Ah that’s a fair compromise. In that case, assuming they were all going to join, I’d go for the non Elon / Zuck / Spez run platform for sure.

That just makes me think, this is a strange question for the fediverse because I’m pretty sure a fair amount of instances aren’t American run already.

Fuck no. The Americans provide 90% of our entertainment and they’re actually fun people to interact with and chat with (the ones that aren’t wearing MAGA hats that is). What am I gonna go without Americans on social media? Talk about fucking Table Mountain? Join the Europeans in looking down on the USA for everything and always acting like their own shit doesn’t stink?

Fuck that, I’d start using VPNs.

Shout out to the SquaredCircle community in this regard. The moderators there do a fantastic job of making the place seem worthwhile to participate in. Even if it’s just the same two moderators working over time to make people feel welcome, it’s nice that I can go there and be the only one commenting on the least popular wrestling promotion and still get responses and feedback. And it makes me feel like going back again and again.

In comparison, there’s other communities with a sea of posts with no upvotes getting posted daily. But no interaction. And if you do, no one gives a shit or is going to interact with you anyway. And the way I see it, the first ‘fans’ in any community should be the moderators. They should be encouraging discussion instead of just dumping links to 20 articles a day.

While it’s nice to have certain spaces to dump your thoughts on the TV show that you just watched or whatever, when there’s zero activity and no other fans, it just makes you think that there must be a better community somewhere else, maybe on another platform.

Honestly I’m gonna go against what people usually say and say that Arch is better to start with than Ubuntu, as long as you’re not afraid of command line or editing txt files. Whether it’s Arch or Ubuntu, as a noob you’re going to be doing a lot of wiki reading and copying and pasting of commands.

Personally though, a big difference between the two I found is that after a couple of years of copying and pasting commands in Ubuntu, I still didn’t really understand anything about how Linux works behind the scenes. Whereas Arch had me feeling like I too could be a sysadmin, if I felt like it, within a week.

And maybe things are different these days with Ubuntu, it’s been a few years, but I find that Arch has a way more enthusiastic and helpful user base. And the Arch wiki is practically a bible. Whereas searching for problems and solutions in Ubuntu can feel a bit like searching for problems and solutions in Windows, where you’ll probably get copy pasted generic solutions or someone telling you to restart your PC.

All depends on which app / UI you’re using I guess but it should look pretty much like Reddit almost everywhere. The only difference here is that there’s no grand total at the top of your profile like a high score. But when I was signed up on world, in the app I’m using you could see separate up and down vote counts for everything.

They’re really not meaningless though. For one thing, they allow moderators and admins to more easily detect trolls and bad faith actors. And on platforms or with add-ons that allow better tracking of vote history, it allows the user to more efficiently moderate their own experience, should they so choose.

Also, I think you’ve got to be kind of an asshole to not recognise that a little bit of validation from communities that you participate in is a nice thing to have and that downvotes can hurt to an extent, even if it’s not the same as getting physically slapped. And to be clear, I’m not pointing at you or anyone, I’m just riffing here. I haven’t even seen downvotes for a while now.

So yeah, I’d say they’re meaningless in a video game sense. You’re not going to win any prizes with them. But there’s a reason they exist, plus no one is immune to the effects of positive or negative reinforcement.

About bloody time. Containers are fine for on the fly use - for checking what pages look like logged out, or visiting a link that you don’t want affecting algorithms etc. but for separating personal and work and whatever else, profiles are the way to go. It’s actually already pretty easy to add ‘about:profiles’ to the toolbar but the more accessible they make it, the better.

I look forward to profiles also making it to the Android app 5 to 10 years from now.

It has been eye opening to say the least, how easily people are whipped up by obvious propaganda, as long as it gives them something to hate.

Even as far away as here in South Africa, I’ve come across people that have been clearly listening to Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or some shit; who want to ‘chat’ about transgender people.

As if it even concerns them in the first place. And as if being transgender is some sort of fad, and not talking about a miniscule percentage of people who are just trying to live their lives without bothering anybody. Because this ‘fad’ must be happening in some other town from what I can see. With my eyes. While not listening to self important ‘gurus’ on the podcast or some shit.

I just want to say that it has nothing to do with being transgender and it could’ve been any easy to single out group. People like to hate and look down on something different that they don’t understand in order to feel superior in some way in their own shitty lives.

But I feel like that’s empty and useless to say to someone while they’re being actively targeted. Like telling a bullying victim to just suck it up because their bully has a bad home life or some shit.

So really all I can say is that I’m sorry this is happening to you. And that I wish there was a way to offer support other than with just words. Like a new country or island where the people are enlightened and not prejudiced, hateful and easily turned by easy to spot slimeballs.

Something I’ve seen pointed out about Lemmy and I’m starting to notice a little bit occasionally, is that people love ‘answering’ questions by not really answering and grandstanding a little bit. Someone asks “is there a gen z community?” and the responses they get are things like “who cares about these generation labels?” and no answers to the question.

Here you ask why there’s a large amount of downvotes on a particular instance, and not what people’s personal philosophy regarding downvotes is, and yet the top answer is someone that came here especially to tell you that they don’t care and no one cares.

And these guys are gonna complain about people going to places like Bluesky instead of joining the fediverse. AskReddit was basically the gateway to Reddit for new users.

To try and guess at an answer, even though I’m new here and haven’t even seen downvotes for the last few days. I think that people are trying to keep a certain political atmosphere and not let trolls / right wingers / people who are “just asking questions” take over. So votes go hard in that direction. And also I think there’s probably a lot more of the types around here that’ll have a ‘discussion’ while downvoting every response they get from you, more than on Reddit. Just going by the sneering that comes with how some harmless questions are answered.