Oh hey, I think I’m the guy from that post! Lol
Glad you’re enjoying it! I’ve been having a lot of fun with it too - even if my wife sometimes thinks I’m crazy when I “just quickly run over here” to check the hours for this place, haha.
My “Global Rank” is a bit over 5000, but I’m not sure if that’s the same number as you’re looking at, given the range. 400th in Canada, though!
Honestly I wish there were less communities. I’ve said this before, but people treat Lemmy like late-stage Reddit, expecting niche communities for everything, and we end up with hundreds of communities with no (or one, if we’re lucky) active members.
This problem is then amplified by the fact that these niche communities are split even further across several instances, so our userbase ends up completely dissipated.
I would love to see users focus on a smaller number of more general-purpose communities. Of course, these should still be shared across instances, but I think we would benefit a lot from having, say, a “video games” community instead of 500 specific game communities.
As a side note as well, I don’t think we shouldn’t be “allowed” to create more niche communities (though if an instance admin wanted to regulate, that’s their call). I think this should be more of a user culture shift, if anything.
The only way to play, imo.
Man imagine this game with a proper modern physics engine.
I mean, I guess it inspired a lot of what we see in modern physics games, so I don’t really need to imagine, but still, I would play it.
I’ve done this a few times through my life, especially lately as I’ve finally been getting my own life stabilized. Here’s some more “notable” examples.
A family member, where I’ve been trying to mentor them and help them in every way I possibly can - sometimes at great personal cost - but as the saying goes, I’ve led them to water but I can’t make them drink. Still won’t give up, though.
Another family member I’ve done the same for has actually been trying to take me up on it. Still early stages, but they’ve started on applying for college in a field they’re interested in. I’m helping them study since it happens to be adjacent to my own field, and I’ll help cover the bulk of the cost if they don’t qualify for gov’t funding. I’m really hoping things work out for them.
The only time I’ve really actually seen obvious results is in my students where I volunteer teaching English. One student in particular really struggled to read even a single word, but in less than a year, they can now read most sentences on their own - which is honestly just insane to me.
Obviously it’s like 99.999% their effort rather than mine, but I like to think I’m helping lol.
…writing this all out makes me feel like I’m bragging or something. Really I’ve just been in a rough spot for most of my life, and now that I’m getting my life together I’m just trying to give back a bit where I can. I just want everyone to be happy, lol.
Some folks on Lemmy recently recommended StreetComplete, and I’ve been really enjoying it so far.
It’s a “Pokémon Go” style thing, but you go around answering simple questions about your surroundings which are then used to update/improve the data on OpenStreetMap.
One concern I considered after using the app was that because your contributions are uploaded to OpenStreetMap, in theory I imagine someone could use that data to track where you are / where you’ve been / where you tend to be. So just be aware of that.
I would hope it moves just like any other knight - going in one direction for a while before suddenly veering off to the side and coming to an abrupt stop.
I feel like it has to do with the “mystical” or metaphorical perception of mirrors, especially early on.
Like, as if looking “into a mirror” is analogous to looking “into a (or rather: the) mirror world”, if that makes sense.
Kind of the same reason we use the preposition “in” or “into” rather than the more physically correct “at”.
Wtf its been a year?? What a wild ride!
Aha, so I was right, you will give it to someone. >=3
Give it to someone that needs it.
You absolutely aren’t wrong there.
Always in favour of healthy competition.
The first and easiest thing I’m seeing is to up that meager developer hardware budget.
I completely agree that “third places” have been all but eradicated in favor of revenue-generating spaces. This trend alone has lead to the death of a lot of things, including a sense of community and local engagement. (Edit: Worth noting that I also agree with your point about atomization)
I think it also has a lot to do with how abstracted we are from reality. We’ve built all these systems to replace actual face-to-face communities, and people would rather surround themselves in that than to expose themselves to the unpredictability of real life - for better and worse.
It’s a hard sell to get people to reverse course because it’s so much more painless/numbing to engage with these systems. (Not to even mention AI promising to give every person their own personal Yes-Man.)
I think one of Lemmy’s issues is that everyone wants to create a community instead of contributing to what’s here. People expect to have all the “niche hobby” communities like Reddit had right off the bat, but we don’t have the mass of people to support that - especially when you can have multiple communities for one topic across instances. Everything dilutes to nothing.
So we end up with nearly a 1:1 user/community ratio and every community either gets abandoned or only has 1 power-user posting.
I think the solution is essentially what you’re doing - to take existing communities and breathe life into them. Start out small and focused, and then branch out when it feels necessary.
I’m not necessarily looking for “wholesome” content, though. I’m looking for interesting content.
Also, there isn’t enough content to browse just a few subs, and there are a lot of communities being created that i would miss out on, and “opt-out” is generally my preferred way to browse.
I think the reason I’ve gotten to this point is that I’ve been angry at things before and I’ve very strongly expressed an opinion that I later on found I disagreed with.
This is probably just an age thing, but I could only do that so many times before I stopped to think maybe it’s worth reevaluating how I look at things.
I say we ditch this nonsense altogether and go back to vague descriptions of the Sun’s position in the sky.