Same here, which is why my Bluesky feed is much better. Everyone wants to be where everyone else is (that isn’t X), and it seems like that’s Bluesky.

I’m gonna echo what others have said here. The mastodon signup process is too complex, and searching for instructions just leads to “what is the fediverse and/or activitypub” explainers.

I created a mastodon account a few years ago and it was my first introduction to the fediverse. It was frustrating and I only persevered because I REALLY wanted to replace twitter.

Once I got it set up, I realized that no one who I followed on twitter was there. My feed is currently like 2 people, plus a bunch of dead accounts from people who dipped their toe in but didn’t stay.

Joining Bluesky was simple, and there were already a bunch of accounts I wanted to follow. The recent influx has increased that, and it feels a lot like old school twitter without the nazis.

People originally joined twitter (and stuck with it for so long) because that’s where everyone else is. Mastadon is too clunky join and use, so people aren’t.

The yield is small enough that it isn’t a threat to the soldiers launching it. Still, I wouldn’t want to be the one tasked with firing it.

Yeah, it’s quieter so there’s fewer overall responses even in “popular” posts, but it doesn’t feel like anything gets ignored. If a post is interesting, you’ll get at least a few replies even if it takes a few days.

That part is kinda nice - the lower turnover on the “front page” means you’ll have people reading and commenting on discussions for days. If you reply to a 1-day old post on Reddit the only person who might see/reply to you is the person you replied to.

I’ll only be a carnivore on day 1

As annoying as it is to lug a bag around and find room for it, I much prefer this to checking it. There’s the small but nonzero chance your bag doesn’t make it to your destination, plus the added time waiting at baggage return.

I will run this thing until it dies.

Good luck with that. My 2011 MacBook Pro still works. I’m pretty sure it’ll outlive me.

Seek by iNaturalist

The app uses AI to identify the species of plants, animals, insects and fungi. In video mode you scan around something you want to ID as the AI narrows it down to the species. Then you can take a pic. The app keeps track of each unique species you’ve found (along with your photo of it). There’s also badges and achievements for identifying different numbers of species, if you want to gamify your nature sightseeing.

It’s basically real life Pokémon. Oh and it’s completely free.

With betavoltaics it’s more a matter of physics than lack of engineering refinement. Even assuming 100% efficiency, you would need something like 250 gallons (1000 liters) of tritium gas at atmospheric pressure to power a 100 Watt lightbulb.

Nuclear reactors, however, absolutely should be supplying a larger fraction of our electrical grid. Traditional, large reactor facilities have such a high cost and long timescale for permitting/construction that it’s difficult to get newer, more modern reactors built in the US. There are some exciting developments in small, modular reactors that would sidestep these issues. I believe a few designs are in the process of being built for full scale testing.

www.charitynavigator.org

If you’re interested in a particular charity organization, you can look them up on Charity Navigator. They pull information from the charity’s IRS filings as well as their website to rate various aspects. They give a breakdown of things like the fraction of funds spent on administrative costs, privacy policies, fundraising efficiency, etc.

They also provide the contact information and website for the charity. This way you know you’re donating to the actual charity and not a scammer impersonating them.

Betavoltaic devices are exactly what you’re describing. They convert beta radiation (energetic electrons) into electricity in the same way that photovoltaic cells (solar panels) convert photons into electricity. You can create a nuclear battery by putting some radioactive material that decays via beta emission in one of these.

The downside of these devices is that they generate very little power. It takes a dangerous amount of radioactive material to generate the power needed for say a phone or laptop. Commercial betavoltaic devices generate ~tens of microwatts. They’re useful if you need a low power battery somewhere that you don’t want to replace, like in a remote sensor.

Lemmy has a slur filter feature that instances can choose to use. It seems that lemmy.ml has it enabled and has a fairly expansive list of what the instance owners consider to be slurs. For example, the “b” word (term for female dog) is censored since it’s a gendered slur.

Edit: removed explicit language in case it gets auto filtered

Just a bad day for all the face holes

What a terrible day to have eyes. For multiple reasons…

Captcha support, which is in 0.17 but was dropped from 0.18. It’ll be added back to 0.181, which is what lemmy.world admins are waiting for.

I believe it was dropped because the 0.18 release removed websockets, since that doesn’t scale up to lots of users very well. The developers priority was understandably getting lemmy stable despite massive user growth. Unfortunately without captchas, open sign up instances like lemmy.world will be overrun by bots.

There’s currently no way to migrate accounts between lemmy instances. I know that this capability is one of the main feature requests, so hopefully the developers can add it at some point in the near future. Not only would it allow users to migrate if they have advanced warning that their instance will shut down, but it would make it easier to spread users out amongst the federated instances to avoid there being only a few “main” instances.

Which implies there’s damage to control. The subreddit blackout is clearly working.

I’d like to add that there’s already been a significant increase in the amount of content and comments in just the last few days. I joined a whole 5 days ago (so many ages ago, I know) and back then it was somewhere between 1 and 2k users on this instance. It was way emptier - you could read all of the posts in most of the “big” communities in an hour or so. And the new feed was pretty stale.

Lemmy’s not the firehose of content that is Reddit yet, but it’s making real progress.

I like that every news article mentions this

Hard agree. A few years back I was a member of a local subreddit that only had one mod. It was small enough that they were able to keep up with spam/moderating. Then one day it started getting brigaded by one of the racist subreddits. One of the many ones that had an unrepeatable name (variant on a racial slur) that’s since been banned.

We later found out that sole mod had gone camping for a few days, so there was no one to remove all the explicit racism and ban people. They immediately cleaned up and notified admins when they got back, but I can see how quickly a community can turn awful if you don’t have dedicated mods.