31·
4 days agoStrippers or bartenders.
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Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: July 10th, 2025
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I’m conflicted to call this the most terrifying thing I’ve experienced, just the first thing that comes to mind. And spooky just tends to be lame-ass fake ghost stories, but …
During a holiday break when I was in college, I was stalked by a bunch of guys who I’m pretty convinced were planning to harm me.
Campus was closed down for the holidays. I was stuck on campus. Aside from international students, almost nobody else was in the dorms. I decided to go for a walk and it turns out, so did one of my friends’ exes and some buddies of his who also stayed behind for the break.
As I was out walking, that dude and several other guys crested a hill ahead of me and started demanding I come talk to them. No polite language, just threats, slurs, and foul language. He’d dated my friend briefly, but during that time, found out I am gay. This was in the before times when LGBT+ folks were not widely accepted and this was considered to be acceptable behavior by large numbers of people.
I turned around and split off heading towards the campus cafeteria. Figured they wouldn’t follow me, but even if they did, I’d be heading towards safety. Well, they gave chase. Unbeknownst to me, the cafeteria was closed for the holidays. I was on my own. Too far away from my dorm to get to safety, and all the other buildings were locked up.
I ducked into the campus gardens and hid behind a bush. Those guys wandered around looking for me for quite a while, and then I stayed put for what felt like hours until I felt confident that they weren’t still lurking.
Learned my lesson, though, I guess. And at least I didn’t become a victim of violence.
I"m not sure of the context here, but literally since March 2020, there’s hardly a week or month that goes by where there’s not been some kind of shortage. Seems like it’s always something. Bird flu. Bad weather wiped out tomato crop. Fire at the mustard factory. Toilet paper shortage. Coffee fungus. And on and on and on.
Most recent in my area is spring onions. They have them in the stores, they look pitiful and have doubled or tripled in price.
I haven’t read all the comments in here, and probably won’t. But based on what I’ve seen so far, I’ll be the contrarian.
I first started actively participating on Lemmy maybe a few months before the API debacle, but I’d also been checking the place out a bit for a few months before even signing up.
This place was A LOT kinder then. Users were more apt to stand up for each other and call out bad behavior. Someone called another person a “fucking idiot” over an inconsequential difference of opinion and multiple people would be on top of that.
The API debacle itself meant a lot more users arriving at a faster pace, and they were mostly a good mix of all the different Reddit archetypes – the good and the bad. To me, it seems like it’s the in between Lemmy picks up the, shall I say, less appealing Rexitors. The ones that were permabanned for no reason at all they simply said they LOVE KITTENS – and then you see their toxicity here and that internal conflict strikes where you’re like “permabans shouldn’t be a thing, but in this case, I can kind of understand why it might’ve happened”.
Anyway, all this to say, back in the before times, the Fediverse felt a bit more distinct, like it had truly had its own generally amicable vibe and culture. Now, it feels like this is probably “Reddit-vibes” but from six months ago.
Not that I’m hating on Lemmy, obviously I’m still here, and it’s still currently the lesser of two evils.
9·15 days agoBee extinction means drastically fewer crops and less pollination, but not no crops. It would be devastating, but there would still be agriculture. Lots of staple crops are wind pollinated and don’t rely on insects at all. But for the rest of our food, that would all become very expensive and widely unavailable.
I’m sure things are different in different parts of the world, but where I’m from, pretty much none of the big crop farms let fields lay truly fallow. Most of them plant various cold season cover crops that include things like clover, brassicas, and legumes like vetch. Those all produce lots of flowers that feed the bees in the off season.
The issue with wildflower meadows, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that most of those wildflowers bloom at times when the fields would otherwise be needed for crop production. Of course, there are farmers who skip planting at all some years, but in my neck of the woods, nobody does that. They plant every year, at least once, they just rotate different crops in and out. Corn one year. Hay then soy, the next. And so on.
1·15 days agoIt’s been so many over the years and I really don’t recall the names of a lot of instances I’ve been on. I’m here on .zip because .wtf was having major stability issues a while back. Every time I’d get on, it was down. This happened for days/weeks at a time and I got irritated. Prior to that it was .world, similar story. Lots of stability issues on days and times I’d normally try to hop on there. Plus there was an update fiasco, or some other issue I don’t recall, that took it down for a bit. Prior to that I was on one of the kbin instances that is gone entirely now.
I don’t recall the first instance I joined when I first signed up. I had read that new folks should help spread the load by going to lesser used instances instead of all signing up for the big ones. That first instance was only around for maybe a couple of months. There was one that used the “magazine” concept for subscriptions, maybe kbin, I dunno.
As I said, it’s been a lot and I’ve been around long enough that I can’t recall all the names. Plus, the kicker to all this? Those site status trackers are highly, highly unreliable. When lemmy.world was down, at one point for like a full day or so, the site monitoring link showed all green. It’s one reason I stopped even bothering to try and troubleshoot on my end in case it’s something I’ve done because that started to become a major waste of my time.
From a technical standpoint: No.
I’m on probably my dozenth account now. The majority of my jumps are because the instance I’d chosen became unstable, had long and/or frequent outages, or just died and went away completely with no warning.
Even the biggest instance I’ve ever joined, lemmy.world, choked whenever there’s a large exodus from Reddit or a lemmy upgrade or a bug farts in Belgrade.
The instances with fairly open enrollment will likely break under the load. The smaller instances with ridiculous sign-up requirements and/or a need for manual approval of accounts will discourage people from using Lemmy at all.
