I am far more interactive on here. I was almost exclusively a lurker on Reddit.

There are places like that, even with YouTube, but you usually have to pay rather than use the ad-supported free product. (Assuming ad blockers don’t work well any longer)

There’s a lot of fantastic work going on with Lemmy apps, and I have several installed.

But I keep coming back to Memmy!

I think I have like 5 Lemmy apps installed, including the voyager web app, but I keep coming back to Memmy.

Plus, many of us are in STEM fields and appreciate/prefer the metric/SI system. However, we think in imperial units because that’s what we used in daily life in our formative years.

I have no problem with metric units, but I do a rough mental conversion to imperial to relate to the measurement, and get a “feel” for it. This goes for temperature, distance, speed, volume, weight/mass, pressure, and essentially anything else that’s an everyday unit.

It’s analogous to how much of the world thinks of nuclear explosions in terms of kilotons or megatons of TNT. I mean, all you have to do is multiply megatons by 4.184e+15 and you’re back to the sensible unit of Joules. :)

This is the way to do it. Getting your photos printed by somebody else will be tons cheaper AND give you better results.

Eh, I am all about wired networking wherever I can, but my awesome old Brother laser printer gets used like once per month or two, and it lives off in a far corner of the house where it isn’t taking up valuable space. Plus it could work with a tiny fraction of the LAN bandwidth available to it.

On wi-fi it stays, lol. I think I may have had to reconnect it once in the decade+ we’ve had it. Otherwise, the printout is ready before I can even walk to the printer (unless it has a ton of pages, naturally).

I don’t even know how old it is at this point. I just know it’s over a decade because I didn’t buy a third party toner cartridge until 2014.

Ah well, it figures they have a tradeoff like that. Maybe they’ll be limited to remote locations then.

Like so many things, it will come down to cost. It’s fortunate that renewables are getting so much cheaper because we pretty much are betting on them by being so reluctant to expand nuclear. Hopefully batteries and other energy storage technologies keep advancing rapidly.

This is exactly the thought process I went through while reading the post. Doing it preemptively can make it come across like you’re severing the connection due to opinions rather than rule breaking.

But still, THANK YOU to the admins, in general. I am not accusing you of anything negative like that. I trust that you thought it through way more than I did. Thanks for keeping this big general insurance of ours awesome.

We should be investing in this amazing science!

Oh but fuck that other amazing science over there that everybody is into.

This is awesome to see, but I wonder if an array of Small Modular Reactors would be the way to do it in the future. Nuclear is a fantastic and safe source of clean energy, so I hope it can compete better on the economic side.

Absolutely right! It can be a pretty great crutch, used sporadically, but constant use signals something else to work on. And depending on the issue, constant use can just make it slightly more comfortable to stay in that crappy state. (Ask me how I know, lol)

Over here on Memmy you can fullscreen and resize it pretty seamlessly.

No argument here. The wasteful and dangerous vehicles are just a minor symptom of our cultural issues.

There is a lot of anger, frustration, and unacknowledged insecurity going into vehicle purchases in the US.

Instances have to be created and run by somebody, so we automatically have a bunch of admins in the loop.

Then somebody has to make communities on the instances. That involves choosing the purpose of the community, and writing any relevant description or guidelines. So again you inherently start with somebody in charge of the community.

But none of them answer to a corporate overlord. Things are run the way the people decide. And if the people disagree, they can run different communities or instances. There can easily be unmoderated communities, and I’m sure there are.

We may be thinking of different populations of users. The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.

And to be clear, I did not mean to argue that redundant communities are a problem. I can just see potential benefits of allowing cross-instance merger of communities IF the leaders of those communities decide they want to.

There undoubtedly IS strength in redundant communities, just as there is with all the different instances to choose from. One mod, one admin, one hardware failure or seized server, etc cannot just shut things down. Plus competition is good. There can be a natural selection process to determine over time which community is the best run.

But thanks to the network effect, there is also a first mover advantage, and an inertia to whichever community gets the most users at the beginning, since many people will just sub to the one or two most active communities on a subject. It would be interesting too see how, and IF, such a “merge communities” feature would be used by like-minded communities/mods. That kind of feature would/should be low priority in these early days though.

It all comes down to the network effect that I mentioned. It’s not a matter of making the users’ lives easier, it’s a matter of making the content better, especially the comments.

A single merged community may kick off discussions and debates that would never happen if the users were spread across 10 different communities in different instances.

I mean, maybe the conversations would still happen if everybody subscribed all 10 of the instances’ communities. If everybody interested in, say, photography subbed to every photography community out there, you’d basically have the same effect as merging. But people won’t do that. Some will, but I bet most won’t.

That’s fine on an individual level, but unless everybody does it, you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — being spread too thin. If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect. And if the “merge” functionality just mirrors all content to all connected communities across instances, it would make popular ones more reliable.

But that should only be an option for communities, never forced. There’s strength in diversity too.

I thought the same thing when some (talented and well meaning) individuals recently put out tools/procedures to access Reddit in a more clean way.

Nah. I don’t need to be an absolutist — I’ll load up a page if some search shows me that’s the only place to get what I’m looking for — but spending time to make undesirable websites more accessible for myself isn’t something I plan to do.