Never been part of that community personally, but thanks for helping to support the platform. Even if you’re not seeing much traction, it’s appreciated. What would you think of picking the most engaging Reddit content and migrate it here to help boost community size? Or maybe posting to Reddit with a watermark/credit leading to your Lemmy community?

I think Lemmy would either need to find a way to wean Redditors off of their dopamine machine or replace that dopamine machine long-term to sustain an exodus from Reddit. Either that, or Reddit will need to break their dopamine feedback loop. There are some cracks showing, and that might have already killed the platform in the long term, but it’ll keep going from pure momentum for a while. Maybe as long as months or years.

Seems like there’s more sexists and racists than I used to see over there, which is definitely offputting. I’ve found communities that are supportive of thoughtful discussion are more appealing, and Reddit definitely lacks that lately, outside of some small, relatively niche communities.

Would you be willing to share how you make that work? I can’t imagine living on my own for that much, let alone raising 3 kids. What does a weekly meal plan look like? Do you drive? What are rent and property values like in your area?

Edit: Just ran some numbers, and I can see how that could be possible, but it’s dangerously lean. We shouldn’t need to live like that. I commend you for making it work, but would like to say that you’re definitely worth more than $20k/yr (especially with all those home improvement skills, but regardless)

Nor did I elect you king of what I’m allowed to enjoy. Go ahead and police people’s thoughts if you insist, but don’t expect to be included by people you willfully offend.

You’re welcome to dislike something, but that doesn’t mean you need to discourage someone else from liking that thing. You can share an opinion without making it sound like it’s a sin against nature to disagree with that opinion.

It’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s as unsolvable as that. Figuring out how to overcome the strategies being used to divide us could rapidly repair the damage. Education, both in and out of school, is a crucial element of that. The ones frothing over “liberal tears” clearly don’t want to find common ground, so we would need to learn how they communicate and why they won’t listen, then find a strategy to break through that barrier and help them on their way to broader skepticism. In essence, once we cure the disease, we need to vaccinate them to mitigate the next outbreak.

There’s been some focus on this area of research. We have evidence that “strong men” rise to power by capitalizing on fear and anxiety. They set themselves up as a savior who will get rid of the scary problem by blaming someone/some group that is innocent but unknown (and therefore a suspicious stranger) to their base. They start with (comparatively) small lies and build trust among their following. Once the more suseptible slip into this form of groupthink, they’ll fall for bigger and bigger lies, and are very difficult to recover. The question is, how do we wake up they who scream of “sheeple” without an event so tragic it traumatizes an entire generation? The last few times involved massive wars or similarly harrowing events. Events so massive they dissillusioned the followers and forced them to confront the fact that they got played by a charismatic (to them) narcissist with a superiority complex.

Unless we can figure out how to snap these people put of it relatively peacefully, we’re most likely going to be in for a really, really bad time before it gets better. With any luck, at least in the US, maybe Trump will get thrown in prison and the Republican party’s leadership will turn on Trumpism or collapse before they can take control. Maybe if their chosen authority figure is imprisoned and disowned by their team they’ll be able to see clearly again.

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I’ll have you know it’s perfectly unnatural when I invert my corporeal form to assimilate my terrified victims into the eldritch void where my soul used to be.

But in all seriousness, agreed. It’s not possible for something that’s part of nature to be unnatural. All behaviors are natural. Some behaviors pose a threat to the individual or society at large, and that’s the only case where any action should be considered, but only as a harm reduction strategy rather than punitive. An individual’s sexuality, gender identity, etc., definitely don’t qualify as dangerous.

If we end up triggering a self-sustaining feedback loop, that’s how I understand it, yeah. We still do have some very high risk strategies we could implement, like solar shielding to reduce total light reaching the earth, or bioengineering plants that suck up carbon super efficiently, but it’s hard to say what the impacts of those would be

Reminds me of this discussion of how a scene/subculture grows and evetnaully dies: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Feels like federated social networks are creating a new fresh scene, and there’s now an influx of new users (including myself)