• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I bet a lot of folks have just quietly given up or moved to lemmy or mbin because they’ve gotten frustrated with all the issues.

    I made an alt two months ago when Kbin would never connect. I have barely been back since, so it is now my main. I hoped Kbin would come out if its slump but… that seems unlikely at this point. I’m actually quite happy on Lemmy, especially after the v0.19 upgrade allows blocking of an entire instance. I personally virtually never see any spam (maybe one comment per month) and while connection issues do occur, they are like a handful per week rather than handful per hour (it varies a lot though, sometimes it does get bad for a day or two and then weeks go by without a hitch).

    I avoided the initial hurdle of making a Lemmy account for so long and, while it was super annoying, in retrospect it wasn’t that bad, compared to all the other problems here and still having to go through all that, eventually.

    If anyone is thinking about switching: don’t worry unduly about it, just make an account and see if you like it, but you can always keep your Kbin active too, assuming Kbin remains alive.

    Also, you may need to try out a few places before you find one that fits you best. But that reduces your anxiety bc you know more and don’t need to worry about having to do it again in a worst-case scenario.







  • But once you pay farmers to grow corn, they have to sell it somewhere. Hence HFCS, and corn oil, and corn gas, and ofc corn corn, and… The then-head of NIH Francis Collins was once asked what single thing Americans could do to be healthier - he said to eat better, especially less sugar, and Congress could remove the farming subsidies, or at least expand them from beyond corn & soybean to include fruits & vegetables. They laughed in his face. Ain’t nobody got time for 'dat!

    The single worst part of it all is that those subsidies were put into place when a huge fraction of aspiring volunteer soldiers were turned away in WWII due to “malnutrition”. Thus the campaign was born to literally fatten up America. It worked!!! And it will continue to work… forever, bc once you create a voting block, ending it or even redirecting (towards a healthier end for us all, but lower profits for Monsanto in the short term) seems next to impossible. It actually is a good argument against socialism, at least in the USA where the government is so enormously susceptible to special interest groups (although there are even better arguments against capitalism so I don’t mean to say that it PROVES that socialism is bad, just that it is one example of its misuse, when the government is in charge of something and also the government is stupid; and before anyone says it, yes this situation is an argument against both at the same time:-P).

    An excellent documentary about it, most of what I’m saying here is from part 4: https://www.hbo.com/the-weight-of-the-nation/season-1. I know, filmmakers can be… uninformed some(MANY MANY)times, but this was done as a joint venture between the FDA and NIH, so this is highly credentialed. Also trigger warning; it will make you very very sad watching this, bc facts in this era of end-stage capitalism tend to do that, so if you do not want to see things like mothers feeding their 300 pound 10-year old an enormous meal of pasta - literally killing them right before your eyes, slowly and painfully - then… well, I did warn you at least.






  • At the time of the Reddit protest, Lemmy was only beta version software, not fully ready for the migration. Whereas Kbin on the other hand was only alpha version. It has come a long way since then, but keep in mind that it started out far behind (Lemmy, and even farther behind Reddit), hence has focused more on foundational aspects than small UI matters such as this. i.e. it’s not fully functional even now - for instance, doesn’t it still lack moderation tools, and an API that can be used by a third party app? A better way to look at it is perhaps how it is this tremendous project given how it is still so experimental, rather than looking at it from the lens of a finished, fully viable product like Reddit is.

    Which in turn does not entice non-technical minded people to join, when they come here from Reddit to evaluate it, and not liking what they see, return. We who are here prefer things this way, but it is not everyone’s cup of tea.

    And you may enjoy community creation or expansion too, or perhaps you can even write some code to implement this feature that would benefit us all.



  • Spez is unlikely to ever do anything unless the Musk has already said that he wanted to do it.

    At which point you might start to worry that both X and Reddit may join us at some point? But consider this: if Spez ever did tell people that he wanted to do that, it would take their programmers 20 years to write the code to make it happen, and by then we’ll all have moved on to direct thought sharing over the Web10.0 anyway. :-P Whereas if he simply bought the code off of somebody else who already made a fully-functional copy, then like Alien Blue - the forerunner to Reddit’s official app - it would still self-destruct in his hands, converting itself into a pile of dung. At which point we simply defederate from it, no worries.

    Here we are free.



  • I hear that, but also…

    Well, I was doing the same, but noticed that even in the niche subs, the conversations seemed to be getting more and more… juvenile? Like prior to the Snoopacolypse (as you called it, and I love it! The term not the event in case that needs any clarification:-P), it was a point of pride for me that I had never blocked anyone in my life - whereas now I don’t think twice before doing that bc who has time to waste on someone not engaging in good faith!? Especially if they lack enough self awareness to even realize that fact about themselves while they are doing it. (Tbf, possibly watching Innuendo Studios’ analysis of GamerGate that uses many tactics of the Alt Right in America had something to do with my changing views as well:-).

    Ymmv ofc, bc different subs means entirely different people & thus experiences interacting with them, but I’m just saying that rather than stick with the subset of that community that remained after Rexit, I eventually just find myself going or even wanting to go there less and less, instead enjoying engaging here more, even at the expense of not being able to talk about those matters. I haven’t posted there for months, nor even commented for a month, and barely go once a week to read. Bc I use Kbin and the mobile browser experience here is so horrible to write a comment, I find myself not commenting here often either - but when I do I have much more fun doing so, not having to be anywhere near as defensive as that other place that shall not be named.

    I hope you find something that works best for you as well, wherever that may be.