cowvin

quick summary of the most notable instances i’ve read about:

lemmy.ml is run by pro-china folks. there’s some drama surrounding that. it is defederated (fully or partially) from some other instances.

lemmy.world is the biggest lemmy instance. if you want to find something reddit-like, this would probably be the first place to try.

beehaw is a much more private instance that only has a few moderators but has stricter standards on being nice to one another. it ended up having to defederate with lemmy.world early on because it couldn’t handle the moderation load from too much content.

kbin.social happened to pick up a lot of tech type folks for some reason. it was just a side project from one dev so it was not as polished at first and barely survived the incoming users but it’s in a good place now. he’s got a few folks helping him so the future looks bright to me at least.

I’ve been using Mastodon since Twitter was taken over by Musk, so I’m not a super long-term user, but I can give my perspective:

Platforms like kbin / lemmy are more like “topic” communities. Like people on kbin create “magazines” and on lemmy they are actually “communities”. From the user perspective, you can just look for these communities you are interested in and sign up to get updates from them.

Platforms like Mastodon are more like you and specific people you like to see content from. So you find people you like to hear from and you follow them to get their updates. They may post on subjects you aren’t interested in but oh well, that’s up to them.

Both formats can produce desirable, tight-knit communities, but they just use different structure. In my opinion, the kbin / lemmy style is more accessible in terms of finding people interested in a specific subject but feels less personal since you are just all there to talk about a specific subject. On Mastodon, when I find people posting content I like, I end up learning more about the random nonsense they are interested in. Like my feed there has a ton of moose pictures now because one person I followed likes to post pictures of moose. I don’t mind seeing them, but I never expected to see so many moose.

TLDR: Mastodon is about following people, kbin / lemmy are about following topics.

Well they mention Github artifacts in that message so it sounds like it’s more like they may have obtained source code and that sort of non public stuff.

Usually what happens is that these sorts of blackmailers will leak small, verifiable pieces of data so people know they really got something. We don’t see that here, so for now there’s no reason to take them seriously yet.

This isn’t ransomware. This is standard blackmail.

It took me a while to accept cloud storage but I use it now. I backed up all of our family photos on Google photos.

The head wobble doesn’t have one simple meaning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gbrB8KwES4

I worked for many years with someone from south India and he would do the head wobble so over the years he tried to explain it. I still don’t fully understand it. Haha

Yeah, right-wingers are trying to suppress people being educated about this part of American history. They don’t want people to sympathize with the victims of the slavery era.

It was an awful time and we as a nation need to do better.

I had a couple of Motorola phones back in the day. Most recently I had a Moto Z2 Force, which had a shatterproof screen. I really liked that because around then I had my first kid and kids cause accidents all the time. LOL

The Republican party serves the rich. Poor Republican voters are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires so they are cool with suffering themselves as long as other poor people are suffering. Other people deserve to suffer because of skin color, religion, “laziness”, or whatever, so they keep voting to cut services for themselves.

It’s good to have a spare I guess. LOL

Hmm this still doesn’t quite work for those of us visiting from kbin because from kbin we access this community as: https://kbin.social/m/youshouldknow@lemmy.world/ so even the /c/ doesn’t match up.

We probably will need some special markup that each instance converts to their own local community / magazine format.

Harming animals is absolutely a sign of someone being deranged. Many eventually escalate to harming humans.

I’ve been a professional software engineer in the game industry for 22 years now. I started off in school at first on Apple computers with Basic, then when I got a graphing calculator in school I started writing tools for school work and games on it all the time. After college, I wasn’t sure what sort of software I wanted to work on (dot-com era), but one of my good friends talked me into applying to some game companies. I’ve been in a bunch of different companies since then but right now I’m working on online systems for one of the biggest online games.

Hmm, surely there must be a way to whitelist other instances you want to federate with so they don’t get blocked by cloudflare…