Do they at least microwave the beers for you?

1,000 steps but only about 50 feet, huh?

Many of them are just straight up lying, a little bit to you and a little bit to themselves.

For others, it’s the sense that they’ve lost the golden age of their fathers made BY and FOR their fathers alone, for which someone must pay.

1. I’m a good person.
2. Being a good person means I hate bad people.
3. The people who are against me are bad, because I’m a good person.
4. Trump hates all the people I hate and is a strong male leader, so I follow him.
5. The only people who would attack him (read: me) are bad people.
6. People complain and produce false charges when they are afraid of their enemies and need to take them down.

Conclusion: I identify more strongly with Trump for being attacked for being right by bad people.

The sad thing is that, short of taking a mental sledgehammer to some really important internal concepts of self-esteem and value, you can’t stop this train of thought, and you’ll upset them for even suggesting it’s what they think. The closest you can get is putting in their heads the sense that Trump won’t win, in which case they’ll glom onto the next narcissistic, reactionary blowhard.

If you want some more detailed dissection of this thought process, read “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altmeyer: https://archive.org/details/The_Authoritarians_Bob_Altemeyer_2006.pdf/page/n2/mode/1up

It’s an easy read, but damn if it wasn’t chilling the first time I read it, back in the Obama years.

Has some real “of COURSE I’m anti-union” vibes.

Sure, but there’s a distinction between maintenance and profit.

If that requires a maximum ratio of active users to average donation, then it’s feasible, and has the potential to survive with a more invested userbase than a site that’s severely bloated with lurkers.

For those of you who are multilingual from birth, do you have a preference?

Yeah, the best social networks are designed to prioritize…socializing. It’s like building a public park and people start asking where the money comes from. The point is that it’s made for people to use.

Oh I’m always in the All section. Still kinda wrapping my head around instances as a concept: mentally I think if it as a single room with a ton of cubicles.

I treat subscriptions more like bookmarks: communities that I want to come back to specifically, but I don’t just browse them. It’s more like going to a grocery store and being sure to get the staples but not ignoring the rest of the aisles. How else am I going to find a new interest or perspective worth keeping if I don’t look?

I agree with you: I think decline of a site is an inevitability, especially after advertising is needed due to increased traffic.

But I personally don’t need Lemmy or anywhere else to be permanent, since what I get out of it is either transient (scrolling for memes and things that pique my interest) or meaningful enough that it remains with me, meaning enjoyable or thought provoking discussions.

Granted, I’d rather alternative sites not go tits up in rapid succession while the shuffling corpse they’re trying to ape continues to slog on mindlessly, but keeping the impermanence in mind makes it easier to see these places as areas to congregate rather than the end to surfing the web in general.

Just think of it as a “service fee”.

Oh no, not my productivity! That thing that is definitely directly proportional to my financial compensa-oh, right.

Dark mode forever and always, bitches.

“Reddit would implode instantly”

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

It’s also a generational thing: everyone around me up to the mid 30s uses “no problem” to indicate that the request/help was of little bother so the requester shouldn’t feel bad for asking, which can sometimes annoy the people who say “you’re welcome” instead.

“Happy to help”, to me, suggests a greater eagerness than just being kind.

I imagine a LOT of us have many, teeth-clenching opinions on what constitutes a good email. XD

Problem’s already been solved, however: it’s mine. My way’s the best.

Some of these are good, because getting into the habit of thanking people for helping (“thanks for catching that!”) fosters good working relationships or providing specifics that, presumably, work for you, too (“can you do [x] times?”) is a better starting point than being truly open ended.

But I well and truly despise the “thanks for your patience/when can I expect” because we ALL know what you mean and I respect someone far more if they acknowledge, explain, and move on from their errors than just…reword shit.

Is that 2,000 paid employees or does that include moderators?

Remember back in the old web when letting people know your real name was a horrifying breach of personal privacy? Heck, having the same username for multiple places gave me the hives, if it was unique enough.

We need to go back to those days; not just for safety reasons but because there’s a freedom to the individualized anonymity of being a (apparently) distinct user in each instance.

That’s what I was looking for, yeah. Part of it was that I was subscribed to language learning communities (and memes in the target language: the shared language of memes provides a lot of context!) which can be named a large variety of things, so I’d be back at square one and searching for things manually.

It’s not the worst thing to be back to basics, because it forces me to explore and learn about the Fediverse, but there’s always going to be that nagging “did I get everything out of the old apartment” feeling as I drop off the key.

“Honey what’s wrong, you’ve barely touched your Androgyn-Os.”