What is link aggregation? Just combining network connections of a cloud? What does that have to do with lemmy?

It’s specifically a social media platform like Reddit (where people share links to media and users discuss it via the comments, typically). This is as opposed to (for example) microblogging, like Twitter (Mastodon on the fediverse).

Why would there by different servers in the first place doesn’t that make the social media smaller for everyone?

All of the various lemmy servers can interact with each other. You can use your lemmy.world account to interact with communities on other lemmy servers (aka Instances).

What is an instance?

A specific server running whatever Fediverse software. lemmy.world is a lemmy instance.

Isn’t the point of a federalized social media to be better connected?

Yes, and it is!

I’m not familiar with nor am I equipped to comment on the natalist PoV, but I will comment on your argument:

Gun violence isn’t even in the top 10 leading causes of death in the US. You’re more likely to die in an auto accident or to cancer or heart disease or diabetes or a number of other things than due to gun violence. If you’re trying to present a serious argument here, you might want to consider actual statistics.

Edit: To be clear I’m not saying gun violence isn’t a problem. According to the CDC, there were 46728 gun-related deaths in 2023, but 58% of those (27300) were suicides, so really, mental health is a greater risk than gun violence. If your argument is “Gun violence is out of control and therefore natalists are hypocrites” or whatever, there’s so many other things you could have cited as things that should be addressed that would have made the point better than gun violence does.

I only started eating spicy food regularly maybe 10 years ago (starting with spicy noodles, actually), and at first it was a harrowing experience. Now, I’m much more tolerant to it and things that were at first inedible don’t taste particularly hot at all anymore. My wife got me a variety of dried chili flakes for Christmas which include Trinidad scorpion and Carolina reaper and they’re certainly hot, but tolerable. I think they’d have about killed me 5-10 years ago.

We have a local wings place that has a wing sauce they simply call ‘Diablo’, and every time I order it I’m sitting here crying while I eat them thinking, “Why do I keep doing this to myself?”, but after they’re gone I just want more. It’s weirdly addictive.

I was going to about say codify laws for them not to be messed with, but even codified laws can still be messed with. There must be a new way to instill laws that not even Congress can touch and fuck with. That no President after this one can touch. That no Supreme Court of any kind can touch.

This absolutely should not be a thing. Imagine if the founding fathers had done this to codify e.g. slavery in this manner.

Instead, we have the constitution. The closest thing to what you’re describing is a constitutional amendment. It’s not immutable, though (as evidenced by the fact that a constitutional amendment is a thing that can actually happen).

The problem isn’t content, it’s engagement on the content. Folks complain that niche communities have no engagement, just a bunch of posts by a single person… but it feels like 95% of the time, if I comment on those posts, there’s no reply, not even from the OP, and that discourages further posting.

If you’re willing to engage on everything you post, I don’t see the harm in it, but at that point, why even use a bot? Why not just find content you like (or have the bot notify you of content), then post it yourself as an actual human?

Even if ads were a thing, they would be instance specific, unless they just took the form of posts advertising things (much like Reddit has) which personally I find to be toxic as hell. How would that money make it to content creators?

Personally, I’d prefer to read posts from people who want to post them because they have something interesting to share or something they want to discuss, rather than people who are trying to maximize engagement because engagement = income. There’s plenty of other places to go if you want to be fed that kind of content.

I think the sweet spot was 20-25 years ago when we had special interest forums with tight-knit communities around specific topics. It would be nice to get more engagement on Lemmy in niche communities, but I’d argue the way to achieve that is to go to other places where that content is posted, and share links to content on Lemmy, as a way to spread the word. Part of the problem there though is recognition, and if people see links to 20 different lemmy instances, they won’t associate those with lemmy as a whole, they’ll see it as all disparate things, and I’m not really sure how to solve that.

I can imagine that the Fediverse could develop remuneration models that are much fairer and more sustainable

What do you even imagine that would look like, without degrading the experience for everyone else? Not throwing shade, just curious what you’re thinking of. Like, who is hypothetically paying in these scenarios, and where is the money coming from? I think everyone would agree that if it’s coming from ads or anything similar, nobody is interested.

The best feature of Lemmy is that it isn’t as big as e.g. Reddit. I much prefer the size we have now to some big mega-site. Yes, there’s less content. Who cares? None of us need a constant stream of new content 24/7. It’s OK if you’ve viewed everything on your feed. It’s more reminiscent of forums from the late 90s / early 2000s, especially in the more mid-sized communities. I like that.

I had a horrible Amazon experience 3 or 4 years ago and haven’t shopped there since, so I’m probably remembering the time when it did work.

Closest thing you’ll find is likely to be prediction markets, but “whether it rains tomorrow” isn’t something that would be available unless it’s in the form of “Will X event be rescheduled due to rain?” or similar more boolean things.

Love the idea in concept. One major issue is the shipping. A major benefit of Amazon is just being able to add 20 things to your cart and get them all in like 1-2 boxes. In this hypothetical scenario, you’d presumably still have to handle checkout through each individual store, and if you ordered 20 things, you’d be placing up to 20 individual orders, each with their own shipping costs.

This becomes more problematic when maybe multiple stores you’re buying from sell multiple things on your list… ideal case would be to buy as many things from one store as possible, to consolidate shipping, but what if their prices for the individual items vary? Now you’ve got to search each individual storefront for each item and calculate the difference in cost. (This store sells item A for $2 cheaper but shipping is $3.50, is there another item I can add in to save shipping? They sell item B for $0.50 more, but I might save on shipping costs…)

Technically this is no worse than it is now if you’re shopping from a variety of stores rather than one megastore, but it would be a large barrier to adoption if you’re trying to capture some of the “fed up with Amazon but still like the convenience” crowd.

He might have felt pressure to keep up with your dad due to just meeting them / wanting to make a good impression, and not realized how drunk he was getting. Doesn’t excuse his actions in the least, but might help contextualize them… given it doesn’t sound like this is something he would normally do.

Oh, see, that’s your problem. You’re supposed to put beans, rice, meat, cheese, lettuce, guac and whatever else you prefer inside those the taco shells or tortillas, not tasteless mush. I’m glad we got to the root of the issue.

Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose, even if it’s wrong.

You’re distributing copyrighted material so the short answer is “Yes”, but the longer answer is “Probably, but it really depends on a lot of factors that you haven’t disclosed, like your location. It could certainly get you in trouble with MEGA regardless; whether it will get you in trouble with the law comes in large part down to the laws governing wherever you live.”

The chances of anything coming of it are another matter entirely and you may consider it worth the risk if you feel that chance is low enough.

Maybe AI isn’t so bad after all. In fact, they should implement this in more locations.

The cargo company should be prosecuted for littering. Unless they can convince some benevolent locals to go help them clean up the spill.

I mean, if he said it completely seriously, and the article was published saying he had, then he later came out and said “It was just a joke guys! Jeez, so uptight!”, I’d agree with you, but it was apparently clear from the outset that it was a joke and the headline is likely intentionally written to sensationalize it. The only problem I see here is that someone at rawstory thought this was newsworthy.

If you earned 100,000 bits every day since the first day the Earth existed, you wouldn’t even be half way there today!

Yeah but that isn’t as impressive sounding.

Did you know the wayback machine saves 150,000,000,000,000 bytes worth of webpages every day?! If you stacked 150,000,000,000,000 bytes end to end, they would reach from earth to the moon and back SEVEN TIMES! That’s enough bytes to fill 18 American football stadiums!