That doesn’t mean we need to discuss it everywhere, all the time. For starters, not everyone is American and wants to see American centric discussions everywhere, and also, not all discussions everywhere need to start revolving around modern politics. Creating apolitical spaces doesn’t mean being an apolitical individual. Just wanting to look for more peaceful alternatives.

I’m perfectly fine with being called worthless if you can’t see the logic behind that, I legitimately don’t give a shit as long as I can get a break from the insane and miserable shit throwing that is online political discourse.

If you like feeling miserable and angry every time you go online, great for you, but I’d much rather have an option not to do that.

Exactly. Just discuss anything else. Whatever. I don’t care anymore. I don’t want to know. I have absolutely no control over whatever happens in most countries, and I only have control over my own votes (if anything). Online discussion and politics always gets insanely toxic and dogmatic.

I’m not even American and I usually don’t care either way, but it’s so annoying. Why can’t we just have apolitical or at least more focused communities online anymore? I would literally join any community that outright banned all political speech for a change nowadays.

No, I don’t think you understand what instantaneous actually means. It literally means instantaneous. Faster than the speed of light (which is actually why teleportation is physically impossible but that’s irrelevant).

Wouldn’t that mostly depend on how long teleportation takes? But if it’s instantaneous, you wouldn’t need to account for inertia to end up literally a couple of feet away from where you are, right?

Then again, music streaming services pretty much removed music piracy from mainstream usage altogether. Obviously people in this sub still pirate music, but it’s so uncommon nowadays, I’m sure many people wouldn’t even know where or how to find it.

My PayPal account. Though I believe my undergrad thesis project may be another option from another perspective.

I kind of agree that remote working every single day gets very socially deprived very quickly. Although the office isn’t a place for socialising, not having anyone to talk to day in day out at work drives me a bit mad.

But I also think 90% of the time, working from home is better. Maybe a hybrid model where you only go to the office once or maximum twice a week or something could work for most people. The introverts and the extroverts reaching a compromise.

Yeah my office rents a WeWork space downtown and we only go there a couple days every few weeks. I like it, it’s a change of pace.

What? That’s absolutely incorrect. Cities are the number one most sought after and thriving alternative, especially among young people.

Maybe cities in the US, but that’s because they’re mostly poorly designed parking lots for suburbanites.

Cities are certainly not dying anywhere else on Earth wtf.

A lot of people get paid by hours worked so not showing up means a lower monthly income. And hourly contracts don’t have sick leave in many cases. At least in several countries around the world.

I think you’re being downvoted more because of your attitude than your points, to be honest. Which isn’t necessarily Reddit bullshit, and just seems like a normal reaction.

That being said, I think a community doesn’t necessarily need to strive for eternal growth and mainstream appeal. Lemmy and the Fediverse isn’t exactly mainstream-friendly to begin with, with how confusing the whole federation concept can be to new users, and how unstable it is by nature (an instance can collapse on a whim, taking down all of its users with it).

The real question I have would be: what should be more important to these communities, keeping up growth as a priority, or focusing on the type of space that is being built instead? In a way, opening the door to Meta and other large corporate instances does have the potential to change the nature of this community, and will inevitably lead to a massive influx of users. But maybe that’s not necessarily what the community wants or needs right now.

I don’t believe in alienating Meta simply because “corporate bad”, but perhaps growth shouldn’t be a non-commercial venture’s end-all be-all. That need for eternal growth is exactly what has made plenty of social networks become hellholes devoid of any personality. Meanwhile, I’ve seen many Internet forums that never strived for mainstream appeal, and instead kept a moderately-sized and engaged userbase. It wasn’t hermetic enough to alienate new users, but also it wasn’t large enough to deplete all sense of community and civility.

I think my main issue with a potential federation with Meta isn’t that they’ll approach our communities from an exploitative perspective (like you said, they can do that anyway), but rather that most of the communities will crumble under the pressure of the massive scale of a Mainstream network. None is ready for moderating the potential huge influx of users. A lot of servers aren’t ready to handle that level of activity.

I think this is a lose-lose situation, though. Federate, and the entire ecosystem is at risk of collapsing, but defederate, and the entire ecosystem is at risk of falling to irrelevancy. Right now the existing communities should be focused on becoming their own thing and having their own attractive that can survive without depending on mainstream appeal. Mainly because most of them probably wouldn’t even be able to handle mainstream appeal.

There are a few key things that you’d notice between high quality and very low quality audio. Mostly, a loss of information, which would result in a muffled audio, a lack of crispy sounds and a loss of general clarity, as well as unpleasant distortion and other made-up noise at worst.

For 99.9% of people, it’s not really an mp3 vs wav/aiff comparison, but rather a kbps comparison. High quality mp3 (320kbps) is usually indistinguishable from lossless formats for most people.

For a good reasonable idea, compare 128kbps vs 320kbps at the bottom of this page and pay attention to the cymbals and other high-pitched sounds. You should notice that 128kbps sounds a bit more opaque, like it loses a lot of its spark, whereas 320 sounds crisp and clearer.

That being said, it’s not a huge difference unless you go below 128, and there’s no point in listening to wav and lossless files if you use Bluetooth, since Bluetooth hard-caps all your rates at 320kbps anyway. But I think it’s fairly noticeable anyway.

I’m pretty sure they can, they just don’t know it. It’s extremely obvious.

I also joined Reddit in 2012. I was a teen and hardly understood anything that was happening. All the drama and context flew right over my head. I never knew what Digg was, I never knew what Jailbait was or anything like that, but I had fun sharing dumb memes.

Would be awesome if the fediverse could be that for many people who will look back to it fondly in the future.