Well I didn’t want to have a bio, but Lemmy doesn’t let me null it out, so I guess I’ll figure out something to put here later.

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninjatoLemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    9 months ago

    What you’re describing is only possible on de-anonymized platforms that essentially have “know your customer” type policies where users have to provide some kind of proof of their identity. While I agree that there is value in social spaces where everyone generally knows the people they’re interacting with are who they say they are, I don’t think this is ever going to be feasible in a federated social platform. I think Facebook is the closest thing we have to what you’re describing, to be honest, and I believe Meta has even kicked around having a more sandboxed Instagram for minors (though I don’t use Instagram, so I’m not certain on the details there).

    For me, in most cases on a platform like Lemmy, a person’s age is not something I care about. I care about what people are sharing and saying. But then again, none of my interests for online discussion at this point in my life are really age centric. I think there are clearly better platforms than Lemmy if people want to guarantee they’re only interacting within their age specific peer groups.


  • I don’t want to make it sound like the Lemmy situation is rosier than it is, but considering how sharply users dropped off, say, Threads… I think Lemmy is doing alright. There are a number of factors that might contribute to user counts dropping, but mostly it’s unavoidable when you have a sharp uptick of anything. I think accounts and activity are going to flatten and then start trending back upward. If Reddit keeps fucking around, that’ll definitely bring more people in and this cycle will repeat. I’m actually fairly pleased with how many people have been sticking around on Lemmy.



  • I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It’s Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you’re firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don’t think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it’s interesting to consider things like whether there’s a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we’re in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.










  • I think maybe you are confusing instances with communities? Instances are the servers you sign up your account on like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml whereas communities like asklemmy are hosted on an instance. I think there’s universal agreement that growing communities is generally a good thing because it leads to more content and discussion. Growing instances on the other hand isn’t super important (indeed there are going to be plenty of people like myself that are going to stick with a single user personal instance and be perfectly happy). I think the person you’re replying to was confused by the wording of your post.


  • I feel like this should only be a problem when users don’t make use of the crosspost functionality built into Lemmy (which ultimately should only be a technical problem that Lemmy clients need to address at the time of post creation). Aside from appropriate options in a client that should allow you to crosspost to multiple communities at once, I feel like this is a server side issue more than a client side one because the server shouldn’t be returning duplicates like this if posts are appropriately crossposted IMHO.


  • Believe it or not, we’re living in the most peaceful period of human history thus far. I’d recommend the book The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which talks about how far we’ve come. That said, I see the threat of global warming, lack of fresh water, famine, and energy scarcity becoming threats to the current status quo, though. If we don’t figure some things out as a species, we’re likely in for some turbulent times in the next hundred years.