• 21 Posts
  • 364 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.

    Yep. Finding the small scattered imageboards which ban or reject politics and combat spam is difficult, but rewarding. And they tend to be special-interest focused sites, like erischan or lainchan, so they’re not all going to be interesting to everyone. trashch /comfy/ is a possible counter-example.



  • To oversimplify a complex multifaceted question: money went online. Pre-2000s and early 2000s was dominated by self-hosted community sites, like forums. It was often a personal sacrifice to host them, rather than a business like with modern social media platforms like reddit, YouTube, etc.

    I’ve often preferred to stick away from the middle of the internet, the smaller community sites are so much better than for-profit grifter-filled addiction machines. When I see a few people (less of them now) saying “Lemmy is too slow/dead”, I think about the sites I love that get 10 posts a week. One particular board occasionally has some new kiddo arriving to a thread and asking a question to (or getting annoyed at) a post made over 10 years ago. And since these aren’t sites dedicated to sharing things that other people make, they develop their own cultures. Anyone there to advertise and make money will leave dimeless, anyone there to insert political propaganda will be ignored or laughed at and banned.

    Lemmy has some shared traits, and some of the benefits are glaringly apparent when we compare to reddit, but it’s still largely a content sharing site more than a creative community.







  • I budget my donations so I make an effort to see who I think need it the most. For example, I use Tor daily, but they have huge institutional funding. My to-do list app doesn’t.

    There are also some worthy candidates who simply reject donations, like Handbrake.

    A few I haven’t seen mentioned:

    • Small websites anyone can use for FOSS services, like (e.g. Private.coffee, Disroot, Nadeko, Riseup)
    • Any of the 5 remaining Invidious instances, Google has put effort into killing off other instances. Same with other social media alternative frontends.
    • Someone mentioned F-Droid, I don’t know what I’d do without the Google Store alternatives like Aurora.
    • yt-dlp devs
    • Lemmy and various instances
    • Your operating systems, incl phones and servers if relevant
    • Codeberg
    • A few FOSS softwares used for non-fediverse sites I use. Look at all the sites you use and think about which ones are probably underfunded. Don’t be afraid to ask if they haven’t said anything.






  • Find a physical activity you enjoy and do it at least three times a week. Either join an organized religion or specifically curate a group of people you do a weekly activity with who will come check on you if you suddenly stop showing up.

    I managed to get both these with sport teams. (At least in my area), the local sports competitions are actively looking for players, and if you have skills or enjoy a role others don’t, you can even just volunteer (instead of pay fees) in a few teams before joining one you like. And one foot in the door will likely get you invited to other teams and competitions when someone’s team needs a substitute player (or you can just ask, “Does anyone have a team that play on Thursday nights?”).

    In my favorite team, I became de-facto captain of because I showed up most reliably and was the remaining member of the original team as people left and joined. One week I forgot to tell them I would be away for the match due to travel, and the next day I wake up to a couple of check-in messages just to make sure I haven’t vanished or had a bookshelf fall on me. And it’s a reassuring feeling to realize you’re part of a community that cares about each other.




  • Celebrating on the 24th. It’s not even a long historical tradition in my own family or local culture, we adopted it after my grandparents celebrated a few Christmases with a Central European immigrant family in the neighborhood who start celebrating at midday 24th December and realized it enabled those of us who were married/etc to celebrate the next day with our other families. It’s much more relaxing like that, I’ve heard my friends complain after trying to fit in a breakfast, lunch and dinner at three different Christmas parties in one day to avoid offending anyone.




  • Or to frame it slightly different: I believe that too much money and/or power is what turns most people evil over time.

    What are the mechanics of this?

    Instead, I believe the means of acquiring money/power from those who have enough of it creates pressures (say, a newspaper sponsored by Coca-Cola is pressured into not reporting on Coca-Cola’s problems), along with the hyperrealities created by conventional rich lifestyles (mainly associating with other wealthy people, being used to paying people to do work instead of doing it yourself, all that kind of thing) distorting ones worldview and alienating them from most of society and its issues.