I made a community for the Minnesota Twins over at [email protected]!
Added to the list!
Bingo. Researching product choices was one of my best use cases for adding site:reddit.com to search queries. Avoids spammy articles and gives you actual discussions with legitimate dissenting opinions.
That's so cool there's a dedicated instance for Tucson! And you betcha!
Yeah, I also made a Mastodon account during that big Twitter exodus a few months back, and admittedly haven't used it that much either for the same reasons. I just never really have that many unprompted/creative things to say, which is kinda the primary use case for the Twitter/Mastodon genre of social media.
Reddit/Lemmy on the other hand is way more about the discussion, which is both way more interesting to consume as media and also way easier for me to get involved in.
I've been pretty pleased with lemmy.world so far, but I might have to take a look at that!
Forgot about Netflix! Yeah they've got to be pretty close to late-stage enshittification at this point. They can only raise their prices so much while simultaneously removing content before they completely lose their users.
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn't really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There's going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it's definitely going to be worth it in the end.
I've honestly been pleasantly surprised so far.
Like, the communities over here are clearly tiny compared to the ones we've been used to over on Reddit, but they're also large enough that they have enough interesting content to keep you browsing. In some ways, the environment here feels a bit more welcoming right now than a lot of Reddit due to there being a lot of pretty high-quality content from folks that clearly want this place to succeed.
That said, there's still some growing pains. Some of the instances are pretty sluggish, there are bugs that need to be worked out (this isn't to knock on the devs - I'm thankful this works at all!), and the number of niche communities is still vanishingly small.
Fedora is so wonderful! It also proved to be quite useful for me to use Fedora on my home desktop, as a lot of my work lately has involved working with a RHEL server. It's awesome to already know 99% of what that computing environment is like just from using my desktop.
Always found this to be such a fascinating story!
I also figure I should share this video I stumbled upon on YouTube that contains an episode of ABS News Nightline from April 14th, 1998 (starting at 1:00:20), covering the 1991 flood in Grand Forks and the Herald's role in reporting on the flood.