Of course. That explains why when day transitions to night you see the Sun zoom off into the distance until it diminishes to nothing, with the Moon zooming in from the opposite direction until it’s big enough to see.

You don’t get to be that rich by paying bills.

As a long-time cryptocurrency observer, it is going to be very amusing (in a bitter sort of way) seeing everyone discovering that they’re trying to solve the same problems that cryptocurrencies have been working on solving for over a decade now. And then finding all sorts of ways to contort themselves into solving them differently from how cryptocurrencies did it so that nobody can accuse them of being “crypto bros” or whatever, even though the technology is perfectly applicable as-is.

I’m now seeing reports over on [email protected] that people who have deleted all the comments from their accounts - even those who did it years ago, not just in the past few weeks out of protest - are having all their comments reappear again. This apparently also includes comments that were overwritten with edits.

Scummy behaviour from Reddit, but a potential boon for archivists. People who are running backups or maintaining archives of Reddit comments might want to take this opportunity to re-check historical deleted comments to see if they can be collected now, in this remaining window of API accessibility.

Indeed. I was expecting a two-week “calm before the storm” at this point, as the protest blackout ended but the API was not yet removed. But the protest continued and Reddit keeps stirring the pot. Interesting times.

I know that in the end Reddit will be able to brute-force themselves a “win”, but if the Fediverse gets a nice solid critical mass of users as a result then I think Reddit’s destined for a long decline.

Of course, the people of the Donbas were just sitting there peacefully doing nothing when all of a sudden the Ukranians started shelling them. That was the start of the military action, silly me. Good thing all those vacationing Russian soldiers happened to be there a the time to defend them.

I think we’ll see a temporary “return to normalcy” after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we’ll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.

In a way, this seems like the best way of driving things. The protest has raised awareness and got a ton of development work going, and then there’s going to be a respite giving instances time to prepare themselves for the second surge.

I wish the AFU had the courage to not waste the lives of their soldiers and come to the negotiating table so that no more lives are senselessly wasted

What’s to negotiate? Russia has seized Ukrainian territory. Ukraine wants it back. There’s nothing for Ukraine to concede.

The only side “wasting” lives here is Russia, if they’d just go home the war would be over. Ukraine’s not going to try seizing any Russian territory.

How dare the people rise up against their rightfully-installed rulers and decide they want someone else. What did they think this was, a democracy?

Anyone that “knows” they will completely overpower Ukraine apparently stopped paying attention to reality many years ago. They’ve been proven to be incapable of it.

Russians, without any double meanings that Russian sympathizers could jump in and say “aha, racists!” or “aha, russophobes!” over.

A common pattern among Reddit alternatives has been that their initial population has been some particular group that has been driven out of polite company for some reason. Voat had the Incels and Trump supporters, for example. Lemmy happens to have been started by authoritarian fans. The difference is that Lemmy is open and finally the “normal” Redditors are coming. So I expect them to flood out the niche folk soon enough.

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The ones that are permanently blacking out are the hardest. I kept telling myself that if nothing else, at least I could visit the pale shadows of the old places I enjoyed via desktop. But /r/dndmemes is probably closing forever and I wasn’t quite ready for that.

There’s /c/[email protected], though, and perhaps others eventually. So the magic may someday return.

It’s not surprising, but IMO the shutdown is still worthwhile. It’s shaking people loose to start looking for alternatives, and giving those alternatives opportunity to shake themselves down too. We’re not quite ready for a Digg-style implosion yet. It may come more gradually this time.

Just checked and it’s at 1/3 of the planned shutdowns now.

What might be neat is a user preference that allows one to enable or disable downvoting just for you. If you disable downvoting then you get a different view of the community and comments that only accounts for upvotes.

This is the number one source of reassurance I give people who object that Lemmy is “overrun by tankies.” That was just the earliest niche community that happened to jump ship in this particular direction. Now, even at this early stage, Lemmy is being overrun by everyone else.

Older audiences are more likely to dislike the new changes, though. They’ve been on Reddit for a long time and will be aware of how much better it used to be.

The only hope I have for Reddit - and it’s a vain one, I fully recognize - is that after shareholders buy it they might put a board of directors in place who go “hey, our userbase is bleeding profusely and Reddit alternatives are flourishing, maybe we should do something to staunch that if we want this thing to retain any value.”

The current owners evidently don’t believe that, so an IPO that swaps them out is the only option.