Vitamin D supplements. You’re not gonna get much sunlight, and you need vitamin D not to get depressed.

The locals are used to seasonal depression. Foreigners tend to have a hard time with it.

Layers are key. Noting beats real wool.

Use mittens, not gloves. Gloves suck.

I think Homage to Catalonia is an important read. It’s a great account of things that can go wrong in a resistance, despite amazing people and incredible efforts.

They elected the candidate backed by Russia, which is still the shining beacon of a global superpower for the Tankies out there. So I guess Trump is a perfectly fine representative of fascism, left or right.

I think we have to accept that the American electorate actually wants fascism.

I meant to say that I would never have believed back then that Lemmy would become as popular as it is today.

My point is that it’s a moving target. Reddit has a billion active users. Instagram has two billion. I don’t think these make sense as targets.

Does it currently make a profit? If not they will find ways to make it worse. And even if they do make a profit chances are they’ll want to increase their margins.

Maybe stuff like the Google deal could keep money pouring in while keeping usability at a respectable level though.

I’m gonna say yes, for the exercise.

Four assumptions:

1. Reddit will keep getting worse, due to the nature of enshittification and venture capital. Eventually enshittification reaches a breaking point where people leave or stop arriving.
2. Lemmy (in a broad sense - et al!) will keep getting better, due to.the nature of open source software.
3. Non-free alternatives to Reddit will eventually enshittify, law of enshittification.
4. Free alternatives will use ActivityPub for the obvious advantages.

If these assumptions are met, given infinite rounds of enshittification and unhappy users, eventually a federated and free alternative will be the most lucrative option for the majority of users. Eventually Reddit will Digg itself a hole. Maybe Lemmy won’t take over then, but it’ll stick around.

The most unrealistic assumption is of course that the federated solutions will keep getting better indefinitely. Maybe they won’t. But as long as people keep developing and contributing to the Fediverse, it’s alive and improving in a way commercial alternatives cannot in the long run compete with.

If I saw this question posted the first time I visited Lemmy (some months before the Reddit app drama) with “popular” being defined as the current level of activity, my clear answer would be a loud and clear “probably not”.

That’s super interesting, thanks!

I find the last point particularly fascinating - that memes might have been replaced by God somehow. I feel like this resonates with an impression I already had, but that I haven’t thought consciously about before now. Tucker Carlsen’s demon attack story seems symptomatic.

I find this to be incredibly interesting. It’s like 2016 saw online polarization, but it happened on the same platforms. Today, there’s a polarizations of platforms - we exist in different realities online.

I wonder if this split would have happened anyway, or if it was motivated by American politics. And I wonder what the consequences are.

It seems like a pretty fundamental development in how our information channels work, and I haven’t seen it been discussed much by commentators.

Maybe my question cannot be answered because ‘online’ today just means something completely different than it did in 2016.

For sure.

In terms of rallies Trump seems to attract comparable crowd sizes, but at much fewer rallies. The number of rallies can probably be explained by age and energy.

How energized the crowd is compared to 2016 I have no idea.

Yeah, this is a solid insight maybe we’re all just locked off into our walled gardens now. But the Fediverse crowd is a bit of an extreme case - surely there must be some sort of vibe going on on the more popular platforms? Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, I don’t even know any more.

I don’t think that’s the question I try to ask, though I probably struggle to formulate myself well. It’s not really about comparing to Harris.

It seemed that Trump engaged a lot of people who would not usually bother with politics in 2016. He ran a campaign that completely dominated the Internet. People seemed to have nothing better to do than to create right wing memes in half serious, half joking support of him.

I don’t see that any more. What I see is a more normal campaign ran by a guy frequently making fascist talking points. He could still win, and maybe it’s still a successful campaign, but it feels very different to me from the 2016 one.

But then again, I have changed my Internet habits so that I wouldn’t see it anyway. Maybe there’s still hordes of 20-something incels posting frog memes for the masses to be offended by, it’s just off my radar.

I can’t even enter Truth Social from Europe. I see Wikipedia estimates 600 000 monthly active users, which is of course a lot. But I struggle to wrap my head around how important it can be. Isn’t it potentially a bit self defeating for them to close themselves off in a closed forum?

The Trump subreddit in 2016 seemed to have a cultural impact. Truth Social seems to be more of a footnote?

In a way Twitter is bad enough, but my impression there before deleting my account was that most of the Trump spam was Musk posts that appeared on my profile for no good reason.

I have a PhD, the only time I use my title is when booking tickets for trains or planes with German companies.

I’m a social scientist. Nobody hears the word “doctor” and thinks of a person like me.

I guess Etsy could be a good place to look. It has gotten annoying in the last few years, but sadly it’s still the best place for a lot of people to sell their crafts.

She might enjoy a unique handmade piece by a silversmith there just as much or more as a high-end necklace, and unique hand-made designs can be cheaper than diamonds. Maybe you can even reach out to a silversmith and design something together.

I tried searching for #jewelry on mastodon.social, and @[email protected] was the first thing to pop up. Of course you probably want to look around more, but their latest post is not necessarily a terrible starting point. For illustration purposes of course.

In short, I think it’s possible to go about it looking for a silversmith rather than a jewellery store. What it lacks in expensive stones it makes up for by being potentially personal. :)

Van Hasselt said he thinks the blade’s inscription has religious ties that are written in Latin.

…if it’s written in Latin, couldn’t they just read it? What is it I’m missing here, making this theory somehow worth reporting?

Studies have shown that if you ask people to make a plan for voting, they are more likely to actually go out and vote. It’s even cited in the FAQ of cards against humanity.

So we ask people to make a plan because it’s an efficient way to make them more involved and more likely to actually go out and vote when the day comes. Not because it’s so hard that they need a plan (unless you live in certain states of course), but because it forces you to think actively about it rather than just passively.

I think you missed the joke.

(Also, regarding trees on Easter island, it’s a popular theory, but if I remember correctly it has been a bit debunked in recent years)