Zink

Our voting system (first past the post, winner take all) is keeping us in the two party system better than anything else the dnc could do. Let’s see them support ranked choice or similar.

This is awesome to see, but I wonder if an array of Small Modular Reactors would be the way to do it in the future. Nuclear is a fantastic and safe source of clean energy, so I hope it can compete better on the economic side.

Absolutely right! It can be a pretty great crutch, used sporadically, but constant use signals something else to work on. And depending on the issue, constant use can just make it slightly more comfortable to stay in that crappy state. (Ask me how I know, lol)

Over here on Memmy you can fullscreen and resize it pretty seamlessly.

No argument here. The wasteful and dangerous vehicles are just a minor symptom of our cultural issues.

There is a lot of anger, frustration, and unacknowledged insecurity going into vehicle purchases in the US.

Instances have to be created and run by somebody, so we automatically have a bunch of admins in the loop.

Then somebody has to make communities on the instances. That involves choosing the purpose of the community, and writing any relevant description or guidelines. So again you inherently start with somebody in charge of the community.

But none of them answer to a corporate overlord. Things are run the way the people decide. And if the people disagree, they can run different communities or instances. There can easily be unmoderated communities, and I’m sure there are.

I guess when you’re more worried about nearby LGBT and minorities than infrastructure and public works, you sometimes get the wool pulled over your eyes, lol.

I could totally see that working where I live. It’s a growing town of ~35K people with a lot going for it, but it’s also very white, and sits right on the border of rural areas. I think I’ve seen in the election results that votes go 75/25 towards Republican candidates, give or take.

Competing for the Republican nomination would be pretty gross, but if you’d also be running unopposed for that, ezpz.

We may be thinking of different populations of users. The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.

And to be clear, I did not mean to argue that redundant communities are a problem. I can just see potential benefits of allowing cross-instance merger of communities IF the leaders of those communities decide they want to.

There undoubtedly IS strength in redundant communities, just as there is with all the different instances to choose from. One mod, one admin, one hardware failure or seized server, etc cannot just shut things down. Plus competition is good. There can be a natural selection process to determine over time which community is the best run.

But thanks to the network effect, there is also a first mover advantage, and an inertia to whichever community gets the most users at the beginning, since many people will just sub to the one or two most active communities on a subject. It would be interesting too see how, and IF, such a “merge communities” feature would be used by like-minded communities/mods. That kind of feature would/should be low priority in these early days though.

I took a look at the “conservatives banning books” link and it says thousands of books have been banned and/or removed from libraries.

I took a look at your link, and it describes the process by which one book was removed from the required reading list, but was still allowed to be used in class.

It makes me think of the “we are not the same” meme.

It all comes down to the network effect that I mentioned. It’s not a matter of making the users’ lives easier, it’s a matter of making the content better, especially the comments.

A single merged community may kick off discussions and debates that would never happen if the users were spread across 10 different communities in different instances.

I mean, maybe the conversations would still happen if everybody subscribed all 10 of the instances’ communities. If everybody interested in, say, photography subbed to every photography community out there, you’d basically have the same effect as merging. But people won’t do that. Some will, but I bet most won’t.