👍

I used to enjoy it, but over time I ended up in a similar boat. Just a huge bust of anxiety, especially socially. But on the other hand, I feel pretty okay in the day to day. I’ve come to see it as a sort of forced introspection - not necessarily revealing anything I don’t already know about, but bringing it all to the surface and forcing the mind to see it. In that respect, it could still be drawing a line between feeling and how things are going.

Not that it makes it necessarily more universal, but I think there’s a grain of truth.

No my eyesight is fine, what are you on about?

Not sure if it counts as a first day, but a third interview had me gone. I was quite late and they told me I was out of the running. Reasonable enough, but the company was in the middle of a move, so this interview was in a different location across town from the first two, and the only indication of where it was taking place was a tiny sign stuck in the ground. I must have circled the parking lot 10 times.

It was for the best because I later learned the work conditions there were rotten.

N-no…

I have never strongly identified as any particular religion, so if that is where you’re coming from this answer might not be helpful.

My parents both came from religious backgrounds, but they decided not to force me into any particular faith. When I was about 8, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church, which certainly has religious tones but is very specific about accepting all kinds of faiths, choosing instead to focus on community.

As a result, I’ve been exposed to many different kinds of faith. I don’t tend to believe any creation myths or creators myself, at best I am agnostic. But I do believe that faith is an integral part of the human experience. Faith and hope are inextricably tied together, even if they don’t both show up to every family dinner, to strain a metaphor.

I may not have faith in a god or gods, but I find that sometimes I have faith in my fellow man. I hope the goodness of humanity will prevail. In much smaller terms, I have faith in my friends; I know that they will have my back when I need it. Every time I take a risk, I have at least a little faith that I’ll be okay at the end, or at least that I can pick myself back up.

Humans rely on faith for a lot of things, and in my opinion, that doesn’t have to look like God.

I don’t have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I’ll share an interesting fact from a buddy’s. It’s one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.

This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn’t truly automated - it was federated.

What you’re experiencing I think is completely normal. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Reddit is mainstream, and Lemmy is not. Hypothetically, you might find, say, your plumber on Reddit, who casually browses in down time. The most normal user probably just uses a browser or the normal app; they may have very little or no knowledge about the reddit blackouts, what’s happening, and why.

Maybe some users were using third party apps and know what happened, but if they don’t care much about the reasons they might just stop using Reddit or settle with the native app. This category of users and the last are all probably making up a large part of the user base in general, and of the non-tech (normal?) Subreddits in particular.

The users who migrated to Lemmy by this point will be pretty much a reversal of Reddit’s dynamic. The majority will be privacy/tech minded and have moved specifically in protest to Reddit’s corporate/capitalist practices. They are here hoping to disrupt the norm and prove that we don’t require a centralized power system to run social media.

Then there are probably a minority of users who are simply curious because they heard about an alternative and wanted to see what this is all about. A lot of these users probably don’t stick around if they don’t see the kind of stuff they want to see.

Out of any groups, only a small portion will provide content, and a slightly larger portion will take part in discussion. Memes are the easiest content to produce and to consume, so that’s probably why they’re so prevalent.

Personally I enjoy the conversation around privacy, FOSS, etc, but I do truly hope we’ll start to see more of the normal communities develop here. Particularly I miss some of the creative writing communities which I know for sure haven’t really transferred off of Reddit by this point.

Not a big texter anyway but I’ve never run into anyone who even mentions it outside of techy friends.

Most of the technology subs I followed have migrated to some degree, but I’ve noticed a lot of “normie” subs are still stuck. For me in particular, r/Writing prompts, r/nosleep, and r/YoutubeHaikus are sorely missed.

I don’t think there’s really any one universal best answer, really. I agree with the idea that mirroring is the most fundamental answer. I try to ask questions too, where appropriate.

I’ve been reading up on this very thing today. Let me put it to you in paraphrase as I heard it. What we have to lose is a truly federated network - it has happened before, and it can happen again. Facebook, when faced with an app that most users preferred, chose to buy it, and now Instagram is just as big a project concern as the rest of Meta.

You can’t buy a federated network, but you sure can improve on it, just as Google did with XMPP in days of yore. Once a federated chat protocol much as we’re on a federated social network, Google introduced Google Talk in 05, and federated it via XMPP in 06. They introduced a variety of features and QOL over the years, and being as big as they were, they held a vast majority of the users across all XMPP platforms.

Then, in 2013, they announced that Google Talk would be phased out and as a result, a huge chunk of the federated community would be walled. All of a sudden, a thriving federated community was mostly just Google.

People join just to talk to their friends, and to make friends; if most of those people went to Google for their features and most of their friends were there too, there was no big loss for them. It’d be like if Reddit used to be an instance all on its own and then suddenly decided to unfederate completely.

That’s not to say that all this will happen with Meta, but I guarantee that is their goal.

I use Sync and saw someone suggest to the developer (who is adapting the app to Lemmy) that when the app stops working, it leaves a message indicating that Lemmy is a possible alternative. Not to say that suggestion will be taken, but I think it’s entirely possible that a decent chunk of basically uninformed users will find their favorite app inoperable and find themselves, directly or indirectly, referred to Lemmy.

I disagree; while this is a critical juncture, experimentation is absolutely necessary. Whether a push to expand the user base/migrate from failing centralized services succeeds or fails, this is where lines get drawn and precedent gets set. An instance must be free to defederate from another instance, just as a user must be free to leave and pick up an account on another instance, should they disagree with the decision.

I think with the registration questions they’re just trying to solve two things: preventing bots from signing up, and preventing trolls. It doesn’t seem so bad, really.