? There’s no need to keep trying beers if they’re not for you.

Aside from the fact that “he was coming at me” is entirely inconsistent with shooting someone in the back, I find it astonishing this man has internalized and is willing to admit out loud to an NYT reporter that he believes the words “I feel my life is in danger” are a magic incantation that absolves you of guilt when you shoot someone

“I said, ‘I feel my life is in danger.’ I said that ’cause I know that’s what they say,” Mr. Mathews told the officer. “And he went around the side of his car and started coming at me, and I shot him.”

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Hell yeah. Maybe even put a figurehead on the basket and go full pirate ship.

Well, then, there’s no flaw in my reason for being. Glad that’s settled.

I actually wasn’t.

If this is straight out of the gate for you, I’m sincerely sorry your first comment you read on the matter was me getting heated. For me, this is approximately the 4 billionth thread about “how should we gatekeep fedi?” and I’m extremely over it, possibly to the extent that I react when “who should we gatekeep?” is only a small part of a larger conversation.

I hope to see you over in our community! It’s not a lot but I think we have fun.