I know that is bs because I haven’t been there in days and I probably added 100 visits a day to their stats. So they’re at least a couple hundred shy.

The article mentions 55.31 million daily visits (average). You decreased their stats by 0.00018%. Even if all new active lemmy users had your level of activity, the other site would still return to normal. There are just so many other users.

I know that I am not back. And I won’t be back, and I think a lot of people are staying away as well. That the traffic is now normal seems a bit sketchy.

I’m afraid that’s just bubble bias. Most people just don’t care or haven’t found a viable alternative yet. These +43k active users on Lemmy are huge for Lemmy, but not even a scratch for the other site.

After the initial exodus at the start of this month, you could see more and more comments demanding returning to business as usual.

Utopia (from Ουτοπία) is an impossible Vision of the future, while Evtopia (from Ευτοπία) is the best possible Vision.

Interesting. I never heard of Evtopia, and I also did not understand Utopia as necessarily impossible. Could be possible or impossible, depends on context.

• https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utopia
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia#Etymology_and_history

I also don’t think being unreachable is necessarily a bad thing. Consider an ‘Ideal’. Although some ideals may never be fully actualized, they are seen as something good and worth pursuing nevertheless.

But mostly, I don’t think the opinions of proponents or opponents of this idea are swayed by wether we call it Utopia or Evtopia. If anything, using the more common term makes it more relatable.

You’d think if it was all basic biology we would just have a unique gender for every one wouldn’t you?

Nothing in biology is exactly identical between individuums. A common eye color is brown, although there are as many shades of brown as there are people.

It is just practical and how language, or even perception works, that we tend to categorize similarities, and strongly favor common occurrances over outliers.

the doctor is describing your phenotypic sex based on observable characteristics.

Your doctor is assigning you a gender.

Maybe you two aren’t even disagreeing?

I’d say the doctor tries to assign the new born into male or female according to biological sex, and gender is inferred from that.

He calls you either a boy or a girl based on your genital configuration

Yes, that’s what I mean. A two-step process. First, biological expression is assessed. Next, based on #1, social gender is inferred.

Sorry for being unclear. What I meant is:

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore [as a presence in the fediverse].

When they run the most and the biggest popular communities on their instances, do most of the development, offer the best tools and services in the fediverse, they have become too big to ignore.

If they then start playing dirty, it is too late to defederate them. They will play dirty. Let’s not make ourselves dependent.

There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.

The first step is a UX disaster: https://join-lemmy.org/

Only 2 clicks / pages down the road you can start registering an account, and you don’t see what the experience might be before that. Instead, you’re being presented tech talk about servers.

You might argue it’s not actually lemmy but just the landing page. I argue, it’s so good at being a scarecrow, most people visiting lemmy haven’t seen anything else except for that page.

The inner lemmy is pretty fine, I agree. Some parts are still confusing. For example, most people will not figure out they can search for content from within a specific community by carefully configuring the drop downs in the general search form. Most will look for the search directly attached to the community.

If Meta plays dirty, defederate them then. Now is just too premature.

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore. If you let them gain that much ground, it’s too late to isolate them without doing even more harm to your own network.

Also Meta is not a startup with unknown reputation. Meta plays dirty, that’s a given.

Ok, but you can only do that if they already joined the fediverse. I replied to “the powers that be must never be allowed to join the fediverse”. It’s also questionable if everyone will block them.

I’m worried this will not be enough in the long run.

Imagine Meta provides more original content, a higher user base, more engagement, more activity. That alone would make it interesting for many other users, further increasing their relative attractivity.

Additionally, they could invest in the codebase, and implement some of the community’s dream features, some nice mod tools, search engine discoverability and whatnot. On a fork which lives on their instances, of course. Services which work if you federate with them.

They have the resources to rase the stakes higher and higher. The incentives are objective, real, advantages for users, communitites, mods and admins. Isn’t it only a question of time / stake height until significant parts of the fediverse choose to cooperate for various reasons?

We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.

How could that be done? Anyone with the resources can host an instance, and there are plenty of instances with a low entry bar.

If the fediverse grows enough, we can be sure some entities will join not because they share our values, but because they see our value.

I don’t see how we could prevent that or ensure only good guys enter. The fediverse is open by design.

the powers that be must never be allowed to join the fediverse

How are they not allowed? How is it checked, how prevented?

As I see it, they can freely use the code, freely set up instances, freely create user accounts on their own or other instances, with ‘independent’ users, employees or bots.

The only thing stopping them is the current fediverse’s insignificance. We’re just not tasty enough, yet. But if we become, how could we disallow them from joining?

If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they’ll do it all over again.

They have that ability, and always will have. They can create as many accounts as they like on as many instances as they like, or run as many instances as they like themselves, use incentivized individuals, or employees, or bots, or any combination of all of the above. No one can stop them, maybe even no one can spot them.

The only thing which is holding them back right now is lemmy/kbin still being too insignificant. If the network continues to grow, more and more big corps will see it as a market and an opportunity, and they will have plenty of ways to interact with it.

if Google or Meta wants to join they should to us not us to them so if they break federation we should not care and continue implement our stuff

As I understood the article, the danger is that large actors like these are too important too ignore. Too many users, too much content to neglect. So while in theory you are obviously right, in reality there will be a temptation to cater to their needs, because it seems so worthwhile.

I always thought removable batteries were clearly a good thing, until I watched this YouTube video: Techquickie - Why Removable Batteries Are NEVER Coming Back

While acknowleding the pro side, it also gives some arguments for the con side:

• phone cases are easier to make water proof if they are not meant to be opened
• sturdier battery case for safe and easy handling makes the phone heavier and bulkier
• customers favor metal/glass phone cases, but those tend to break when frequently opened
• non-rectangular batteries allow for more compact hardware design

The video is 4 years old and I haven’t followed the topic too hard. I just found it interesting to have some fairly reasonable counter points for a nuanced discussion.

“And, as Putin said yesterday, one of the tasks was to demilitarise Ukraine. In fact, this task is largely completed. Ukraine is using less and less of its weapons. And more and more it uses the weapons systems that Western countries supply it with.”

Ah, the subtle differences between demilitarization and upgrading to NATO standards.

If his statement had ever anything to do with reality. Probably just feel-good words directed at the domestic audience.