I feel like it is just a matter of time before either:

1. The fragmented communities develop more and become distinct, so that they are more unique and shouldn’t merge.
2. One of the communities becomes the more popular “default” option, and the other becomes less active as people gather in the more popular one.

Even if that doesn’t happen, redundancy isn’t bad. We’ve seen how hard it is to migrate when there’s only 1 real option and that option disappears or goes bad for some reason (i.e. reddit). If there was another fairly active community with the same focus, that would make it easier to keep going. That’s part of why decentralization is good.

This is a non issue. Different communities and instances have different rules, norms, cultures etc. There’s no need to smash everyone together in a monoculture.

Exactly. This is a non issue and actually a feature.

There are now, fortunately, plenty of low carb, low glycemic products that are a lifesaver when you have cravings.

What products are you thinking about?

I mean, just set the limit to a ridiculously high number then? I’m not aware that Lemmy has any in-built limits, but I could be wrong.

I believe that Mastodon instances with limits only link to external posts that exceed the limit, they don’t display the whole post.

Of course you can always run into network limits if you get huge posts, but that applies to everything and doesn’t have anything in particular to do with Mastodon.

Isn’t character limits an instance setting?

That feels relatively young for something like that, I would’ve thought maybe that would’ve been a little further back.

In some ways it does go further back, because each village basically had its own time. So there were lots and lots of time zones, if you think about it that way.

No, that’s what I wrote as well. The identity service would not know what sites were visited or ideally not even how many sites were visited.

I’m not sure that is feasible, because in order to trust the answer, I feel the asker must know and trust the one providing the answer. It sounds like you’re imagining a system with many different ID providers? What prevents me from creating my own provider that just answers “Yes”, even for people under 18? If the site asking does not know it is my fake ID service providing the answer, I’m not sure they can trust any answer.

But I won’t pretend to be an expert on this topic, so perhaps it is feasible somehow.

In principle it should be possible to do a zero-knowledge proof.

This means that the website asking for age verification asks a yes/no question like “Is this user 18+?” and the age verification service (like a digital ID provided by the government or whatever) answers “yes” or “no” accordingly, but without telling anything else about the user. Also, the verification service should ideally not know who asked for the age verification.

So the site you want to visit only knows the thing they need to know: Whether you are 18+ or not. Nothing else. And the age verification service only knows somebody asked for age verification and provided the answer, but do not know which site you visited.

This is all possible, but I don’t have high hopes this is the intended implementation of any government seeking age verification, so don’t get your hopes up.

Tinnitus has no cure and is generally a permanent condition, so my guess is yes.

The video posted elsewhere in the thread explained it well

I don’t get 4 to 5

This kinda erodes cultural differences between different communities though. Different communities may have very different approaches on how to talk about a post. I feel like this approach just leads to monoculturism.

Finally someone who gets it. This “problem” is in fact a total non-issue. Different groups talk about the same thing all the time. This is good, not bad.

the conversations should be combined

Disagree. As OP points out, there is value in separating the discussions as well.

Consent-o-matic: automatically rejects cookie banners, even the most annoying ones.

The real stupid thing here is that a header has to be added to disable reactions. Why didn’t Microsoft just use a header to enable them? I mean make it opt in instead of opt out. Then they can use that header in all their Outlook shit and everyone else can go on with their day not worrying about it. So stupid, but not sure what I expected from Microsoft.

And how many units do these things sell compared to a shitty HP printer? I would guess the shitty HP printer sells more.

As someone who owns Makita power tools, I feel personally attacked 😂