I don’t know? They both pretty much shaped and changed my life from the moments they happened onwards…

They fudged everything but the appearance of the black hole in that movie.

This person becomes so insistent with these statements that they end up being kicked out of the club. Before leaving, the person calls the club an “Echo Chamber” about tulips.

Would this person be right?

In theory, yes, that’s what it is.

In practice, accusations of being an echo chamber are mostly made against inclusive spaces by people who are upset that they can’t air non inclusive opinions

One of my workmates moved to Australia from Uruguay when he was 14. He only spoke Spanish at the time, which isn’t very common in Australia. He’s talked a few times about the different experience he had vs his sister who is a few years younger than him. He still has a noticable rioplatense accent to his english, but his sister does not. He also had to go to a special immersion class/school to get his english to the point where he could do manage in regular english language schooling, but his sister did not, and managed just fine being moved straight in to english speaking schools.

Ultimately, he said that he got there pretty quickly, because he was still a kid, but he spent the best part of a year feeling isolated from his peers, except when he was in the immersion class.

“small political differences”

A nazi salute isn’t a small political difference…

Some of the folk who swallowed the propaganda and want to erase folk like me from the planet may have been conned, but however they got there, their goal is still to hurt other people.

Lemmy tiene comunidades espanol, pero no muchas.

There are upsides and downsides to such an approach.

We admin several instances for example, because we are trying to create safe spaces for queer folk and want to foster those communities. We pay out of our own pockets to do so.

I’ve got no interest in running a generic piece of network infrastructure that can be used by bigots just as readily as the people that they harass.

The people that do want to run that are “free” speech types, which is how you end up with nostr

1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

No. You’re looking for Mastodon/Sharkey/Misskey/Friendica or kbin for that! Lemmy is more the federated equivalent of a site like reddit.

2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

There is no such thing as a community for yourself. Every community is either visible to everyone, or you can lock it down to just people on the same instance as you. But you can’t ever make it just for you. You can make it so that no one else can post to it, but you can’t stop them reading it.

3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

Basically, the instance just ignores downvotes that it receives. Other instances don’t. So that means that the timeline you see will be different to the timeline someone on a different instance sees, because their timeline will factor in downvotes and yours won’t.

4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah?

Nothing that is publicly visible or searchable is safe from AI scraping.

Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

Different things.

Lemmy is “reddit like”. Mastodon and Bluesky are “twitter like”. On lemmy, you subscribe to and follow communities. On mastodon, you subscribe to and follow users.

So it really depends on what you’re looking for.

5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

Yep, it can and is crawled. If you don’t want that, lemmy isn’t going to be great, as it’s impossible to avoid.

You do have more control over that on mastodon, as you can lock posts down to be more private, but even then, it’s imperfect.

6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

Active and ongoing, with a couple of competing alternatives that are also actively developed

7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

Admins have full access to the database, and in theory, can pull out pretty much anything. Which is just the same as reddit. Your best bet for privacy is anonymity

8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

Lots of meme communities too! It’s a size thing. Not as many lemmy users as there are reddit users, and the ones that are here tend to be more tech oriented.

Lots of queer communities our instance!

Having no to few peers is isolating no matter how compassionate you are.

Healing factor - always-on healing.

Don’t we already have that?

Great way to feel lonely and isolated! It’s already an issue “gifted” folk struggle with, and the more “gifted” you are, the more isolated you tend to be

Interestingly, I’d be forced to take this deal if wiping my memory of it was a side effect of rejecting it.

And when I took it? Yeah, the money would influence me and self interest would shape some of my decisions, but at the end of the day, I have to live with myself. If my decisions aren’t also shaped by empathy and compassion for others, then I’d have lost myself.

This is such a strange take to me.

I was on the broader fediverse for a year or so before lemmy took off, and I got used to the very strong left leaning environment I found there, where compassion for your impact on the people around you was built in to the norms of many of the communities. I wasn’t used to it, but I was so glad to have found it.

And then lemmy happened. And unlike the rest of the fediverse, which was largely populated by people escaping twitter because it had been taken over by a fascist, the lemmy population was largely people escaping reddit because they could no longer use 3rd party apps. And the difference in ideology between those two groups is night and day.

To me, the broader fediverse feels left wing and comfortable. Lemmy feels centrist, where half of my time as an admin is banning trolls and bigots spreading hate.

tl;dr - Your definition of leftist is not my definition of leftist.

Formal language also indicates dispassionate separation from your topic of conversation and the people you’re communicating with, which can be disrespectful in and of itself in some contexts.

Think of it this way. All bans and content removals are local only, and don’t federate to other instances, with a few exceptions

The most notable of these exceptions are

i) a community moderator removing content or banning a user from their community. This federates. An instance admin doing the same thing does not federate, unless the community was created on their instance.

ii) an instance admin banning a user based on their instance, and choosing to remove all of their content. This will federate the ban and the content removal to other instances.

when on voice or the phone?

That’s it. Those are my pet peeves

I don’t know, because my parents were irreligious too. My dad was an atheist, and my mum is agnostic. She has some spiritual beliefs, but has no religious beliefs or belief in deities.

You went mask off pretty quickly…

But I have to play devil’s advocate

That’s not being a devils advocate, it’s just plain transphobia. As if trans people somehow have the power social power to choose the worlds attention.

You say hate is for religious reasons, and then blame the victims of that hate for the attention they’re getting from their oppressors, the very people you yourself just said are responsible for it.

And honest opinion or not, you chose to spend your energy undermining a trans person talking about our oppression, when you could simply have chosen to not do that. And that shit is creating the very problem you just blamed trans people for