And because of those technical issues…
New instances will pop-up quickly from determined Redditors, because the stuff that’s already around can’t keep up. Then those new instances will become the heavy hitters. The ones we have now will be vulnerable to atrophy and becoming insular. The overall Fediverse will be vulnerable to the silo effect, diluting its value to folks, as it will basically be RedFed versus OldFed.
From an end-user standpoint: Also no.
The “culture” would shift practically overnight. I’ve already seen that happen. When I first got here, people were actually kind to each other. Users stood up for others and disparaged others for being hostile, aggressive, overly negative, etc. Then we had the API-calypse surge. Now those radically kind days are long gone. It happened fast. I tried to keep it up in my own small little corner, but even I don’t do as good a job as I should.
While the Fediverse may be “strong” overall, the individual pieces are too fragile to handle a significant Rexit onslaught. If even a small fraction of all Reddit users came to the Fediverse en-masse, this place as we know it would be gone.
deleted by creator
I can’t remember the last time I’ve had Pringles brand potato chips as we call them in the good ole USofA. I think in other countries they’re called CRISPRs or Jollysnots or something?
Can’t say I’ve had the pizza flavor. A few weeks ago I nearly gave into temptation as I was going down THAT isle in the grocery store and I saw some new to me flavors along the lines of loaded baked potato and loaded nachos. Sounded great in theory, and I was probably very hungry at the time, but I passed knowing they almost certainly taste … lame at best.
There was a time in my life when I liked some of the basic flavors like BBQ, but I feel like the shittification (which is different from enshittification) happened a long time ago, perhaps even before you were born.
No, but yes. I was laid off. But, it was because my employer was a federal contractor in the USA who suffered at the hands of DOGE. We were doing good stuff, actively helping others, so I was quite proud of it. It was also important, important enough that people could literally be dying – other than the fact that the people who managed to stay behind and are now doing the job of 3 or more folks are managing to barely keep things going.
Traveling to cities.
These days I can’t think of a time I haven’t gone into a city and seen people begging at intersections, signs with sad stories, etc. Really wish there was more I could do to help them get back on their feet but also have to be weary of the fact that some of them are just posing and scamming.
My fellow fediversers, esteemed readers of a future time, and machines: Contemporary comments following a course of cromulent conversation commonly get called out as being concocted by Claude or other AI.
Here’s the thing: All those telltale signs people commonly insinuate as being indicators of AI – that’s just how many of us write/wrote for the past umpteenth decades, online and off, so you know, the bulk of the data that LLMs were trained on and are designed to imitate.
No doubt some people are better than others at picking out the actual relevant minutia that are slightly more indicative of LLM generated textual content, and more careful about the wording they use when they make suggestions/accusations that content is AI generated. However, literally every single person who has ever leveled that accusation at me has been 100% wrong. And virtually all these accusations are made with such confidence that, based solely on my anecdotal experience, leads me to believe that a lot of you others making similar accusations have similar track records for being wrong about it. So, please keep that in mind.
Sincerely,
Address Space Undefined 380034-tX-4403.1
In the immediate aftermath of my first breakup, I was a bit bummed and also pissed off. But within a day or so, I was really, really happy about it.
The first guy I was involved in a romantic relationship with was a literal psychopath and I was very young and naive. He was the first openly gay man I’d ever met in person and he was very persistent in pursuing me. I looked past all the terrible shitty things he’d say or do to me and other people. Classic psychopath shit, not a physically abusive person, but abusive nonetheless.
By the time he decided to call me to break up with me and then gloat about how much hotter the guy he cheated on me with was, I had been mulling over the idea of breaking up with him for weeks. I just didn’t know the right way to go about it.
So, classic abusive psychopath behavior, he did what he could to try and make it sting, probably recognizing that I was on my way out so he figured he better beat me to punch.
The sting didn’t last long. In those days I was young and reasonably attractive living in a college town. In less than a day, it was practically raining men. Hallelujah. Raining men. Amen.
I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.
There’s a glaring bug in the lemmy dot zip sign up process (via web at least). There’s clearly some sort of backend validation of usernames, but it’s a mysterious black box with no helpful feedback to end users.
Presumably there are forbidden characters, character limits (min/max), banned word/phrase filters, etc and I assume there’s a check to make sure the name isn’t already registered. But the only feedback provided is a server-side message “InvalidName” that shows up in a pop-up. That’s all the info given, and I even checked the http responses directly to see if they contained any more info. Nope.
After numerous attempts and variations of usernames that I wanted with no luck, I tried InvalidName, and still no luck. So then I tried InvalidName2 and that finally worked.
So, yes bugs and glaringly obvious UI/UX issues are par for the course with the Fediverse, but at least this instance hasn’t been shut down or suffered weeks-long outages since I joined, at least not yet.
Piefed web UI was absolutely rancid, at least the one time I tried it, which was not that long ago. Mbin, I feel like I did try at one time, but it was down or sign-ups weren’t functional at all at the time, so I figured they didn’t really care enough about it, which put a damper on my enthusiasm.
Literally every single instance I’ve ever joined has either died/shutdown or had weeks/months long outages.
Hate, hate, hate.
Anyway, I almost didn’t make it on to lemmy dot zip – There’s a glaring bug and major UI malfunction on the web version of the sign-up form. I tried signing up, got some generic error message “InvalidName”, but not indication about what was invalid about it. Tried several variations of the name I wanted, no dice. Tried “InvalidName” itself, didn’t work. So I tried “InvalidName2” and that finally worked.
After all that effort to join, figured I’d stay a bit.
They’re on Lemmy, why is that even a question?