Oh I’m always in the All section. Still kinda wrapping my head around instances as a concept: mentally I think if it as a single room with a ton of cubicles.

I treat subscriptions more like bookmarks: communities that I want to come back to specifically, but I don’t just browse them. It’s more like going to a grocery store and being sure to get the staples but not ignoring the rest of the aisles. How else am I going to find a new interest or perspective worth keeping if I don’t look?

I agree with you: I think decline of a site is an inevitability, especially after advertising is needed due to increased traffic.

But I personally don’t need Lemmy or anywhere else to be permanent, since what I get out of it is either transient (scrolling for memes and things that pique my interest) or meaningful enough that it remains with me, meaning enjoyable or thought provoking discussions.

Granted, I’d rather alternative sites go tits up in rapid succession while the shuffling corpse they’re trying to ape continues to slog on mindlessly, but keeping the impermanence of quality in mind makes it easier to see these places as areas to congregate rather than the end to surging the web in general.

“The Uterine Dance” was after the Spanish chocolate but before the Bon-Bons, right? Been a while since I’ve seen The Nutcracker.

“‘There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.’” From: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2814

There were (and are) a ton of utterly ridiculous beliefs about what can cause harm to women, but I find this one particularly amusing in an age where millions of women fly on planes. Imagine the plane takes off, leaving all those wayward uteri spinning in the dust at the gate…

Just think of it as a “service fee”.

“Reddit would implode instantly”

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

It’s also a generational thing: everyone around me up to the mid 30s uses “no problem” to indicate that the request/help was of little bother so the requester shouldn’t feel bad for asking, which can sometimes annoy the people who say “you’re welcome” instead.

“Happy to help”, to me, suggests a greater eagerness than just being kind.

I imagine a LOT of us have many, teeth-clenching opinions on what constitutes a good email. XD

Problem’s already been solved, however: it’s mine. My way’s the best.

Some of these are good, because getting into the habit of thanking people for helping (“thanks for catching that!”) fosters good working relationships or providing specifics that, presumably, work for you, too (“can you do [x] times?”) is a better starting point than being truly open ended.

But I well and truly despise the “thanks for your patience/when can I expect” because we ALL know what you mean and I respect someone far more if they acknowledge, explain, and move on from their errors than just…reword shit.

Is that 2,000 paid employees or does that include moderators?

Remember back in the old web when letting people know your real name was a horrifying breach of personal privacy? Heck, having the same username for multiple places gave me the hives, if it was unique enough.

We need to go back to those days; not just for safety reasons but because there’s a freedom to the individualized anonymity of being a (apparently) distinct user in each instance.

That’s what I was looking for, yeah. Part of it was that I was subscribed to language learning communities (and memes in the target language: the shared language of memes provides a lot of context!) which can be named a large variety of things, so I’d be back at square one and searching for things manually.

It’s not the worst thing to be back to basics, because it forces me to explore and learn about the Fediverse, but there’s always going to be that nagging “did I get everything out of the old apartment” feeling as I drop off the key.

“Honey what’s wrong, you’ve barely touched your Androgyn-Os.”

I was like that on Reddit, but that was partly because it’s SO heavily trafficked and there are so many comments within any given post that you either have to be in at the start or make a popular post to have any effect upon discussion. And by “discussion” I mean more using a loudspeaker: there’s little meaningful back and forth, just presentations.

Smaller communities allow for more forum-like interaction.

Wefwef feels like Apollo in a stable beta version: it doesn’t have everything I’m used to (blocking communities from the main feed is a big one) but everything is in the right place. Pity I only got it after Apollo went down, since I can’t get my data from Apollo now.

I’m just trying Lemmy (writing this comment on it) and it’s still rather light but thankfully speedier than on a browser.

I figure I’ll bounce between them for a bit and see which one starts to gain more usage and features. But yes, it’s good that there are more options available.