riskable

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I don't think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.

Google doesn't have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.

The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple's chat app could only do SMS.

I guess what I'm saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.

If you're trying to get ancient software to work I think "user friendliness" is the least of your concerns. Especially compared to the alternative (Windows) where the answer is just, "No: That's not going to work no matter what you do."

The majority of trips taken in the US in cars is 3 miles or less

This statistic is true but incredibly misleading. Firstly, a huge chunk of those trips are trips to the supermarket or other shopping which is not something you're going to do on a bike. You can only fit so many groceries in a bike trip... Even with a trailer. (Aside: I wonder if frozen foods would even make it safely all the way home in the South if you loaded up a bike with a trailer and had to travel 3 miles?)

The second reason why it's misleading is that it includes trips after you've gone to work. So you commute to work: 41 miles. Actually, you stop at Starbucks on the way and that's only two miles from your house so that counts as a single-destination car trip. Then for lunch you take a short trip from the office to a restaurant/fast food place. That's a single-destination car trip.

You go out to dinner some nights at a restaurant 3 miles away. That's a short trip that certainly could've been done on bike but are you really going to get the whole family on their bikes to show up at the restaurant all hot & sweaty for dinner? In the South you'd be so sweaty it'd be worthy of taking a shower and in the North you'd be trudging through snow, freezing your face off.

Then there's the fact that the weather doesn't matter when it comes to cars. Rain or snow is no issue: You're still going to the supermarket but you would not make that same trip on a bike unless it was an emergency and you had no other option.

The reality is that while the majority of trips are 3 miles are less it's also true that the majority of trips are not trips you'd want to make on a bike.

There's another problem with that statistic: The majority of people in the US live in big cities! I wonder how much that statistic would change if you removed big cities/metro areas from the data. My guess: "<3 miles" would jump to "<10 miles".

I live in Jacksonville, FL and we have two supermarkets that are ~5 miles away (in different directions) and we have bike lanes! Nobody uses them. It's just too fucking hot! For about 9 months out of the year it's >90°F with ~90% relative humidity (in the morning; late afternoon it can drop to a mere ~60% when it's not summer! haha). The only time of the year it would be comfortable to do something like ride your bike to get something done (as opposed to just for exercise) is December through February. Any other time it's just not realistic unless you plan (and have the time) to take a shower afterwards.

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Florida/humidity-annual.php

It also rains pretty much every single day in the afternoon during the summer and sometimes off/on all throughout the day. Rarely rains at all in winter though so that's a plus I guess.

On July 1st when the apps stop working.

Biking infrastructure is only useful in big cities where your distance to work could be quite short (within 5 miles or so). The average American commute distance is 41 miles. It just doesn't make sense to build out bike infrastructure very many places in the US.

Trains and changing the roads to make it easier for cars to drive themselves make a lot more sense.

IMHO: We should retain automatic federation approval but with automated de-federation for bad behavior. Thresholds could be increased for "merely very active" instances so they don't get automatically defederated while newcomers get the threshold for "plebs" 😁

Example: If your instance has just a handful of users spamming like crazy or any number of users spamming the same content/links that would put your instance over such a ban threshold pretty fast.

Kitchen sink disposals are awesome! Why fill up your trash with stuff that's going to stink when you can just reduce it into particles the size of grains of sand, complete with energy free transportation to sewage processing (or your septic system)?

They don't clog your pipes or anything; human excrement is much more sticky than the stuff you're supposed to send into the disposal. Disposals are basically small macerators which is what waste processing/sewage lines use to make sure that your poo can make it smoothly through lift stations and processing facilities.

People say things like, "if you put grease down there it can clog your pipes!" which is 100% true whether or not you use a disposal. The disposal doesn't even factor into that equation; it's irrelevant.

The closest thing to a universal word is a scream. After some experience nearly all humans--regardless of region or native languages--can tell the difference between a scream of sudden fear and the scream of a mother who's child just died.

The scream of pain is a bit cultural/regional ("ow!", "fuck!", "damnit!") but I'm guessing most humans could tell what someone means when they shout any given sound or word after accidentally banging their finger with a hammer or stepping on a lego brick while barefoot.

Building online communities takes time. Migrating from one site to another takes a little less time but it's still a long-term thing.

It's not so different from moving a retail location. Your store is moving from address A to address B down the road. You put up a sign at the old storefront telling customers, "it's just down the road!" with instructions to get there and yet businesses that do this see massive sales drops. It's not uncommon to lose half or three quarters of your customer traffic in the first three months after changing locations. It usually takes a year or more to stabilize to a new normal.

I see no reason why the migration of communities from Reddit to the Fediverse will be different since this type of migration is based on basic human behavior. We need to view it as a new location getting a great big lucky bonus surge because of people angry at our competitor and not some on/off switch.

The key is to maintain quality at the new location so the "customers" start to realize they're getting a better experience here than they did over at Reddit.

Yes, install your 25-year-old software on your 30-year-old NTFS filesystem (it's that old).

EDIT: I just looked it up and NTFS turns 30 on July 27th, 2023 LOL

/m/linuxmasterrace would like a word