I’m in the same place without having read that piece you mentioned. And I’m not going to be looking it up.

As I see it, climate change is the greatest threat the human race has ever faced. It makes World War II look like a squabble in a kindergarten playground. We should all be INCREDIBLY impacted by this, and yet everyone keeps going on as if nothing is happening.

But I think 50 years is a little bit of a narrow time frame. More likely we’ll all die within 100 to 150 years. I mean, our species will go extinct.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what a sane society would do to try to mitigate the worst effect of climate change, while preparing society for the world that’s coming. A world without fossil fuels or basic infrastructure.

Wouldn’t e-bikes be a relatively stopgap measure? They still require a relatively advanced and carbon-wasteful technological base, after all: maintenance and repair for the bikes themselves (including regular replacement batteries, which are definitely NOT environmentally friendly), plus paved roads in good repair (again, requiring a lot of fossil fuel expenditure).

There’s also the likelihood that as the Earth’s environment becomes increasingly hazardous we’ll require protection from the elements more and more often - protection which would be difficult to add to a bike of any sort.

The US military has projected that basic infrastructure in the USA will be collapsing throughout much of the country in less than twenty years. It’s hard to see how ebikes will be practical under those conditions. Gearing towards long-term lower-tech solutions would seem to be a wiser choice.

It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

Same here. Example: I have a question I want to post on AskLemmy. I started to post it from Beehaw, and realized that I’d be cutting off responses from a huge swath of the Fediverse if I did. So I’ll be posting it from kbin, instead.

But those are some of the highest contributors, I’d bet. That 75,000 might well represent a hole in the Reddit’s hull that will end up sinking the ship.

They’re certainly enough that a substantial percentage of the total Reddit user population - at least the involved ones - are now aware that there is an alternative to Reddit. That’s huge. As Reddit continues to go downhill - and it has to, that IPO is coming - and Reddit management continues to screw users and mods, more and more people will jump ship.

June 30th, the 3Pocalypse, will trigger the next major wave. Each reduction or elimination of NSFW content will trigger another. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Reddit doesn’t make more serious unforced errors along the way.

And spez et alia aren’t quite as stupid as many believe. They don’t care about 75,000, sure. But they can read the tea leaves as well as anyone else. Their major concern has to be that the emigration from Reddit to Lemmy could impact the value of the IPO. It’s a clear danger, albeit only a potential one at this point.

Oh, they’re watching all right.

I went over to kbin (I already had an account there) and replicated my subscription list as best I could. Splitting my time between here and there. I wish I didn’t have to have two separate accounts, though! I didn’t want to be fragmented.

You have to pay a few bucks? How many and how often?

Personally I’ve been surprised at how little I miss Reddit! Which goes to show just how much value it had lost, I think. I can’t speak for anyone else, but participating on Reddit felt very enervating in the last few years. Will this be downvoted? Will this get me banned? Why would ANYONE downvote that comment? etc. It wasn’t a safe place to be, but that’s not the primary problem; a little uncertainty can lend spice to a situation. Rather, it was like being in a big room with a fairly large number of bullies, any of whom could also turn out to have untrammeled authority and the desire to abuse it.

I always felt that Reddit should have been run democratically. Perhaps we’ll start seeing Lemmy instances that are run that way!

I imagine that communities like that will be created here before long!

Or at the least have some underpaid flunkies doing it for them.

I had a cat that lived to be 21, too. My sympathies; I remember how hard it was to lose him.

Whenever one of my cats has died, I always end up thinking of a passage from May Sarton’s The Fur Person:

“They did not love him for his glossy tiger coat, nor his white shirt front and white paws, nor his great green eyes, no, not even for the white tip to his tail. They loved him because he was himself.”

Governments are at least answerable to the people, or should be. Corporations are answerable to no one except their major stockholders.

As for the learning curve for Lemmy, I think that’s been overemphasized. People can learn. And at the same time feedback from the increasing number of users will help the devs to smooth out the rough edges, making Lemmy easier to use.

I remember when practically nobody knew what the internet was. Now everybody’s walking around with the internet in their pocket, using it all the time.

There’s the Lemmy Community Browser, of course. Getting that functionality INSIDE Lemmy should really be high on the to-do list for the devs - that, and making it easier to subscribe to communities that aren’t in your instance.

Usenet.

There IS an instance specifically for erotica/NSFW, I believe: https://federotica.com/

I suspect that Google could do it, but won’t. When they ditched “Don’t be evil” as their corporate motto, they went all the way. Alphabet is as evil as they come. The Fediverse isn’t a giant corporation, and Reddit is. So Google won’t be doing us any favors. It’s that simple.

I agree that the double @ is off-putting.

Good points! I’ve been online since the '80s, so this isn’t my first rodeo - not by a long shot. And I really dislike venture capitalists, having spent 7 years working in one of the largest venture capital law firms in America.

I’m going to be clear-eyed about this. There are some things I want that the Fediverse can’t supply, at least not yet. Things that require a user base of a certain size. I’ll go back to Reddit for those things.

Dating, for example. I found a while back that Reddit was the best place for me to meet compatible women. The Fediverse can’t match that at this point. I don’t even know if there are dating communities here, much less for demisexuals. And the odds of finding compatible women in my particular neck of the woods? Infinitesimal!

Another interest is gaming. At some point I expect to be looking for gamers to join a campaign I’ll be starting. Again, that requires a large user base - particularly since I would like to find at least some gamers in my general area. The Fediverse can’t fulfill that need for me. I hope that someday it can.

But my trust in Reddit is irrevocably broken. I’m not comfortable there any more. So I will be maintaining a strong presence here. My hope is that the Fediverse will become popular enough to meet some of those needs. I think it could happen.

People talk about the relative technological complexity of the Fediverse as a barrier to widespread adoption, but I’m skeptical about that. I remember when I had to explain to people what the internet was, and they looked at me like I was from Mars. Now I’m sure all of those people use the internet all the time, everyday. The technological gap wasn’t insurmountable for them after all. The same, I believe, is true for the Fediverse.

One more thing: I’m pissed. I contributed a lot to Reddit over the years. Yes, I did it to feel good, for the most part. I recommended books to a hell of a lot of people over there, and I know that at least some of them actually read some of the books I suggested. That gave me a good feeling. The owners of Reddit took that away. So, if I may be forgiven for the expression, fuck them! I won’t be giving them any more of my time and effort than the absolute minimum. I’d rather spend that time here, trying to make this a more inviting place for people who don’t realize that Reddit is just screwing them.

Also, there are other things I could be doing with my time as well. There’s a whole world of books to read, for example. 😄

Absolutely. Capitalists are mad dogs. You are never ever safe with them. I like the Fediverse. I’d like to see it improved by becoming fully democratic and publicly funded.

LEMMY NEEDS PORN!!!

Jk, sort of.