I appreciate the perspective. Think I’ll do some instance shopping.

Interesting. Didn’t know that this instance had that reputation. Is there anyone out there archiving and cataloguing removed posts / comments across instances? I’d be curious to see some data around this. Would be a fun NLP project to try to identify who might be running certain instances based on the ideological bent of their censorship interests. Could be fun to try to parse out state propagandists from the religious extremists, from the single-issue warriors, from the non-ideological power-trippers, etc.

you misunderstand. a Skeloton is a spooky stationary bike that steals your data, but it’s very expensive. You could buy a knockoff skelaton, but it’s more economical, privacy-protecting, and environmentally friendly to just use a dead body you already have lying around.

I’ve never used mastodon and I’m not familiar with mastodon.lol. I’m fairly new to federated platforms in general tbh just figuring it out as I go along. I tend to browse all instances but I made an account on lemmy.ml because that was the one that was recommended to me on reddit. might join a different instance at some point if I find lemmy.ml to be unsatisfactory at some point e.g. if I find out they defederated from some instance I am interested in.

The peer pressure thing… I mean yeah, people voice their opinions, disagree, and if they can’t reconcile they defederate. It’s messy but I think that’s kind of the point. The only alternative to peer relationships is some kind of asymmetry.

I mean, kinda. in the Fediverse anyone can set up a town and appoint themselves sheriff. More towns (instances) -> more sheriffs. And because the power is more distributed, there are more checks, which has a side effect of making discussions about power (and the abuse thereof) noisier. If it makes you feel any more at peace with it, the perpetual argument about norms and rules is the only alternative to having a single faction seize control and enforce their rules, so anything that is being argued about in public (and not censored) hasn’t been fully captured by a single thought-policing entity.

UFO 50 looks incredible, don’t know how I hadn’t heard of it before now but I love the concept. Glad you mentioned it ❤️

That phrase has always had a Buddhist-type quality of acceptance for me, even before I knew what Buddhism was. But I think it is favored by people who fail to recognize the difference between “seeing reality as it is” and “believing that reality can’t be challenged or changed”.

People who champion “brutal honesty” generally seem much more excited about the brutality than the honesty.

I’ve job hopped a medium amount. It’s extremely common. The red flags you’re seeing are most likely indicators of serious problems, and you should trust your intuitions about them. Especially the thing about everyone being overworked jumps out at me. That kind of problem is systemic, and unless the new company leaders are honest about it being a problem and are taking steps to fix it (for example, hiring more people) you won’t be able to fix it as a low level employee and it can burn you out if you try. On the other hand, one month is not a lot of time to get familiar with a new workplace and understand the dynamics. Are there upsides that counterbalance the downsides? Can you find ways to mitigate or improve the situation at your new job? How much power do you feel like you have with your team to change the problems you see, and is this job worth the effort that that will take? Since you’re on a short clock, you won’t be able to get all the information you need to make an informed decision, so this is partly going to come down to your gut, which is scary. And no one on the internet is going to be able to make the decision better than you, for better or for worse.

Something else to consider: counteroffers are sometimes a trap. If your employer knows you are actively looking to leave, they will often begin preparing to replace you on their own, before you can make a move. Deciding whether this is a realistic possibility comes down to how much you trust your manager friend, how much you trust the other powers that be at your old company, and whether or not your old company can resolve the issues that led you to leave in the first place. Because if you go back to your old job and it’s the same old job, you will probably still want to leave at some point, and now your manager knows it.

Good luck. that’s a tight spot, and I hope you navigate it and land somewhere you feel comfortable ❤️

The first rule of FUDposting club.

This is true in all cases. The proof is left as an exercise for the student.

My computer was getting older and slower and I couldn’t afford a new one and wanted to squeeze as much performance out of it as I could. That and, I heard it was all the rage with hackers and I fancied myself a bit of a hacker.

Really blows my mind that so much ink is spilled over “literally” while “really” gets a pass for doing the same thing really.

Sometimes minor league ball is a more interesting game.

A practical addendum to that last point: I am eternally grateful that I am too old to have had to deal with the current landscape of app-based dating, so I am definitely commenting on something out of my experience, but I would advise trying to meet people in real life and make non-romantic friends, rather than “trying to date”. Book clubs, Ultimate frisbee leagues, activism groups, etc. I met my partner doing community theater. I think if you want to find someone you can be friends with as well as partners, you have to try being just friends first. And it doesn’t always progress beyond that, and sometimes that sucks like a bastard. But I still think it’s better than the alternative methods I’ve seen.

Who’s going to be doing this railroading? It’s going to be up to you and whoever you decide to have a relationship with to decide what your roles in the relationship will be. When I started getting serious with my partner (now cohabitating over a decade and going strong), we both thought we were cishet little ex-christians. But we were buddies from the start, and that hasn’t changed even when we started to question our gender identities. For all I know, it may have been the fact that we were in a stable, loving relationship for the first time in both our lives that made it safe enough to start exploring that aspect of ourselves. I know for us it took (is taking…) a while. I loved them when they thought they were a woman, I love them now as their NB self, and if they discover more about their gender identity I’ll love them then. We’re still, and will hopefully always be, partners and best buds.

So if you want to try being in a relationship with a girl, find a girl you like, and love her.

I wouldn’t say it was a number one favorite, but I feel like the internet isn’t the same without timecube.com

TW: conspiracy nonsense, racism, crimes against grammar https://web.archive.org/web/20050829015921/http://www.timecube.com/

Sharecropping is optimistic. They’re laying the groundwork to have a larger prison population that the government can rent out to the landowners.

I agree. I think with a robust enough proposal, there are a lot of people with power who would be willing to get on board. Some people though… they’ve shown that they’re willing to kill huge numbers of people to maintain and expand their power, and I don’t know that that kind of powermonger can be dealt with gracefully. And I think an internet-native global democratic movement would have to be started by people with internet access, and one of its goals would have to be providing, to the best of its ability, internet access to everyone.

Genuinely, I think the “other” in this case is the extinction of the human species. It’s very scary to me that there are people like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are in charge of nuclear arsenals. Do I think they are going to start a nuclear war? At this point the best I can do is “hopefully not 🤞”. But the longer we roll the nuclear armageddon dice, the better our chances that we’ll eventually wipe ourselves out. And the predicament that Ukraine finds itself in currently is proof that no nation with nukes should ever give them up as long as there’s a real threat of invasion by another nation. And as technology advances and we find more efficient ways of harnessing huge amounts of energy, that arms race will only escalate. I think the only long-term solution is to find a way for all of us to disarm and find a stable way to prevent rearming, or in other words, world peace.